Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
Schedule of Eight Free Lectures and Public Conversations
By: Clark - Feb 21, 2013
The Research and Academic Program at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute presents a slate of eight free lectures and public conversations over the next two months. All are held at 5:30 pm and are open to the public.
- February 26: Bachelor Japanism, a lecture by Christopher Reed, Professor of English and Visual Culture at the Pennsylvania State University. Reed’s current project examines the ways Japanese aesthetics have been used to define non-normative forms of masculinity in the West.
- March 5: Inside and Outside the Cave: Plato and Visual Politics, a lecture by political theorist Mark Reinhardt, Professor of American Civilization at Williams College. Rheinhardt's current project draws on art history, theory, and practice, as well as the broader field of visual studies, to bring visuality more fully into political science.
- March 16: Art History and Materiality, a public conversation that concludes a colloquium endeavoring to reveal the material underpinnings of art historical thought, both in its past traditions and in its current practices. The colloquium is convened by Jennifer Jane Marshall, Assistant Professor of North American Art at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and Kate Mondloch, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the University of Oregon.
- April 2: Re-skilling, Repurposing, and Research in Contemporary Art, a lecture by Claire Bishop, Associate Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Bishop’s publications include Installation Art: A Critical History (2005) and the edited anthology Participation (2006).
· April 6: This Is a Portrait if I Say So, a public conversation that concludes a curatorial roundtable sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery is currently developing an exhibition, scheduled to open in 2015, that will examine the rise and evolution of symbolic, abstract, and conceptual portraiture in American art. This preparatory event will help form the intellectual framework for an exhibition that hopes to reassess the theoretical underpinnings of portraiture as a genre, practice, and social activity over the course of the past century. This event is convened by Jonathan Frederick Walz, Curator, Cornell Fine Arts Museum; Kathleen Merrill Campagnolo, Independent Curator and Scholar; and Anne Collins Goodyear, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings, National Portrait Gallery.
- April 16: Colored Photographs and White Weddings—A Study of Reception in South Africa, a lecture by John Peffer, a specialist in modern African art and photography and Associate Professor of Art History at Ramapo College. Peffer’s current project examines the vernacular uses of photography in South Africa with special emphasis on hand-colored wedding photographs in Soweto from the 1950s.
- April 20: Conditions of Visibility in Greek and Roman Art, a public conversation that concludes a Clark/Oakley Colloquium. The colloquium is convened Jas’ Elsner, Corpus Christi College; Guy Hedreen, Williams College; Richard Neer, University of Chicago; and Verity Platt, Cornell University. In this conversation, the panel will address the following questions: What were the conditions of visibility for “them” (the Greek and Romans), and what are the conditions for “us” (the modern public)? What were, and what are, the necessary and sufficient conditions for an image to be visible in the way art history needs it to be?
- April 30: Beyond the Skin of Appearance, a lecture by Beat Wyss, Kress Fellow in the Literature of Art and Professor of Art History and Media Theory at Karlsruhe University for Arts and Design. Wyss, a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, is currently working on a project that traces the Platonic legacy in occidental aesthetics.