
Lecture by Heghnar Watenpaugh, September 9, 2019

The Art History department congratulates this year’s graduating BA students!
Olivia Baerga
Marisa Davila
Jennifer Dioguardi
Emma Fishbein
Emily Greenberg
Erin Livingston (honors)
Annemarie Maag-Tanchak
Keara McAdams
Lauren Rachel Poretsky
Thomas Rice
Sabrina Soffer
Associate Professor Alicia Wilcox Walker (History of Art, Bryn Mawr College) will deliver the 2019 Ferber Lecture as part of the Spring 2019 VizCult Dean’s Speaker Series, 5:00 PM on Wednesday 13 March in FA 143. Entitled “Erotic Images, Christian Eyes: Seeing with the Body and Soul in Byzantium,” her talk explores how the Greco-Roman tradition contributed in meaningful ways to Byzantine paradigms of female behavior, self-understanding, and comportment. Female characters of antique myth and epic remained relevant in the Byzantine world because they provided compelling models for how corporeal beauty and sexual allure might be advantageously deployed, as well as cautionary examples of how people who engaged with these powerful forces might be corrupted. Her paper explores how Byzantine women’s bodies were put in dialogue with visual and textual portrayals of pagan goddesses and heroines, and how these practices changed in fundamental ways from the early to middle Byzantine eras.
Screenshot, artistsinparis.org
This data salon will be held in LN-1302C (Zurack Hi-Technology Collaboration Center) at 12 pm on Monday Nov. 19. Lunch will be provided.
Julia Walker will be speaking at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) on Wednesday, October 17 at 12:00 in LN 1106. Her paper is titled “’Form is nothing but emptiness, emptiness nothing but form’: Brigitte D’Ortschy and Frank Lloyd Wright in Germany, America, and Japan.” All are welcome to attend.
This paper examines the understudied German architect and planner Brigitte D’Ortschy. Born in Berlin, D’Ortschy spent much of her architectural career in Munich, first at the Technische Universität and later as a founding member of the Bavarian Committee for Urban and Regional Planning. Yet in between, she came in contact with Frank Lloyd Wright, in whom she would find a resonant intelligence—one who privileged the mental and spiritual in architecture and one who contemplated the powerful effects of silence, space, and absence. Her interactions with Wright, I aim to show, laid the groundwork for her later pursuit: becoming a Zen master of the Sanbo Kyodan school in Japan. Through analysis of D’Ortschy’s essays, letters, talks, and photographic archives, this paper reveals her intensive engagement with Wright’s ideas, from his theory of “organic architecture” to his thinking about the importance of flow and continuity in architectural space. I hope to show that D’Ortschy’s developing interest in Zen and Japan, aided by Wright’s philosophy, led her to view architecture as yet another form of the ideal “emptiness” she sought in spiritual contemplation.
Binghamton University will host The Path of Tolerance, a sponsored public art exhibition featuring over 90 works of art from contributors worldwide. The exhibition will be on view from Sept. 29 through Oct. 9, on the Lois B. DeFleur walkway, between the Glenn G. Bartle Library and the Fine Arts Building, on campus. Binghamton will be the first major institution to present the full Tolerance collection in the United States, and the first to exhibit the pieces directly on the ground. This public exhibition originated from a larger project initiated by renowned graphic designer and illustrator Mirko Ilić, who will lead an opening tour of the exhibition at 2 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 29 on the Lois B. DeFleur walkway. This growing exhibition – initially starting with just 21 pieces and now boasting 93 – features artwork based on the theme of tolerance. Each artist is only given dimensions and minimal instructions to follow. Their piece must include their signature, the name of their country and the word “tolerance” in their own language. To make this exhibition possible at Binghamton University, Blazo Kovacevic, associate professor of art and design, selected an appropriate location and printed the images onto specially made outdoor material. Prints will be installed directly onto the pavement as stickers along the Lois B. DeFleur walkway for students to see while walking to class. Families and alumni will be able to see the artwork as well, as the exhibition is running through Family Weekend and Alumni Week.
Other collaborators have shown similar exhibitions all over the world. In Turkey prints were installed in a mall, in Madrid they hung off an overpass, and in Slovenia images were enlarged to fill billboards throughout the city.
For further information, contact Blazo Kovacevic at bkovacev@binghamton.edu. This
exhibition is organized by Binghamton University Department of Art and Design and is
supported by the Elsie Rosefsky Memorial Endowment.