Jeanette Kohl receives year-long fellowship at the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study

Jeanette Kohl has been awarded a year-long fellowship at the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study (HIAS) for the 2022-2023 academic year.  The fellowship has been awarded to advance Dr. Kohl’s book project ‘Sculpture. A History in Sources and Commentaries’. The project continues and expands her scholarship on portrait sculpture and will result in a sourcebook on the discourses around the medium of sculpture in European art histories.

Department of the History of Art – 2021 Work in Progress Series

GOOD TO THINK WITH: Rembrandt’s Aristotle with a Bust of Homer

Join us on Thursday, January 28, 2021 at 5:15 pm (PST) — via Zoom
Register at https://tinyurl.com/y4vgprbz

Dr. Jeanette Kohl
Professor of Art History, UC Riverside

In this work-in-progress talk, art historian Jeanette Kohl will discuss the historical and ‘phenomenological’ significance of bust portraits as powerful objects of individual remembrance and intimate dialogue. She will do this through the lens of a painting: Rembrandt’s “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer,” one of the most celebrated works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An introductory chapter from her upcoming book “The Life of Busts. Sculpted Portraits in Fifteenth-Century Italy,” the study also presents a novel interpretation of Rembrandt’s enigmatic painting.

Art, Identity, and Social Exchange: Maya-Teotihuacan Interactions at Plaza of the Columns, Mexico

Join us on Monday, November 9, 2020 at 5:30 pm (PST) — via Zoom
Register @ https://tinyurl.com/y3xng94h

Nawa Sugiyama, Ph.D.
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside

Professor Sugiyama received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at Harvard University in 2014 and continued as a Peter Buck Post-doctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. In 2016, she began her appointment as Assistant Professor at George Mason University and transferred to the Anthropology Department at University of California-Riverside in 2019 where she established the Archaeological Research Laboratory. She is co-director of the Project Plaza of the Columns Complex at the UNESCO world heritage site of Teotihuacan, Mexico, where she is leading the excavation of a principal palatial structure in the ancient metropolis. She specializes in topics pertaining to the construction of ritualized landscapes, human-animal interaction, inter-regional exchange, and the processes and consequences of urbanization.

African Cities and Writing New Histories, A Conversation

Join us on Tuesday, October 13, 2020 at 5:30 pm (PDT) — via Zoom
Register at https://tinyurl.com/y5ku2es5

Ademide Adelusi-Adeluy, Ph.D.
Department of History, University of California, Riverside

Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi is a historian of Lagos, Nigeria. Her research combines an interest in interdisciplinary questions around the use, design and even destruction of West African cities in the nineteenth century. She received her PhD in History from NYU in 2016. Her recent work explores how colonial maps can be used to perform spatial analysis of indigenous city cultures, and how mapping applications can be leveraged to produce public histories of these sites. She teaches classes on Africa, urban history, digital storytelling and historical cartography at UC Riverside, where she is an assistant professor of History.

Prita Meier, Ph.D.
Department of Art History, New York University

Prita Meier is associate professor of African art and architectural history at New York University. Her scholarship centers on the spatial and aesthetic politics of coastal cities, ports, and border territories and she is the author of the book Swahili Port Cities: Architecture of Elsewhere. Her current research focuses on the material technologies and image cultures of travel and transportation. Most recently she has published articles on photography’s role as a material artifact of mobility and she has also written about the cultural life of Africa’s postcolonial engineering megaprojects.

Woven Silk as Embodiment: Tapestry and Imperial Portraiture at the Yuan Court from a Mongol Perspective
Yong Cho, Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University

Thursday, February 20, 2020 at 5:00pm
ARTS Seminar Room 333

The Mongol ruling house during China’s Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) enshrined portrait images of deceased emperors and empresses along with tantric Buddhist mandalas intended to represent their ritual embodiments. Interestingly, these images— portraits and mandala—were woven completely in silk using the technique of tapestry with slits (kesi). This was a dramatic departure from established tradition in China and North Asia, where such images were either painted or sculpted.

What accounted for this transition in medium, with Yuan rulers opting to produce images of their own bodies as silk tapestry? Examination of the available visual and textual evidence suggests that Yuan rulers understood the process of weaving silk as an especially efficacious means to producing embodied images, where the subject was understood to be present, rather than merely represented. Evidence also shows that such woven images were a product of collaboration among artisans from different corners of the Mongol Empire —a testimony to the cosmopolitan outlook of rulers who, even as they rose to power in China, did not relinquish their ties to the steppe.