“An Introduction to Biological Illustration: Its History, Uses, and Some Methods”: workshop at University Art Museum Saturday

Rimer Cardillo, Wasp, digital carbon pigment print, ca. 1974, printed 2011.

“An Introduction to Biological Illustration: Its History, Uses, and Some Methods,” a workshop with Marla Coppolino, Cornell Center for Technology Enterprise and Commercialization, will be held from 1-5 p.m. Saturday, March 2, in the University Art Museum. Cost is $20 ($5 for students). To register in advance for this event, call 607-777-2634.

The workshop is being held in conjunction with the temporary exhibition, “Quiet Cruelties: Prints, Sculpture, and Unique Works on Paper by Rimer Cardillo,” on view through March 23. The exhibition is on display through March 23. Admission to the museum is free. For directions and museum hours visit http://artmuseum.binghamton.edu.

Next VizCult: Mina Rajagopalan, University of Pittsburgh, TODAY

Graduate Student Activities: Dengyan Zhou

Doctoral candidate Dengyan Zhou has just returned from a field trip to China, where she carried out primary archival research and gathered uncollected materials for her dissertation, “The Language of ‘Photography’ in China: A Genealogy of Conceptual Frames from Sheying to Xinwen sheying and Jishi sheying.” One of her primary goals was to interview surviving participants in the momentous changes that swept through China, transforming its photographic culture in the middle years of the twentieth century. Here she is in January, in Taiyuan, interviewing eighty-four year old Gu Di, who, during the period of the Sino-Japanese War and the Civil War that followed, was filing clerk in the office of Jin-Cha-Ji Pictorial, the journal that shaped photographic practice in the Communist-led democratic areas and, later, in the People’s Republic of China. The three-day interview provided Dengyan with important historical details concerning the establishment and management of the journal’s photographic operations, the professional training of its photographers, the circulation of photographs, and the journal’s relationships with other organs of Communist communications in the years between 1942 and 1949. Gu Di also generously provided Dengyan with documentary materials and photographs from his own collection that bring vividly to life the understudied history of this period of photographic production in China.

Zhou Dengyan with Gu Di

Gu Di in his study and bedroom

Faculty Activities: Tom McDonough at dOCUMENTA (13)

On June 13, Associate Professor and Chair Tom McDonough participated in dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany, presenting a talk on the conferences of the Situationist International (SI) for a session called “The Artists’ Congresses: A Congress.” Please see the panel description below. While in Kassel, McDonough was also interviewed about his work on the SI by kunstundfilm; follow the link to view a video of the conversation.

During the first week after the public opening of dOCUMENTA (13), June 11 – 15, 2012, The Artists’ Congresses: A Congress gathers artists and scholars from the fields of art history, philosophy, and cultural studies to address questions related to the history of the artist’s voice. A series of five events delve into the genealogy of public institutional programming and the nature of the congress format as a platform for the production of meaning. Following a brief introduction to the day’s subject, the speakers present significant cases from the history of artists’ ideological and public congresses throughout the twentieth century, concluding with a roundtable discussion followed by an open Q & A session.

With the emergence of these platforms for artists, which evolved in tandem with the historical avant gardes, a new social reading and perception of  the artist developed: as producer rather than as outsider, genius, bohemian, or academic. These terms referring to the artist as an exception were replaced by a vision of the artist as an active participant in the construction of the social body. If the salon had earlier been the semi-public place in which conversations were activated, feeding the need of the upper classes to regard themselves as both patrons and receivers of artistic activity, the avant-garde positioned the street as a space and the artist as a maker of a new collective mind. This was a turning point where the subjective voice of the artist presented itself and its knowledge in a different arena: the meeting, and even the congress. A new syndicate of forces, as well as a different way of understanding the role and function of speech, and therefore language, started to appear in the realm of art exhibition.

How do the different morphologies, from the free academies that were initiated by artists from the late 1960s on, to the many temporary structures that they are inventing in order to present works and ideas today, affect the institutional life of art? How do they relate to the emergence—starting in the mid-1960s—of specific museum departments dedicated to the production of “parallel” discursive events? How does the programming of talks and conferences as part as the exhibition context, as documenta has done from its very first edition in 1955, affect the reception of art?

Graduate Student Activities: Rotem Rozental

Pinchas Cohen Gan, “Standard Religious Art,” 2012, oil and acrylic on canvas, 70 x 50”. Image courtesy of artforum.com.

Please follow the links to read doctoral student Rotem Rozental’s recent reviews for artforum.com on Pinchas Cohen Gan at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Oren Eliav at the Braverman Gallery. Rotem will also present her paper “Framing an Emergency: Photography in Areas of Conflict” at the symposium “Theorizing the Web,” to be held at the CUNY Graduate Center on March 1-2. Follow the link for more information.

Next VizCult: Mina Rajagopalan, University of Pittsburgh

“An Entomologist Considers Art”: gallery talk at University Art Museum today

Rimer Cardillo, Wasp, digital carbon pigment print, ca. 1974, printed 2011.

The University Art Museum will feature “An Entomologist Considers Art,” a gallery talk with biology professor Julian Shepherd at noon on Tuesday, Feb. 19, in FA-213. The talk, held in conjunction with the temporary exhibition, “Quiet Cruelties: Prints, Sculpture, and Unique Works on Paper by Rimer Cardillo,” is free and open to the public.

The exhibition is on display through March 23. Admission to the museum is free. For directions and museum hours visit http://artmuseum.binghamton.edu.

 

Alumni Activities: Bianca Freire-Medeiros

Congratulations to Bianca Freire-Medeiros (PhD 2002), whose book Touring Poverty has just been published by Routledge. Touring Poverty addresses a highly controversial practice: the transformation of impoverished neighborhoods into valued attractions for international tourists. In the megacities of the global South, selected and idealized aspects of poverty are being turned into a tourist commodity for consumption.

The book takes the reader on a journey through Rocinha, a neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro which is advertised as “the largest favela in Latin America.” Bianca Freire-Medeiros presents interviews with tour operators, guides, tourists and dwellers to explore the vital questions raised by this kind of tourism. How and why do diverse social actors and institutions orchestrate, perform and consume touristic poverty? In the context of globalization and neoliberalism, what are the politics of selling and buying the social experience of cities, cultures and peoples?

With a full and sensitive exploration of the ethical debates surrounding the ‘sale of emotions’ elicited by the first-hand contemplation of poverty, Touring Poverty is an innovative book that provokes the reader to think about the role played by tourism—and our role as tourists—within a context of growing poverty. It will be of interest to students of sociology, anthropology, ethnography and methodology, urban studies, tourism studies, mobility studies, development studies, politics and international relations.

Bianca Freire-Medeiros is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Center for Research and Documentation on Brazilian Contemporary History (CPDOC) at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She was a Research Fellow at the Center for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) at Lancaster University.

Follow the link for more information.

Binghamton at CAA: Jasmine Burns

Earlier this week, MA candidate Jasmine Burns participated in THATCamp CAA, a pre-conference forum on digital art history organized in association with Columbia University and Smarthistory at Khan Academy. The “unconference” was convened to discuss topics related to the humanities and technology. Students proposed sessions and created the program, and all participants were expected to talk and work with fellow participants in every session. Jasmine was one of only three of the forty participants to receive a Kress Foundation Travel Fellowship.

Please follow the link for more information.

Binghamton at CAA: Nancy Um

Associate Professor Nancy Um will be chairing a panel titled “The Art of the Gift: Theorizing Objects in Early Modern Cross-Cultural Exchange” at the annual meeting of the College Art Association in New York this week. See below or follow the link for more information.

Friday, February 15, 9:30 AM–12:00 PM

The Art of the Gift: Theorizing Objects in Early Modern Cross-Cultural Exchange
Regent Parlor, 2nd Floor
Chairs: Nancy Um, Binghamton University; Leah R. Clark, Saint Michael’s College

Artists as Ambassadors in the Early Modern Mediterranean
Sean Roberts, University of Southern California

Solicitous Gifts: Kunstkammer Memory, Iberian Diplomacy, and the Translation of Antwerp Art Overseas
Jessica Stevenson-Stewart, University of California, Berkeley and Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, München

The Moor’s Last Gift: Portraits and Patronage in Les marques d’honneur de la maison de Tassis (Antwerp, 1645)
Cristelle Baskins, Tufts University

Gifting and “Regifting” the Old Indies: The Mobility of the Gift in Early Modern Europe
Carrie Anderson, Boston University

Chinoiseries for the Qing
Kristel Smentek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Binghamton at CAA: Alumni Activities–Kivanc Kilinc, Saygin Salgirli, Victoria Scott

Binghamton’s Art History alums will also be active at this year’s meeting of the College Art Association. Kivanc Kilinc (PhD 2010) and Saygin Salgirli (PhD 2009) will be co-chairing a panel titled “Interventions into Postcolonialism and Beyond: A Call for New Sites, Objects, and Times,” and Victoria H. F. Scott (PhD 2010) will be discussing the Art History Society of the Americas at the CAA Student and Emerging Professionals Committee. See below or follow the link for more information.

Wednesday, February 13, 2:30 PM–5:00 PM

Interventions into Postcolonialism and Beyond: A Call for New Sites, Objects, and Times
Petit Trianon, 3rd Floor
Chairs: Kivanc Kilinc, Izmir University of Economics; Saygin Salgirli, Sabanci University

A Call for a Spatial and Temporal Turn in Postcolonial Studies
Kivanc Kilinc, Izmir University of Economics; Saygin Salgirli, Sabanci University

Migrating Sites of Cultural Reproduction: The Rhetoric of Empire in Richard Long’s Land Art
Eric Matthew Stryker, Southern Methodist University

Rethinking Egypt as a Paradigm of Periphery: The Temple of Dendur as the Center of Hybrid Culture at the Edge of a Global Roman Empire
Erin Peters, University of Iowa

Reanimating the Muted Site of Modernity
Shima Baradaran Mohajeri, Texas A&M University

Indigenous Archaeologies of Ottoman Anatolia: Decolonizing Spolia
Benjamin Anderson, Cornell University

Submerged Stories from Eastern Turkey: Dams, Archaeology, and the Unnamed “Colonial”
Laurent Dissard, University of California, Berkeley

Saturday, February 16, 9:30 AM–12:00 PM

CAA Student and Emerging Professionals Committee
The Impact of Contingent Faculty: Changing Trends in Teaching and Tenure
Nassau Suite, 2nd Floor
Chairs: Jennifer Laurel Stoneking-Stewart, University of Tennessee; Amanda Hellman, Emory University

Adjunct Advocacy: An Activist’s Account
Jeanne K. Brody, Villanova University and Saint Joseph’s University

The Art History Society of the Americas (AHSA)
Victoria H. F. Scott, European Postwar Contemporary Art Forum

The Deprofessionalization of the Profession
Michael F. Bérubé, Pennsylvania State University

Contingent, Adjunct, Part-Time, Temporary: Making It Work
Joe A. Thomas, Kennesaw State University

Cause and Effect: Trends in Higher Education
John W. Curtis, American Association of University Professors

Reminder: VizCult with Jonathan Massey, Syracuse University, TODAY