art_history
Department of Art and Art History

Art History Newsletter, Fall 2010

Editor's Greeting

The past year or so has witnessed transformative physical changes in our two buildings as well as encouraging new and ongoing faculty initiatives. As Susan Rather notes in her text below, the Art History spaces in the Doty Fine Arts Building have been drastically reconfigured to make new offices, a large all-purpose meeting room, a lounge, a mailroom, and a partial kitchen. This has enabled most of our faculty, assistant instructors, and teaching assistants to have their offices clustered together. The San Antonio architecture firm of Lake / Flato completed its renovations of the Art Building, which occurred once the staff of the Blanton Museum of Art moved into the Edgar A. Smith Building across campus. The department’s Visual Arts Center opened on September 24, 2010 in the former art gallery. The 25,000 square feet exhibition space is intended as an experimental laboratory, a place for displaying art by students, faculty, artists-in-residence, and other invited artists. The Visual Arts Center provides the art history faculty, including already Professors Andrea Giunta and Moyo Okediji, and students opportunities to curate short-term exhibitions. The Art Building renovations created new offices and work spaces for CLAVIS (Center for Latin American Visual Studies), directed by Andrea Giunta, and the Mesoamerica Center, directed by David Stuart.

Our department continues to expanded its international programs. Casa Herrera, the Center for Learning and Scholarship in Central America, located in Antigua, Guatemala, is run as a partnership between our Mesoamerica Center, the University of Texas, and the Fundación Pantaleón. The renowned Maya Meetings, held at the University of Texas since 1977, convened for the first time at Casa Herrera in March 2010. David Stuart expects for future meetings to be held in Austin and Antigua in alternating years. Plans are underway for University of Texas courses to be taught in Casa Herrera starting in fall 2011. Ann Johns continues to direct the department’s highly successful Learning Tuscany program, summer courses which are taught in Castiglion Fiorentino, a gorgeous hill town near Cortona.

One does not need to travel to Antigua or Tuscany, to experience art. Besides the rich collections of the Blanton Museum of Art and the Ransom Center as well as the changing shows in the Visual Arts Center, our department has in the past few years taken ownership of thousands of pre-Columbian, Native Indian, and central African objects. As Kim Jones and Steve Bourget report below, the Art and Art History Collection (AAHC) provides invaluable opportunities for researching and exhibiting these historic objects. The activities of the University of Texas’ Landmarks program are starting to change the appearance of the Austin campus. Directed by Andrée Bober, Landmarks is a public art project funded by a percentage of the costs of new buildings and capital improvement projects on campus. In addition to borrowing contemporary sculptures from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Landmarks has begun commissioning new art, such as James Turrel’s Skyspace, which soon will adorn the new Student Activities Center.

For more information on the activities of these centers and programs, see the following websites:

www.utmesoamerica.org
www.utexas.edu/finearts/vac
www.finearts.utexas.edu/aah/art_history/special_programs/clavis/index.cfm
www.finearts.utexas.edu/aah/art_history/special_programs/learning_tuscany.cfm
landmarks.utexas.edu

Finally, I encourage our students and alumni to send me news of their activities so I can incorporate this information into next year’s edition of the Art History Newsletter.

– Jeffrey Chipps Smith
chipps@mail.utexas.edu

 

New Art History Office Suite and the Transfer of the Visual Resources Collection

Contributed by Susan Rather

The first suite of twelve offices dedicated to the department’s art history faculty and staff opened in 1979, as part of the newly constructed Fine Arts Building and within the larger arts complex of the same date, encompassing Bass Concert Hall and the Butler School of Music (as they are now called). In addition to art history faculty offices, the Doty Fine Arts Building (renamed a few years ago) also housed a small lecture hall, the “Slide Library,” and dean’s office suite on the same floor, with the Fine Arts Library on three floors above. Just one year later, however, the addition of three new art history faculty required those faculty and successive hires during the 1980s and 1990s to be lodged, once again, in the Art Building. Welcome construction of three offices in previously vacant space on the ground floor of DFA in the later 1990s only minimally alleviated this dispersal. As of spring 2010, barely half of the twenty-three art historians occupied offices within a unified space.

The pressing need for offices contributed to an administrative decision—sad but inevitable in this digital age—to close the slide library, by then known as the Visual Resources Collection. What had once been a gathering place for departmental faculty, teaching assistants, graduate students, and staff had been nearly emptied of activity, except for that of VRC staff, then deeply engaged with the painstaking (and still ongoing) process of building a digital collection. The availability of high quality digital images produced by them, by faculty members, and accessible from sources such as ARTstor rendered the more than 700,000 slides—a crown jewel of the Department of Art and Art History—nearly obsolete. The slides remain available in the Collections Deposit Library and digitization continues, but VRC staff transferred into the UT Library system in late 2009, as part of a coordinated, campus-wide effort to manage digital assets.

Beginning in spring 2009, the process of re-envisioning the VRC space began in earnest. Fast forward to fall 2010: 23 art history faculty offices occupy one capacious suite. The new principal entrance is through the original glass doors to the slide collection. Just inside on the left is a large administrative office and beyond that the graduate coordinator’s office—both with a wall of windows, to the delight of their occupants. Five more faculty offices complete the perimeter of the newly configured space, along with five large new interior offices. Smaller TA and AI offices bring graduate student teachers into our midst, after years of shuttling among isolated spaces, including at one point a closet off the Art auditorium! At the heart of the new suite, a very large room (20 x 27 feet) accommodates faculty meetings, colloquia, dissertations defenses, discrete teaching and research functions, and even social gatherings, thanks to moveable flip-top tables that allow the space to be cleared. Twenty-six people can be accommodated at once if all the tables are pulled together, with the possibility of creating more intimate seating configurations. Although the new conference room has modern conference chairs, the suite’s original Breuer chairs, refinished and reupholstered, dot the hallways. Finally, the complex includes a new workspace in what used to be VRC storage and darkroom; within are faculty and student mailboxes, copier and other equipment, extensive cabinet space, and basic kitchen facilities.

This project could never have happened without the support and generous funding from Doug Dempster, Dean of the College of Fine Arts, and from the Office of the Provost, Steve Leslie. We are so grateful to them and invite all to visit our new space!

 

The Art and Art History Collection (AAHC)
Department of Art and Art History

Contributed by Kim Jones, PhD, Collections Manager, and Prof. Steve Bourget

The Art and Art History Collection (AAHC) consists of ancient artifacts, historic objects, and ethnographic materials from the Americas and Africa. The bulk of the collection was formed in 2004, consisting of cultural collections transferred from the Texas Memorial Museum (TMM), currently known as the Texas Natural Science Center (TNSC). The initial transfers from the TMM included largely pre-Columbian and ethnographic collections pertaining to Central and South America. Subsequent acquisitions expanded the scope to include objects from Central Africa and the North American Southwest. The transfers continued through 2008, bringing the current department holdings to nearly three thousand artifacts.

The Art and Art History department acquisitions were supplemented in 2005 by a generous donation of sixty-five objects from the Duncan and Elizabeth Boeckman collection of Dallas, Texas. The Boeckman collection represents cultures from Central and South America, predominantly ceramic figurines from Nayarit, Jalisco, and Colima cultures of West Mexico. The artifacts complement well the pre-Columbian acquisitions and further enrich the strong Americas focus of the department collection.

The most substantial holdings of the AAHC are the ancient ceramic, stone, and textile artifacts created by various pre-Columbian societies. From South America, the collection includes numerous ritual ceramics and exceptionally fine textiles, pertaining to the Nasca, Moche, Chimú, Lambayeque (Sicán), and Chancay cultures. From Central America, the AAHC boasts a rich variety of ceramic vessels, modeled figurines, bone and stone sculptures created by the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Colima, Nayarit, Zapotec, and Veracruz cultural traditions. The holdings further comprise tripod vessels and bowls from Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Columbia, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

In addition to the pre-Columbian objects, the AAHC has a distinguished group of over 700 historic and ethnographic textiles from Mexico, Guatemala, and the U.S. Southwest. These include numerous colorful huipiles (women’s shirts) from Guatemala and mantas (shawls) from Zinacantan, Oaxaca, and the Huichol regions, collected largely from the 1960s through 1970s. The collection also hosts over sixty Navajo and Hopi textiles that date from the 19th to early 20th centuries.

There are a limited number of African artifacts within the department collection. The objects largely derive from West Africa, such as a divination tray from the Yoruba. There are also wooden sculptures and masks from the Dogon, the Senufo and Mali region.

Representing over two thousand years of ritual and artistic practices, the collection supports a broad range of academic interests for individual research and course instruction. Highly select and representative examples of the collection are on permanent display in the Fine Arts Library, including pre-Columbian ceramics, stone sculptures, and textiles, as well as the African wooden sculptures. Portions of the collection have further been exhibited in the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth and locally at the Mexic-Arte Museum, the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, the UT Visual Arts Center, and the College of Fine Arts Dean’s office. Finally, the collection is being digitally catalogued for greater accessibility. Through exhibition, teaching and research, the AAHC thus serves as a substantial resource for university students and the greater scholarly community.

 

Faculty News

Eddie Chambers joined the faculty in January 2010. He was previously, on a number of occasions, Visiting Professor, Art History Department, Emory University, Atlanta, teaching African Diaspora art history. His most recent published text was “African-American Art: Redefining the Canon,” which appeared in the latest issue of Critical Interventions. Chambers is currently working on an appraisal of the Annotating Art's Histories series, published by the Institute of International Visual Arts, London and MIT Press, and edited by Kobena Mercer. The appraisal will appear in a forthcoming issue of Small Axe. Chambers is also working on a text exploring the influence of iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo on the Black British artist Donald Rodney, who died in 1998 in his mid-thirties. Chambers is conducting research for a book project, “Things Done Changed: A Recent History of Black Artists in Britain.”

Michael Charlesworth, on leave in spring 2010, is currently researching and writing a book about the painter, writer and film-maker Derek Jarman (1942-1994).

John R. Clarke continues to direct the Oplontis Project, a multi-year collaboration that will produce the definitive publication of Villa A ("of Poppaea") at Oplontis (Torre Annunziata, Italy). With the support of a Collaborative Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Texas Department of Art and Art History, Clarke organized a four-week season of excavation and study (May 22-June 17, 2010) at the site, engaging up to twenty workers at a time. This year researchers from the fields of geology, chemistry, paleobotany joined archaeologists and art historians. Research in this period included opening five trenches to explore pre-79 CE levels, as well as coring to the depth of 18 meters to determine the geomorphology of the area beneath and around the Villa. A team of excavators from Swale & Thames, Kent, UK, joined the project for the four-week period. Clarke directed the cataloguing of finds, the study of the Villa's extensive wall paintings and mosaics, and database work. He enjoyed cleaning, describing, and photographing 685 fragments of heretofore unidentified wall painting. Post-season, he joined the group’s sculpture expert, Professor Eric Moormann of Raboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, to study and photograph approximately 40 sculptures from the Villa. Representatives of Art History and the Oplontis Project, former graduate students Regina Gee (Ph.D. 2003) and Alvaro Ibarra (Ph.D. 2009), as well as doctoral candidates Lea Cline and Ivo van der Graaff, joined Clarke at the Eleventh International Colloquium on Ancient Mural Painting at Ephesos, Turkey, to present their work. Clarke has prepared several reports, including one on the activities of 2009 and 2010, which he will present with Dr. Michael L. Thomas, Director of Excavations, at the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of American in January 2011.

Clarke continues work on a book entitled “Seeing Gods: Epiphany in the Visual Culture of the Ancient Mediterranean,” that looks at the phenomenon of the appearance of gods to mortals. In Spring 2010, he taught a graduate seminar entitled “Seeing Gods: Epiphany in Ancient Religious Practice and Visual Representation” to further explore the topic. The book will include comparative ethnographic study of Hindu cults of statue care and "activation" in modern India as an introduction to ancient Mediterranean beliefs about immanence of the deity in material forms. A chapter, entitled "Constructing the Spaces of Epiphany in Ancient Greek and Roman Visual Culture," has been accepted for publication in a Festschrift. Other chapters will study automata, beauty as epiphany, and the appearance of deities among mortals in painting and sculpture. Additionally, Clarke published a paper on copying methods in ancient Roman painting for the Acts of the Tenth International Colloquium on Ancient Mural Painting as well as several book reviews. Work in press includes a chapter on the ancient Roman house, or domus, for the Cambridge Companion to Roman Architecture, and another for the Cambridge Companion to the study of ancient sexualities.

Andrea Giunta worked on three research projects in 2009-2010. The first involves women artists in Latin America between 1950 and 1980, a project that will conclude with an exhibition that will open at the MOLAA - Museum of Latin American Art in Los Angeles in late 2012. This project analyzes women artists' contribution to modernity in Concretism, Neo-concretism and Kinetic Art in addition to lyric abstraction, critical figuration, Conceptualism and Feminism.

Giunta’s second project, Politics of Representation: Human Rights / Visual Arts, addresses a group of images produced by Latin American artists during the past 10 years in relation to the politics of memory and human rights. It considers the role that art images have played with respect to human rights organizations' agendas, with new legislation on the re-opening cases of crimes against humanity, with the search for children born in captivity, with burials and clandestine prisons. The body of work takes paintings and photographs under consideration, as well as actions carried out in urban space. Related to this, Giunta wrote and published articles on Luis Camnitzer's work and on Biopolitics. She presented the preliminary results of this investigation in lectures in São Paulo, Brazil, and St. Mary's College of Maryland.

Her continuing project focuses on Surrealism in Latin America during the post-war period. She presented a paper at the symposium held at the J. Paul Getty Foundation during June, 2010.

Giunta’s recent publications include a book, Objetos mutantes. Sobre arte contemporáneo (Santiago de Chile: Palinodia, 2010). She edited and contributed to two volumes: El Guernica de Picasso: el poder de la representación. Europa, Estados Unidos y América Latina (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2009), with the papers presented in the symposium “Guernica and After. The Power of Representation,” which she organized for the Department of Art and Art History, The University of Texas, Austin, on April 21, 2007; and Museums and Collecting Face the Challenge of the Bicentenial (Buenos Aires: Auditorio ArteBA, 2010), which contains papers from the conference “ArteBA,” which Giunta organized in May 2009.

Giunta contributed artists' profiles on Burri, Fautrier, Fontana, Picasso and Pollock to the Catálogo Razonado del Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Argentina, plus an interpretative essay on the museum's 20th Century collection. She also wrote critical profiles of León Ferrari and Marta Minujin's work for the catalog of the Daros Collection in Switzerland.

Her essay on León Ferrari's work, which appeared in the exhibition catalog of the León Ferrari and Mira Schendel show held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2009), was republished in the catalog for the exhibition’s move to the Centro Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Fundación Iberé Camargo in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Giunta directs CLAVIS (Center for Latin American Visual Studies), which in fall 2010 moved into newly renovated offices in the Art Building. She organized “ART <=>ARCHIVES: Latin America and Beyond. From 1920 to Present,” the 2nd International Latin American Art Forum for Emerging Scholars, held at the University of Texas at Austin on October 15-17, 2010.

Julia Guernsey completed the preparation and editing of The Place of Stone Monuments: Context, Use, and Meaning in Mesoamerica’s Preclassic Transition (eds. Julia Guernsey, John Clark, and Bárbara Arroyo), which was published by Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and Trustees for Harvard University in 2010. The volume contains her essay “Rulers, Gods, and Potbellies: A Consideration of Preclassic Sculptural Themes and Forms from the Pacific Piedmont and Coast of Mesoamerica,” as well as a co-authored Introduction to the volume, which is an extensive consideration of Preclassic sculpture throughout ancient Mesoamerica. She also signed a contract with Cambridge University Press for her most recent book project, Potbellies, Fat Gods, and the Ancestors: Sculpture and Social Dynamics in Preclassic Mesoamerica, which explores the social implications of a famous yet enigmatic type of Preclassic sculpture known colloquially as a “potbelly.” The potbellies, as the name suggests, portray a series of corpulent figures whose identity as ancestors appears to be directly related to the negotiation of elite identity and the graduate process of state formation that characterized the Pacific slope region of Mesoamerica during the Middle to Late Preclassic transition, c. 500-200 BC. Guernsey co-authored the essay, “Warrior Queens Among the Classic Maya,” which appeared in Blood and Beauty: Organized Violence in the Art and Archaeology of Mesoamerica and Central America, edited by Heather Orr and Rex Koontz, two former graduates of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas, for UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology (2009). Guernsey also finalized several other essays for publication, including “A Consideration of the Quatrefoil Motif in Preclassic Mesoamerica,” for Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, published by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the Harvard Art Museum, which will appear in the fall of 2010. She presented a paper, co-authored with current Ph.D. student Caitlin Earley, at the Society for American Archaeology meetings in St. Louis in spring of 2010, as well as a paper and workshop for the Maya Society of Minnesota. Guernsey is currently the Graduate Advisor for Art History.

Linda Henderson delivered the keynote address, "Futurism and the Energies of Modernism," at a Futurism conference organized by the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence in February 2010. During May-July 2010 she was a fellow at the IKKM [International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy] in Weimar. While there, she was working to complete the final segments of the Reintroduction for the new edition of her Fourth Dimension book (MIT, 2011). In June Henderson participated in a panel on the subject of “Extra Spatial Dimensions” with string theorists Brian Greene and Lawrence Krauss at the World Science Festival in New York, an event organized by Greene to introduce contemporary science to the public. The live-stream of the program is accessible at www.worldsciencefestival.com. In July Henderson spoke at an international colloquium on the Alfred Stieglitz circle, held at the château of Cerisy-la-Salle in Normandy; former UT colleague and photohistorian Anne McCauley (Princeton University) also participated. Henderson spent August in Berlin for research, where she also connected with the studio of artist Olafur Eliasson and conducted a two-hour Skype interview after her return to Austin.

Henderson's recent publications include “The Image and Imagination of the Fourth Dimension in 20th-Century Art and Culture,” in Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology (Winter 2009); the text also appears in translation in Zahlen, Zeichen und Figuren. Mathematische Inspirationen in Kunst und Literatur (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming). Other essays published are “The ‘Fourth Dimension’ as Sign of Utopia in Early Modern Art and Culture,” in Utopianism and the Sciences, an anthology based on a conference at the University of Groningen; and an essay on Claude Bragdon, architect, designer, and fourth dimension theorist in the catalog of the University of Rochester's Library's 2010 exhibition Claude Bragdon and the Beautiful Necessity. She has also written the introduction for a forthcoming Brazilian publication on Austin artist Regina Vater, Tramas da Penélope: Notas/projetos de Regina Vater para Esculturas e Instalacões.

Joan Holladay continues her editing work on Gothic Sculpture in America, 3: The Museums of New York and Pennsylvania. The project, which is supported by grants from the NEH and the Getty Foundation, now comprises some 570 objects, which will be covered in entries written by 33 authors, including Holladay herself. About two-thirds of the entries have been submitted and edited. An article entitled “Charting the Past: Visual Configurations of Myth and History and the English Claim to Scotland,” a work that is related to her other book-in-progress, has just been published in a collection of papers delivered at a 2006 conference on representing history in the Middle Ages. She completed another article, on royal women as patrons of the Parisian illuminator Jean Pucelle, for a volume of essays on this artist to be published by Brill. Holladay serves as the current Assistant Chair for Art History.

Ann Johns continues as director of the Learning Tuscany, the departmental study abroad program in Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy. The program continues to thrive. This past summer, she taught with Lawrence McFarland, professor of photography, with a focus on art and the spectator. The program has been able to offer two art history scholarships, thanks to generous donations from Mary Crouch and Linda Henderson, among others. The program now has an updated website (www.finearts.utexas.edu/aah/art_history/special_programs/learning_tuscany.cfm) and a new Facebook page (Learning Tuscany: UT Art and Art History Study in Italy Program).

Stephennie Mulder spent her second year as an Assistant Professor in both the Department of Art and Art History and the Department of Middle Eastern Studies developing and teaching new courses, researching, and traveling. She created an ancient-medieval period world art history course for undergraduates, a graduate component for her undergraduate survey of early and medieval Islamic art, and a course on later Islamic art - beginning in the 16th century with the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals and spanning from there to the modern and contemporary eras. In the fall, Mulder traveled to Philadelphia, where she was invited to speak at a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania entitled “Seeing the Past-Envisioning Islamic Art and Architecture,” in honor of her Ph.D. advisor Renata Holod. In April Mulder participated in a panel on the historiography of Islamic art at the Association of Art Historians annual meetings in Glasgow, Scotland.

Mulder submitted an article on Ayyubid (12th-13th century) mosque architecture to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of World Religious Architecture and is at work on a second article for that publication, on Shrines in the Central Islamic Lands. She continued research and writing on a publication to be submitted to the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, on her work on medieval Islamic ceramics from Balis, the site where she works as ceramicist in Syria. In the summer, Mulder traveled to Syria to complete the final part of her research for that project, which will be published as a comprehensive catalogue of the medieval Islamic ceramics from the site. Back in Austin later in the summer, Mulder continued work on her manuscript, a study of medieval landscapes of pilgrimage in Syria that explores sites devoted to the 'Alid saints (descendants of the prophet Muhammad), and which, she argues, were patronized and visited by Muslims of diverse sectarian persuasions. Mulder wrote and successfully received a grant as part of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies Title IV funding from the Department of Education, toward an ongoing workshop on the historiography and future direction of the field of Islamic art, which she is planning with Nasser Rabbat, Aga Khan professor of Islamic Architecture at M.I.T. The workshop will take place in the fall of 2012.

Nassos Papalexandrou reports 2009-2010 was a most exciting academic year. A fall 2009 faculty fellowship at the Humanities Institute, University of Texas, enabled him to complete a number of projects while also initiating new research. A Faculty Research Assignment in spring permitted provided time for writing and traveling to Paris and Berlin where he continued to research his on-going study of Orientalizing cauldrons and to prepare for his two courses on Near Eastern Art and Archaeology. While in Berlin Papalexandrou crossed paths with Jeffrey and Sandy Smith as well as Erina Duganne (Ph.D. 2004) and her family.

During the summer Papalexandrou initiated a new research project that has to do with the role of Greek Antiquities as state gifts from Greece to US presidents and high officials in the cold war period. In June, he visited Harry Truman’s presidential museum and library in Independence, MO, where he found two substantial pieces from the Acropolis. To his surprise, he also found Greek works of art at the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum on the University of Texas campus.

Several of Papalexandrou’s publications appeared in 2009-10. A museum review article in the July issue of the American Journal of Archaeology deals with the recently opened exhibition galleries in the National Archaeological Museum and the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, Greece. An article on the hybrid character of vision in the 8th-7th C. BCE Greek culture appeared in a thematic volume of Ars Orientalis, a journal published by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He also finished and submitted two articles for publication in conference proceedings and a long monographic article on the Princeton University Art Museum’s Klazomenian Sarcophagus, an ebulliently historiated clay coffin replete with heroic duels, griffins, goddesses and fantastic animals!

Glenn Peers relates that he had the good fortune to lecture at the American University in Beirut, where he met some terrific colleagues and saw some of the recent restorations of medieval wall painting. He remarks, “the country is extraordinary vivid, profoundly puzzling, full of medieval material still emerging from behind plaster and poor overpainting.” Peers continued work on two major projects: an exhibition on Byzantine
materiality for the Menil Collection in Houston and his reconstruction of a later Byzantine text through its gorgeous copies and open fakeries in mid-sixteenth-century France. He spoke on these at conferences and in talks at Manchester, Houston, Venice, and Los Angeles. Peers continue to pursue his studies in the Syriac language through the kindness of a colleague in Middle Eastern Studies. He hopes that this dialect of Aramaic, largely neglected but the most important historical church language after Greek and Latin, will lead him to some enjoyable new avenues of research.

Susan Rather ably served the last of her three years as Assistant Chair for Art History. Much of her time and what she describes as the most enduring aspect of my service concerned the new art history office suite. (See the story above.) Rather was closely involved in its design and made all materials and new furniture selections; met regularly over a 14-month period with project managers, architect, contractors, and designer; and coordinated the transition of faculty, staff, and their belongings into new spaces.

Rather’s article “Contrary Stuart,” appeared in the spring 2010 issue of American Art and two other essays, completed during the academic year, are in press. She gave two talks at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. One as the Carol and Les Ballard Endowed Lecturer for Bayou Bend, the museum’s American decorative and fine arts collection, and in connection with thematic loan exhibitions of the late 19th-early 20th century painters John Singer Sargent and Maurice Prendergast. For the Albritton Art Institute at Baylor University, she spoke on American colonial painting. Rather is on leave in fall 2010 working on her book project The American School: Artist and Identity in the Late Colonial and Early National Eras.

Ann Reynolds received the Lucia, John, and Melissa Gilbert Teaching Excellence Award in Women's and Gender Studies for 2009-2010. During the fall semester, she hosted a residency of the video and performance artist Joan Jonas. During her time in Austin, Jonas and Reynolds team-taught an undergraduate seminar, held a performance workshop for graduate students in the College of Fine Arts, and planned for Jonas’ return to Austin in 2011 to perform her 2005 work The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things. This past academic year she published a co-edited volume with Janet Staiger and Ann Cvetkovich entitled Political Emotions (London: Routledge Press, 2010). This volume is based on a conference they organized in 2008 entitled “Political Emotions: Affect and the Public Sphere.” Reynolds completed three essays that should appear in the coming months: “Curving Into a Straight Line,” in So you see I am here after all: Zoe Leonard (Dia Art Foundation and Yale University Press); “Dwelling as a World,” in Charles Simonds (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks); and “Moving and Still Life,” in Sculpting in Time and Space (Ashgate Press); and she continues to work on her book-length project “Playtime: Creativity, Community, and Publics in New York, 1940-1970.” Her speaking engagements this past year included the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid; the University of British Columbia, Vancouver; the University of New Mexico; the Institute for Film and Video Art and HAU/Hebbel, Berlin; the Land Heritage Institute, San Antonio; and The Menil Collection, Houston.

Yun-Chiahn C. Sena specializes in Chinese art and culture with a focus on the antiquarian movement and literati art after the tenth century. After receiving her Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Chicago, she joined the faculty of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interest involves the Chinese antiquarian movements during the middle to late period in China and the conceptualization of the past manifest in Chinese visual and material culture. Her recent articles on Chinese antiquarian writings and collecting theories appear in the conference volumes, Reinventing the Past: Archaism and Antiquarianism in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (2010) and Traces, Collections, Ruins: Towards a Comparative History of Antiquarianism (forthcoming). In summer 2010, she was named a research fellow in the Peking University, Beijing, for her research on Chinese archaistic bronze vessels from Sichuan. Sena is currently working on a book manuscript, entitled “Pursuing Antiquity: the Chinese Antiquarian Movement in the 10th to 13th Century,” which will present a comprehensive view of Chinese antiquarianism in its formative stage. Sena offers courses that survey the development of Chinese visual culture from the ancient times to the modern period, as well as those that focus specifically on Chinese literati art and culture. She also teaches undergraduate art historical methods and collecting theories on the graduate level.

Richard Shiff notes that several of his projects for artists' books and exhibitions have appeared, including studies of the electronic artist Jim Campbell and the Beijing painter Zeng Fanzhi. His essay for the mid-career retrospective of Mark Bradford also appeared, as well as an essay for the Courtauld Institute show of Cezanne's Card Players paintings. Shiff completed the manuscript for his de Kooning book, which, with luck, will get into print in about a year.

Jeffrey Chipps Smith held the Anna-Maria Kellen Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin from January through May 2010. He and his wife, Sandy, thoroughly enjoyed the experience, especially their interactions with other fellows and spouses. They were able to travel extensively in conjunction with Smith’s research on German early Baroque sculpture, among other topics. Smith received the Department of Art and Art History Teaching Excellence Award for 2009-10.

Smith and Larry Silver co-edited The Essential Dürer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), which included Smith’s essay on “Dürer and Sculpture.” He also published “Dürer and Eastern Europe” in ARS – Journal of the Institute of Art History of Slovak Academy of Sciences (Bratislava), 42 (2009); “Dürer’s Losses and the Dilemmas of Being,” in Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany: Cross Disciplinary Perspectives, ed. Lynne Tatlock, ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2010); “Salvaging Saints: The Rescue and Display of Relics in Munich during the Catholic Reformation,” in Art, Piety and Destruction in the Christian West, 1500-1700, ed. Virginia Raguin (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010); “Hans Reinhart: Religion and Politics in Saxony c. 1535-45” in The Medal 56 (2010) [published by the British Museum]; and a related essay on Hans Reinhart in Apelles am Fürstenhof. Facetten der Hofkunst um 1500 im Alten Reich, eds. Matthias Müller, Klaus Weschenfelder, Beate Böchem, and Ruth Hansmann, exh. cat., Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg (Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2010); and eleven book reviews.

Smith’s talks included “Albrecht Dürer and the Art of Faith on the Eve of the Reformation,” The Center for the Study of Religion, Ohio State University; “Albrecht Dürer as Collector,” American Academy in Berlin and, again more formally, as the Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture (keynote address) at the Renaissance Society of America conference, at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Isola San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice; “Dürer’s Losses and the Dilemmas of Being,” Kunsthistorisches Institut, Freie Universität, Berlin; “To ‘Inflame a Love of Virtue’: Christoph Schwarz’s Mary Altarpiece for the Jesuit College in Munich,” Historians of Netherlandish Art conference, Amsterdam.

Louis A. Waldman co-edited two books of essays: Craig Hugh Smyth – In Memoriam (Florence: Villa I Tatti/Leo S. Olschki, 2009), with Caroline Elam; and Toward a Festschrift: Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors (Florence: Villa I Tatti/Leo S. Olschki, 2010), with Machtelt Israels. Three new articles by Waldman were published last year: “Botticelli and His Patrons: The Arte del Cambio, the Vespucci, and the Compagnia dello Spirito Santo in Montelupo,” in Sandro Botticelli and Herbert Horne: New Research, ed. Rab Hatfield (Florence, 2009), pp. 105-135; “TwoVenetian Painters in Duke Alessandro's Florence: Battista di Francescodi Giovanni and Paolo di Giovan Ghezzo,” Source, 28, No. 3 (Spring 2009), pp. 19-23; and "Giovanni Larciani: An UnpublishedAlbertinellian Madonna," Source, 28, no. 2 (Winter 2009), pp. 14-21. He published an essay-length entry on the tondo by Giorgio Vasari in Szeged, as identified by the author, in the exhibition catalogue Botticelli to Titian: Two Centuries of Italian Masterpieces (Budapest: Szépmuvészeti Múzeum, 2009), pp. 400-403, cat. 126, as well as entries on Daniele da Volterra, Dosio, Naldini, Herman Posthumus, and Vincenzo de' Rossi in From Raphael to Annibale Carracci: The Art of Papal Rome, exh. cat. (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2009). Waldman gave a paper on Leonardo at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Venice. In addition, he presented a lecture on “Agnolo Bronzino and the Death of Pontormo: A Disputed Legacy,” at the British Institute in Florence and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In fall 2010, Waldman returned to Austin after three years at Villa I Tattti, Harvard University’s research center, in Florence.

 

Graduate Student News

Kathyrn Hixson (Ph.D.) died suddenly of natural causes on November 9, 2010 in Evanston, IL. She received her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1985. Hixson joined the faculty there in 1988 where at the time of her death she served as an adjunct professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism with additional appointments in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies and the Department of New Art Journalism. Hixson was a much loved teacher as well as a highly respected critic of contemporary art as she wrote extensively for publications in the US and Europe. She was completing her dissertation tentatively titled “Body/Image. Presentation and Representation of the Figure in the Visual Arts 1968 to 1985: Bruce Nauman, Rebecca Horn, Richard Prince, Martin Kippenberger under the direction of Richard Shiff.

Lea Cline (Ph.D.), currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Florida School of Art and Art History. She participated, along with John Clarke and Ivo van der Graaff, in the XIe Colloquie de l'Association Internationale pour la Peinture Murale Antique (Ephesos 13-27 September, 2010). They presented papers on the wall painting of Villa A at Oplontis, the project that Clarke leads.

Jason Alan Goldstein (Ph.D.) contributed two catalogue entries on Eugène Carrière and Charles-François Daubigny for a works on paper catalogue for the Georgia Museum of Art.

Lauren Hanson (Ph.D.) was awarded a FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship) from the Center for European Studies, University of Texas, for the 2010-2011.

Roja Najafi (Ph.D.) published her article entitled "Creative Practices; Art and Activism after the 2009 Iranian Presidential Election," in Third Text Asia, Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture, 4 (2010), pp. 69-87.

Till Richter (Ph.D.) presented a paper entitled "Ariadne's Thread: Spurensicherung through Clothing in the Work of Christian Boltanski" at the South Eastern College Art Conference; and a talk on the method for art evaluation as applied to Chinese contemporary art at the 2010 meeting of the College Art Association in Chicago.

Alexis Salas (Ph.D.) spoke on the photographer Enrique Metinides at the conference Programme Information - Culture as Resource: Cultural Practices after 1989 in Budapest, Hungary as well as at the conference History Takes Place – Urban Change in Europe at the Centre allemand d'histoire de l'art in Paris. Her talk will be published in the proceedings of the Budapest conference.

Caitlin Haskell (Ph.D.) received a Vivian L. Smith Foundation Fellowship from the Menil Collection in Houston for fall 2010. In spring 2010, she delivered conference papers at the Princeton University Department of Art and Archeology Graduate Student Symposium and also at the Eight Annual Material Culture Symposium for Emerging Scholars at the University of Delaware. In October 2010 she co-organized the Menil Collection symposium “Henri Rousseau: Paint + Process.”

Maia Toteva (Ph.D.) presented talks on “Memories ‘Under Erasure’: Re/Con.Figurations of Absence in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe” at the College Art Association meeting in New York and on “The Dis/Embodied Language of the Cold War” at the “Cold War Cultures: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspective” conference at the University of Texas.

Ivo van der Graaff (Ph.D.) was awarded a University Continuing Fellowship, University of Texas, for the 2010-11 academic year. He published one book review and an article entitled “The Advantages and Limitations of Coring Survey: An Initial Assessment of the Poggio Colla Coring Project” in the proceedings of the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference. He presented a poster entitled "The Recovered Tympanum of Cubiculum 11 at Villa A ("of Poppaea") at Oplontis (Torre Annunziata, Italy): A New Document for the Study of City Walls" at the conference of the Association Internationale pour la Peinture Murale Antique held in Ephesus, Turkey in September 2010. During the summer of 2010, he continued to work as the Field Director on the Oplontis project.

Luis Vargas-Santiago (Ph.D.) received a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholarship from the United States-Mexico Commission for Educational and Cultural Exchange. He curated Imágenes del Mexicano exhibition at the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels in February 11-April 25, 2010. The catalogue includes his essay “Mexico's Self-Portrait. Icons, Images and Reflections,” pp. 16-28. He also published “Emiliano Zapata: cuerpo, tierra, cautiverio,” in El éxodo mexicano. Los héroes en la mira del arte, ed. Jaime Cuadriello (Mexico City: MUNAL-INBA, UNAM, 2010), pp. 352-397; and “Los vaivenes del espíritu. Entre socialismos y surrealismos,” in Materia y sentido. El arte mexicano en la mirada de Octavio Paz, ed. Dafne Cruz Porchini, exh. cat. (Mexico City: MUNAL-INBA, Landucci editores, 2009), pp. 134-151.

Melissa Warak (Ph.D.) has completed an essay entitled “Zen and the Art of La Monte Young” for a Music and Modernism (Cambridge Scholar's Press, Spring 2011). The topic was first presented in the Eleanor Greenhill Graduate Symposium, University of Texas, in 2006.

Laura Lindenberger Wellen (Ph.D.) received a University Continuing Fellowship, University of Texas, in 2009-2010. She published an article entitled “Picturing Uncle Tom's Cabin from Harlem, 1938” in the The Religion and Culture Web Forum, ed. M. Cooper Harris (Chicago: Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion, University of Chicago, 2010). The article was published with responses from John Howell and Jo-Ann Morgan. Her review of Teresita Fernández: Blind Landscapes at the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, appeared in Artforum (March 2010) and her review of Karen Mahaffy's exhibition The Persistence of Moment at Women & Their Work, Austin appeared in Art Lies (fall/winter 2010). Wellen spoke at the Georgia College & State University's Visiting Artists and Scholars: Graduate Student Initiative program. In May, she presented “Archives and Southern Feminism, ca. 1970” at The Archive and Everyday Life conference hosted by the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

 

Congratulations!

Katie Anania, Mary Lily Travel Grant

Doris Maria-Reina Bravo, Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship 2010/2011

Kate Dempsey, University Continuing Fellowship

Amanda Douberly, Luce Foundation Fellowship

Mirka Fetté, Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, summer 2010, to study Czech in Prague

Lucia Henderson, P.E.O. Fellowship

Alisa McCusker, Samuel H. Kress Foundation Language Fellowship, summer 2010, to study German at Middlebury College

Alexis Salas, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Summer Seminar Fellowship (declined), Central European University (CEU) summer course on Culture as Resource: Cultural Practices after 1989. Deutscher Akademisher Austauschdienst (DAAD) grant.

Ivo van der Graaf, University Continuing Fellowship

Hannah Wong, Alternate, Smithsonian Institution Fellowship

 

Alumni News

Mickey Abel (Ph.D., 2001) was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at the University of North Texas.

Michael Carrasco (Ph.D, 2004) is Assistant Professor of Art History at Florida State University. He recently published, with co-author J.E. Staller, Pre-Columbian Foodways: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture and Markets in Mesoamerica (New York: Springer, 2010), and is working on another co-authored book (with Kerry Hull) for the University Press of Colorado titled Parallel Worlds: Genre, Discourse and Poetics in Contemporary, Colonial and Classic Maya Literature.

Eileen Costello (Ph.D., 2010) will direct catalogue raisonné project of Jasper Johns drawings.

Eduardo de J. Douglas (Ph.D, 2000) is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His book, In the Palace of Nezahualcoyotl: Painting Manuscripts, Writing the Pre-Hispanic Past in Early Colonial Period Tetzcoco, Mexico, was published in 2010 by the University of Texas Press.

Erina Duganne (Ph.D., 2004), Assistant Professor at Texas State University, was a Fulbright Teaching Fellow at the University of Potsdam in 2009-10. Her book, The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography, was published by Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England in 2010.

Amanda Garbee (M.A., 2007) has recently transitioned from Curatorial Assistant in the Glassell Collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where she was involved with exhibitions and re-installations in the African, Indonesian, Precolumbian, Oceanic, and Western Antiquities galleries, to a position as Language Arts and Social Studies Teacher, Fifth Grade, Spring Independent School District, in the Houston area.

Stephanie Hanor (Ph.D., 2003) is the Director, Mills College Art Museum.

Anne Henderson (MA., 1985), Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN, was selected as the National Art Educator of the Year.

Elaine Higgins (M.A., 2007) is currently a doctoral student in Art History with an emphasis on Colonial art of the Americas at the University of New Mexico.

John Hopkins (Ph.D. 2010), Getty Post-Doctoral Fellowship.

Alvaro Ibarra (Ph.D. 2009), Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Johns Hopkins University

Miriam (Lisa) Kirch (Ph.D. 2003) was awarded tenure at the University of North Alabama.

Annette LeZotte (Ph.D. 2004), Associate Professor, Wichita State University, has been appointed the new director of the Emory Lindquist Honors Program there.

Eloise Patterson (M.A., 2007) is in her third year of the Ph.D in Art History at Yale University and preparing for her dissertation colloquium in the spring of 2011.

Elizabeth Pope (Ph.D, 2006) is Research Assistant and Collections Manager in the Department of African and Indian Arts of the Americas at the Art Institute of Chicago.

David Raskin (Ph.D., 1999), Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, authored Donald Judd (Yale University Press, 2010).

Junhyoung Shin (M.A. 1996) has been appointed Associate Professor, Dept. of Archaeology and Art History at Seoul National University. He focuses on both Western and Asian art history.

Tatiana (Tania) String (Ph.D. 1996), formerly Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, has moved to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she is an Adjunct Associate Professor of History and Art History. She continues actively publishing on Renaissance art in England.

 

Conference Papers Presented by Graduate Students, 2009–2010

Ashley Busby, “Astral Magicians: Surrealism and the Tarot,” Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, Atlanta, GA, November 2009.

Ashley Busby, “A Surreal Deck of Cards: Surrealism and the Tarot,” Popular Culture and American Culture Association National Conference, St. Louis, MO, April 2010.

Nicole Conti, “Visual Faculty, Bodily Healing: Hieronymus Bosch’s Lisbon Temptation of St. Anthony,” Vagantes, Albuquerque, NM, March 2010.

Kate Dempsey, “Decoding Black Mountain,” Black Mountain Museum and Art Center,” Asheville, NC, October 2009.

Caitlin Earley, “Framed: The Textile Associations of Preclassic Geometric Bands,” Society for American Archaeology, St. Louis, MO, April 2010.

Shrita Gajendragadkar, Research on Gandharan Art in South Asian and European Contexts, Corfu Museum of Asiatic Art, Corfu, January 2010.

Shrita Gajendragadkar, “Beyond Greece: Gandharan Art and Indian Artistic Traditions,” CAA, Chicago, IL, February 2010.

Katie Geha, “Beryl Korot: Weaving the Apparatus,” University of Arizona – Art & Technology Conference, Tucson, AZ, March 2010.

Lauren Hanson, “Living with Pop: Using Domestic Spaces in Early German Pop Art,” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, St. Louis, MO, April 2010.

Lucia Henderson, “A Journey to Fire-Mountain: Lake Amatitlan in Teotihnacano Belief,” Society for American Archaeology, St. Louis, MO, April 2010.

Catharine Ingersoll, “Communicating Authority through Images of Ancestry: Archbishop Philipp von Daun and the North Nave Windows at Cologne Cathedral,” University of North Texas Medieval Graduate Student Association, Denton, TX, February 2010.

Alexia Rostow, “Local versus Foreign: Reading Anti-Semitism in Bodley 764,” Indiana University, Medieval Studies Institute, Bloomington, IN, March 2010.

Chelsea Weathers, “Alienation and the Individual: Dystopia in Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, March 2010.

Laura Lindenberger Wellen, “Archiving Southern Feminisms, ca. 1970,” McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, May 2010.

Jessica Weiss, “Race and Religion: Convivencia and Depictions of the Adoration of the Magi,” The 45th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May, 2010.

Abigail Winograd, “Who Understood the Golden Pippen Boys on the Branches of State,” Material Cultures 2010, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, July 2010.

Hannah Wong, “Mimicry, Mockery, and Hilarious Pictures: The Role of Humor in the Works of Francis Picabia, 1913-1924,” College Art Association, Western Annual Conference, Utah State University, UT, February 2010.

 

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