Fall 2008 Speaker Series
Art History Faculty Lectures
September 4
DR. CONSTANCE CORTEZ, Assistant Professor in Art History – Colonial Art of Mexico, 19th & 20th century Mexican Art, Contemporary Latino/a Art
A Chicana/o Reconquista: Colonial Imagery and Contemporary Latino/a Art
Dr. Cortez will discuss the appearance of Chicano/a Book Art within the context of 1992 international celebration, called the Quincentenary. In particular, she will examine Friendly Cannibals, a volume by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Enrique Chagoya.
September 11
DR. JANIS ELLIOTT, Assistant Professor in Art History - Late Medieval-Early Renaissance Italy.
Medieval Manuscripts: Illuminating the Dark Ages
With their gold and painted decorations, medieval manuscripts have a great visual appeal. This paper will describe how manuscripts were made and decorated and will also describe the many types of manuscripts (bibles, psalters, books of hours) and the people who read them and owned them.
Illustration: Depiction of Blanche of Castile, King Louis IX, a scribe and an illuminator on the dedication page (folio 8r) of a moralized Bible from Paris, 1226-1234. Ink, tempera and gold leaf on vellum (parchment), 15" x 10". New York,
Pierpont Morgan Library, Ms. M 240.
September 18
DR. KEVIN CHUA, Assistant Professor in Art History - 18th and 19th-century European Art, Contemporary Asian Art.
Throwback, or the Rigorous Circularity of Place
Working with a combination of methods and media – including photography, objects, collections, and texts, Simryn Gill’s art has probed the micropolitics of locality and place – how we relate to each other, how we see, where we speak from, and to whom. Her work conveys a deep understanding of material culture, as well as the ways that meaning transforms and translates into different contexts. By closely looking at a single work – Throwback, exhibited at documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, in 2007 – this talk will delve into the complex threads that weave around the interrelated issues of industrial transportation, natural history, commodities, and the gift. In Throwback’s remains what we will find is the archaeology of a future past.
September 25
DR. BRIAN STEELE, Associate Professor in Art History - Renaissance & Baroque; Venetian School and Associate Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts.
More than Just a Pretty Face: Titian’s Mary Magdalen [Pitti Museum] as Saintly Sinner
Titian’s use of the Venus Pudica for the Magdalen’s pose underscores both sexuality and the chastity appropriate to incipient repentance, a moment I read critically in terms of elements --- hair, breasts, pictorial light, and welling tears --- that generated meanings for 16th-c. viewers. Titan’s image constitutes a poetic conception of the Magdalen as beata peccatrice when examined in conjunction with Jacobus da Voragine’s Golden Legend, Pietro Aretino’s Humanity of Christ” and hypothetically-constructed females’ reactions.
October 9
DR. JORGELINA ORFILI, Assistant Professor in Art History – 20th and 21st Century Art and Critical Theory.
Collecting French Art in the 1930s: The Chester Dale Collection at the National Gallery of Art
In November of 1937 Chester and Maud Dale, owners of a then famous collection of modern French art, bought Paul Cézanne’s 1873 House of Père Lacroix at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, New York. Dale was able to acquire the painting for a reasonable price because it was not from the artist's late period, which was favored by museums and collectors. By contextualizing this significant acquisition, this paper will shed light onto an often disregarded period of the history of modern art. At the same time, the presentation will introduce the public to the historical significance of the, hitherto unexamined, Chester Dale collection.
Image title: Paul Cézanne, House of Père Lacroix, 1873, Chester Dale Collection (1963.10.102) National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Fall 2008 Speaker Series
Pinky Bass, Photographer : October 1
Pinky (Marion M.) Bass is a photographer, known for her work in pinhole photography and for her inventive self-built pinhole cameras. The first of these, made in 1989, was a giant pinhole built out of a pop-up travel camper, "Pinky's Portable Pop-up Pinhole Camera and Darkroom". A resident of Fairhope, Alabama, her work has been exhibited extensively around the United States. Her work has been published in Aperture and Pinhole Journal. Her photography, whether pinhole or standard, says, Bass, “has always aimed at revealing edges of the mystery of life, aging and death. Pinhole, with its unusual perspective and glorious array of mistakes, seems suited to my particular investigation of our being. Often surreal, the images that I prefer seem to exist on the edge of the dream world. Combining the written dreams with images has been a method I like to use to draw the viewer into that surreal landscape.”
Image title: PINKY BASS, Fran's Scorpio II (2007) :: photographic collaboration with Carolyn DeMeritt.
October 2
TIM MILLER :: SEX – BODY – SELF
7:00 PM in Human Science Building Room 169
Internationally recognized performance artist TIM MILLER will present a lecture-performance on Thursday, September 25th at 7:00 PM in Human Science Building Room 169. The performance is presented by the Association of Creative Writing in the English Department with support from the College of Architecture, School of Art, Fine Arts Doctoral Program of the College of Visual & Performing Arts, the Department of Theatre and Dance, the Housing Division.
Tim Miller was one of the NEA Four; four performance artists who had his funding by the National Endowment for the Arts overtly vetoed in 1990 by NEA chair John Frohnmayer on the basis of his subject matter resulting in a winning lawsuit by artists that caused the NEA to cease funding to individual artists. Tim Miller has taught performance in the theater departments at UCLA, Cal State LA and NYU.
Buzz Spector, Artist, Critical Writer, and Professor of Art at Cornell University :: October 14
SHELF LIFE: THE ART OF BUZZ SPECTOR
Buzz Spector is an artist and critical writer whose artwork has been shown in such museums and galleries as the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA. He makes frequent use of the book, both as subject and object, in his art, and is concerned with relationships between public history, individual memory, and perception. His work with the book as subject and object has been the subject of much critical commentary, and Spector himself is the author of The Book Maker’s Desire (Santa Monica, CA: Umbrella Editions, 1995), a collection of essays on the arts of the book. Spector earned his B.A. in Art from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1972, and his M.F.A. with the Committee on Art and Design at the University of Chicago in 1978. In 1991 he was awarded a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, and in 1982, 1985, and 1991 he received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Awards. He is a professor in the Department of Art at Cornell University.
Image title: BUZZ SPECTOR, All the Books in My Library, By or About Dieter Roth (1999)
Laurence Miller, Director, Fluent Collaborative :: November 4, 5:00 PM, Art B-01
Laurence Miller founded Fluent~Collaborative, a speculative contemporary art initiative based in Austin in the spring of 2002. Fluent~Collaborative is a place where a critical and creative mix of visual, media and performance artists join authors, filmmakers, musicians, architects, poets and other diverse communities outside of the arts to enable a new awareness and sophisticated discernment of changing thought and culture around the world. Fluent’s two primary projects …might be good, a contemporary art e-journal, and testsite, an exhibition platform for collaborations between artists and writers, have received international attention. Throughout his career, Laurence Miller has been pro-active in professional organizations at local, state and national level. He began his visual arts career in the late 1960s. He has previously served as Director of the Austin Museum of Art (formerly Laguna Gloria Art Museum), Senior Advisor for Programs at Artpace, A Foundation for Contemporary Art in San Antonio where he eventually served as Founding Director. He held the position of Artpace’s Senior Advisor for Special Projects until November 2001 when he became Director Emeritus.
Image title: LAURENCE MILLER, testsite 04.5: Based on a True Story (Exercises in Reading and Writing). Alejandro Cesarco & Gabriel Perez-Barreiro; Installation View.
11th Texas Sculpture Symposium 2008 :: Junction Campus, November 7 – 9
Exhibitions and visiting speakers programs at the School of Art are supported by generous grants from the Helen Jones Foundation and The CH Foundation, both of Lubbock. Additional support comes from Cultural Activities Fees administered through the College of Visual & Performing Arts.