Graduate Activities: Michael James

John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, 1832. Oil on canvas, 72 1/4 x 108 inches. Purchased by Daniel Wadsworth and members of the Atheneum Committee, 1844.3.

Doctoral student Michael James spent the summer as a curatorial intern in the department of American Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, working closely with Assistant Curator Erin Monroe to plan a fall 2016 installation focusing on John Trumbull’s Revolutionary War paintings.

Michael will also present his paper “American Progress and Manifest Destiny: Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” at the annual meeting of the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC), held this year in Roanoke, VA and hosted by Virginia Tech and Hollins University. He’ll be joined on his panel, which convenes on Thursday, October 20 at 10:00, by representatives from UNC-Charlotte, the University of Connecticut, the University of Central Florida, and Georgia Southern University.

Faculty Activities: Tom McDonough in Social Histories of Art

Associate Professor Tom McDonough‘s introductions and commentary for two of T. J. Clark’s essays were recently published in  Social Histories of Art: A Critical Anthology, (les presses du réel, June 2016) under the auspices of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art. This anthology gathers together significant art historical primary texts and situates them in the discipline’s history:

The history of art is not singular. This young discipline, which since the nineteenth century has attempted to conquer its autonomy as a science, is to be read and practiced (preferably, at least) by relating and linking it to a context — diverse, burgeoning, and sometimes unstable, but rich: such is the purpose that governs this book.
Repeatedly, throughout the twentieth century, voices were heard proposing a reading of artistic production informed by material, economic, political, or institutional conditions. This anthology in two volumes makes these voices resonate by proposing a path that sweeps that century, from 1930 to 2000, between Europe and the United States. It allows us to read, chronologically, thirty-three texts, some of which are little known, often translated into French for the first time, and presented and commented by today’s art historians. From one chapter to another, in connection with an art history that leads the reader from the Florentine Renaissance to photography, from the art of the Netherlands to the recent history of museums, these extracts debate Marxist readings and gender studies, technical approaches and theoretical essays, without ignoring the crises, tensions, aporias, and even the silences that have punctuated this history.

Faculty Activities: Jeffrey Kirkwood at the IKKM

The Palais Dürckheim (home of the IKKM), designed by Henry van de Velde in 1912.

Assistant Professor Jeffrey Kirkwood will be a fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM) at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany for the Winter Semester 2016/17. His research project, titled “Modal Materialism,” will examine the history of media technologies in the visualization of counterfactual, contingent, and possible states. Professor Kirkwood, who was an Associate Junior Fellow at the IKKM in 2011-2012,  joins other former fellows such as Boris Groys, Georges Didi-Huberman, Tom Gunning, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, and Harun Farocki.

Faculty Activities: Andrew Walkling at the Huntington

Associate Professor Andrew Walkling kicked off his year-long sabbatical by driving across the country to Los Angeles, where he will be spending four months on an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Henry E. Huntington Library/Art Gallery/Botanical Gardens working on his next book project, “Instruments of Absolutism: Restoration Court Culture and the Epideictic Mode”.  En route, he couldn’t resist stopping in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, home of London Bridge–the actual London Bridge, built between 1824 and 1831 (to replace the 12th-century structure which, by then, was famously “falling down”), and then dismantled in the 1960s, when all the exterior stonework was moved to this bizarre desert outpost.  Note that in the photograph, Walkling’s hand is not actually resting on the metal post, which was too hot to touch, as the outdoor temperature was 115 degrees.  Nevertheless, he braved the heat, and now has a lot of great detail pictures of this nineteenth-century landmark that he’s dying to show to former and future students of his “Early Modern London” class.

Faculty Activities: Julia Walker at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg

Alison and Peter Smithson, Berlin Hauptstadt Proposal, 1958.

From September 4-10, Assistant Professor Julia Walker will be participating in the 2016 Summer School of the Walter Benjamin Kolleg at the Universität Bern. The theme of this year’s Summer School, “Border Regimes: Confrontations, Configurations, Transpositions,” seeks to contribute to a critical interdisciplinary discussion on borders and analogous concepts. Read more about Walker’s project below.

Faculty Activities: Kevin Hatch at MoMA

Bruce Conner. CROSSROADS (promotional still). 1976. 35mm film (black and white, sound) transferred to video, 37 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Accessions Committee Fund purchase), with the generous support of the New Art Trust. © Bruce Conner 2016. Courtesy Conner Family Trust.

On Friday, September 23, Assistant Professor Kevin Hatch will give the keynote lecture at A Symposium on Bruce Conner, held at the Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the exhibition BRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE, which is the first complete retrospective of the artist’s 50-year career. Professor Hatch’s talk is titled “Not Thinking of You: A Letter from Bruce Conner”:

Among Bruce Conner’s many artistic mediums are the letters—sometimes serious, sometimes funny, and always fascinating—that he exchanged with figures ranging from other artists (like Wallace Berman and Ray Johnson) to pop culture celebrities (such as Dennis Hopper and John Lennon). Not only do these letters offer an unexpectedly intimate portrait of a particularly elusive artist, but they also point to something larger: a vision of an ideal art world, realized in epistolary form and unencumbered by the limitations and boundaries of a rapidly codifying art market.

Also see Hatch’s previews of the exhibition in Artforum and The Art Newspaper.

Welcome back!

The Binghamton University Nature Preserve.

A warm welcome to all new and returning students as the Fall 2016 semester officially begins! For more information about Binghamton Art History and to stay up-to-date on our departmental events and activities, please subscribe to this blog, visit our website and like us on Facebook.

Alumni Activities: Paulina Banas at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture

Émile Prisse d’Avennes “Mandarah: salon de réception au rez-de-chaussée,” published in Prisse D’Avennes’ L’art arabe d’après les monuments du Kaire: depuis le VIIe siècle jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe (Paris, Vve A. Morel et Cie., 1869-77), Vol. III, Pl. 141. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Congratulations to Paulina Banas (PhD 2016), who has been awarded a Postdoctoral Associateship at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) at the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University for 2016-17. This appointment will allow Paulina to focus on research and on revising her dissertation, The Orientalist Book Industry (1840-80): Prisse d’Avennes, Systems of Borrowing and Reuse, and the Marketing of Egypt, for publication. She will also contribute a public lecture on her research project to the AKPIA lecture series, A Forum for Islamic Art and Architecture.

Graduate Activities: Dengyan Zhou

Quotations from Dr. Zhou

Congratulations to Dengyan Zhou, our latest PhD, after her impressive defense of her outstandingly original dissertation. Dengyan now returns to Beijing where she will work on turning her dissertation into a book, while pushing forward on an array of publication and exhibition projects. Watch this space! Travel safely Dengyan. We will all miss you!

Graduate Activities: Wylie Schwartz at station923

Join doctoral student and curator Wylie Schwartz at station923 on Friday, August 26, for an opening reception for Ahmed Ozsever’s show Arche/Structure. See below for more information or visit http://station923.wordpress.com/

station923 presents:

Ahmed Ozsever
Arche/Structure
8.26.16
reception: 6-9pm

Ahmed Ozsever’s work explores perceptions of time through the embedded memory traces that manifest in both constructed and natural environments. Ahmed works in installation utilizing various materials and techniques including video, sound, and text; all of which are informed by photographic way of looking and thinking.

The forthcoming exhibition Arche/Structure looks at infrastructure as the bridge between highly regimented quotidian time and seemingly unquantifiable geological time. The subject matter is inspired by Station 923’s proximity to now defunct rail lines, originally constructed to supersede the canal structure of New York State. The resulting works are immersive and experiential; eliciting sensations of compressed distance while establishing relationships between the domestic space and landscape through forced and obscure vantage points. The exhibition will feature sculptural and photographic components; installed to seamlessly engage the unique architecture of the space.

Ahmed currently lives and works in Chicago, IL. Ahmed earned his MFA from Cornell University in 2015 and is excited to be returning to Ithaca for this upcoming exhibition.

On view through September 2nd.

station923
923 E. Shore Drive
Ithaca, NY  14850
607.227.7803
www.station923.wordpress.com

Parking is limited. Please park at parking lot across the street and walk over.

Graduate Activities: Melissa Fitzmaurice at Visualizing Venice

This summer, doctoral candidate Melissa Fitzmaurice participated in the fifth year of the Visualizing Venice Summer School, organized by the Wired! Lab at Duke University, the University Iuav di Venezia, the University of Padua, and Venice International University. From June 8-20, Melissa and a cohort of international scholars were trained in digital technologies for historical and cultural visualization, including 3D modeling and digital mapping. This year’s program focused on the 500^th anniversary of Ghetto of Venice, and culminated in the presentation of collaborative final projects that utilized the various technologies studied during the program to provide new perspectives on the Venetian Ghetto and its history. Melissa’s participation in Visualizing Venice was generously funded by the Getty Foundation. While in Venice, Melissa also attended the Architecture Biennale.

To view one of Melissa’s projects, go to https://skfb.ly/PtT8.