From the Visual Resources Collection: Archivision Additions

It is exciting to announce the addition of over 15,000 new images to our Shared Shelf Collection (accessible via ARTStor). These new modules from Archivision include 3,000 Italian artworks, ancient Roman frescoes, mosaics, sculpture and masterworks—paintings and sculpture—from the Medieval to Baroque periods.

In addition there are architectural works spanning the contemporary (Millennium Park in Chicago; works by Gehry, Pelli, Calatrava and Libeskind) to the ancient world (the mosaics from Villa Romana del Casale in Piazza Armerina, Sicily; Ephesus and other monuments of the Roman empire) and in between (French chateaux and gardens; Byzantine architecture in Mystras; Venice). Other highlights include Frank Lloyd Wright, major murals of Diego Rivera and excellent coverage of Oxford. There are images featuring Russia as a highlight  (over 2000 images including the major palaces and gardens around St. Petersburg and coverage in Moscow.)

The group also holds material from Paris, including several important hôtels, and London–extensive coverage of Chiswick House and grounds, plus many of Wren’s churches. For Classics there are ancient Roman drawings scanned directly from original 19th century volumes (348 plans, sections and elevations) and coverage of the Elgin marbles. Art from the Victoria and Albert Museum, including their amazing cast collection, provides survey support. A collection from Mexico is also included (Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Puebla and Taxco.) For the contemporary period, there is new architecture in London and in Los Angeles, including Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall and complete coverage of the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden at UCLA, and important works by Mackintosh like the Glasgow School of Art and the House of an Art Lover.

Next VizCult: Peter Christensen, University of Rochester

This talk will examine the opportunities that the digital humanities affords the creation of new types of evidence in the study of architecture and architectural history that serve to challenges ideas of solitary authorship. This talk will demonstrate this opportunity through an instructive case study: the architecture of the Ottoman railway network and the buildings designed by the railway network’s German engineers. Generic prefabricated building plans modeled on the German Heimatstil and designed by German architects in Frankfurt were, in the earlier years of the network’s development, deployed to remote sites within the Ottoman empire and adapted in situ by Ottoman laborers. German engineers implementing these designs, supervising an ever-shifting multiethnic labor force, did their best to reconcile the generic blueprints with the specific work site. Meanwhile, the laborers reviewed the blueprints, performing their own form of reconciliation. By virtue of their own notions of what a building should look like, the laborers brought to these buildings their own circumscribed authorial “fingerprints,” an idea which this talk will problematize vis-à-vis the field of biometrics and its digital technologies.

Graduate Activities: Addie Gordon at William and Mary

Peter Eisenman, City of Culture of Galicia, 1999-2012.

Doctoral student Addie Gordon traveled to Santiago de Compostela, Spain this summer in preparation for her dissertation. Addie conducted research at Álvaro Siza’s Galician Center of Contemporary Art and Peter Eisenman’s City of Culture of Galicia, as well as in the collections of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela and various other administrative buildings.

She will present on a portion of this research at the Annual Symposium for Pilgrimage Studies hosted by the Institute for Pilgrimage Studies at the College of William and Mary on October 1, 2016. Her paper is titled “A Canopy of Stars: Contemporary Representations and Transformations of Pilgrimage at the Galician Pavilion.”

Álvaro Siza Vieira, Galician Center of Contemporary Art, 1988-93.

CEMERS 50th Anniversary Conference this October

Graduate Activities: Melissa Fitzmaurice at SFMOMA

Mario Botta’s original design for SFMOMA and the expansion by Snøhetta. Image via http://www.inexhibit.com.

Doctoral candidate Melissa Fitzmaurice recently accepted a position at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. As a private guide, Melissa has the opportunity to research, organize, and lead tours through SFMOMA’s collections, focusing on the architecture of the building, the Snøhetta-designed expansion and the newly loaned Fisher Collection as well as the museum’s permanent collections. This position also provides access to the museum’s archives and other employee resources. Melissa looks forward to sharing SFMOMA with any of her Binghamton colleagues traveling to San Francisco!

Visiting Film and Video Artists and Speakers Series: Henry Hills

Faculty Activities: Ronald Gonzales in Rochester and Syracuse

First VizCult of the year: Tom McDonough, Binghamton University, TODAY

Contemporary Korean artist Haegue Yang (b. 1971) has gained international recognition over the last decade for her large-scale installations incorporating custom made Venetian blinds. Often incorporating other sensory elements — from standing fans to scent emitters — and frequently referencing repressed moments in twentieth-century literary and political history, these works have been understood as poised on an unstable boundary between narrative and abstraction. But what have been their determinants, both sociopolitical and aesthetic? This question has so far remained unexplored. To locate them between desire and power, between the unfinished project of modernity and its overcoming, between the history of geometric abstraction and its exhaustion — those are the aims of this amphibological reading of Yang’s extraordinary work.

 

Homecoming alumna exhibition: Kirsten Moran ’95

SATURDAY, SEPT. 24
6 p.m. – 8 p.m.
Reception for 
Hold and See, solo exhibition of paintings by Kirsten Moran, ’95.
MONDAY, SEPT. 25
5 p.m.
Gallery Talk with the Artist.
Rosefsky Gallery, Department of Art and Design, Fine Arts Building
Join us to celebrate works of art by painting and cinema alumna Kirsten Moran. Moran’s paintings, which intuitively explore the history of girls and women from the corporeal, environmental, and psychological perspectives. They reflect a journey of our ancient ancestral roots: a matrilineage that connects us all through our bodies, the land, and psyche. The exhibition is open Friday, September 23 – Thursday, October 20, 2016.

 

 

 

Barbara Abou-El-Haj’s Lordship and Commune

 

Amiens Cathedral, Vaulting in the Nave, Facing East towards the Apse. Photograph by Sarra Fleur Abou-El-Haj.

The International Center of Medieval Art has launched a collaborative project based on Professor Barbara Abou-El-Haj‘s unfinished book manuscript, to be titled Lordship and Commune: A Comparative History of Building and Decorating in Reims and Amiens and illustrated with new photographs of both cathedrals shot by her daughter Sarra in 2006. The editors and organizers of The Lordship and Commune Project: A Collaboratory include Michael Davis (Mount Holyoke College), Lindsey Hansen (Indiana University Bloomington), Jennifer Feltman (University of Alabama), Janet Marquardt (Eastern Illinois University), and Nina Rowe (Fordham University). The project has been developed at the invitation and with the support of Barbara Abou-El-Haj’s husband, Rifa’at Abou-El-Haj, and her two daughters, Sarra and Marriam, as well as two close friends, Kathryn Sklar and Tom Dublin (both professors and colleagues of Barbara’s here at Binghamton). Please read below for more information and visit the project site here.

At her death on March 6, 2015, Barbara Abou-El-Haj left a book, long in the works, unfinished. Her title was Lordship and Commune: A Comparative History of Building and Decorating in Reims and Amiens. The book was to engage with the ways in which the differing political structures of the medieval cities of Reims and Amiens affected the construction of their respective Gothic cathedrals in the thirteenth century. Abou-El-Haj observed that scholars have noted the differences in the apparent quality and variety of sculptural decoration at Reims and Amiens but failed to consider the dissimilar political situations in the cities. The archdiocese of Reims was ruled by an autocratic archbishop-count, who held the power to levy taxes on its citizens, while Amiens, a suffragan of Reims, was a self-ruled commune independent of episcopal jurisdiction. She maintained that it was precisely the governmental differences at the sites and the resulting disparity of resources that were reflected in the buildings themselves.

Abou-El-Haj’s scholarship was deliberately provocative and she aimed to inspire scholars to think beyond the received wisdom. She particularly questioned tidy formulations that saw parallels between the aesthetic harmonies of Gothic cathedrals and purported social consensus on the ground. Such efforts are evident in two influential articles: “The Urban Setting for Late Medieval Church Building: Reims and its Cathedral between 1210 and 1240,” Art History 11 (1988): 17-41; and “The Audiences for the Medieval Cult of Saints,” Gesta 30 (1991): 3-15.

With her Lordship and Commune book, Abou-El-Haj was poised to inspire a new generation of art historians to grapple with the interrelations of political and social conditions and the aesthetics and iconographies of monumental art in the high Middle Ages. But the typescript she left behind was only half written and it would be impossible for even the most dedicated colleagues and students to complete it adequately.

In this situation, however, we saw an opportunity. In The Lordship and Commune Project: A Collaboratory we hope to pick up what we might term Abou-El-Haj’s “call to analysis,” creating an interactive web site that distills and fills in her text, provides relevant bibliography, and poses questions inspired both by Abou-El-Haj’s propositions and her methods. We hope to encourage readers to supplement, revise, applaud, and generally engage with this material in order to revive the most vibrant parts of Barbara Abou-el-Haj’s academic work.

First VizCult of the year: Tom McDonough, Binghamton University

Contemporary Korean artist Haegue Yang (b. 1971) has gained international recognition over the last decade for her large-scale installations incorporating custom made Venetian blinds. Often incorporating other sensory elements — from standing fans to scent emitters — and frequently referencing repressed moments in twentieth-century literary and political history, these works have been understood as poised on an unstable boundary between narrative and abstraction. But what have been their determinants, both sociopolitical and aesthetic? This question has so far remained unexplored. To locate them between desire and power, between the unfinished project of modernity and its overcoming, between the history of geometric abstraction and its exhaustion — those are the aims of this amphibological reading of Yang’s extraordinary work.

 

Fall 2016 Visiting Film and Video Artists and Speakers Series