Category: conferences & symposia

The international symposium brings together scholars of the humanities – from both sides of the Atlantic – for the first-ever conference dedicated to the art of Winold Reiss (1886-1953) honoring the 125^th anniversary of his birth. This extremely versatile German-American painter, designer, and teacher had once been celebrated by Du Pont Magazine (March 1931) as a “modern Cellini.” In the 1920s and 1930s, Reiss emerged as an influential figure in transatlantic encounters and modernist aesthetics. Recognized for his portraiture and commercial-design work, he was also much in demand for the elaborate mosaics he created for restaurants and other public buildings, including the Union Terminal in Cincinnati, Ohio. Reiss collaborated with leading artists and intellectuals including Alain Locke, Katherine Anne Porter, Paul Kellogg, Miguel Covarrubias, and Langston Hughes. Among his students was Aaron Douglas, the key African-American figure in the visual Harlem Renaissance. Reiss was also the main contributor to the visual narrative of the anthology The New Negro (1925).

Cultural Mobility and Transcultural Confrontations: Winold Reiss as a Paradigm of Transnational Studies will rethink Reiss’ role in the visual representation of ethnic American identities during the first half of the 20^th century. A German element is woven into the fabric of his complex engagement with American ethnicity and with racial conflicts – the European artistic background he brought to the American scene demands a specifially interdisciplinary and international perspective. The symposium will examine this perspective, exploring aspects and processes of international exchange,  intercultural translation, and transcultural confrontations.

http://www.jfki.fu-berlin.de/en/v/winold-reiss/

African Studies Association (ASA) Museum Day
Workshops on Sharing Cultural Knowledge
Smithsonian National Museum of African Art
950 Independence Avenue, SW
Take Metro to Smithsonian Station

If you have already registered for ASA and would still like to register for the pre-conference workshop at the National Museum of African Art, it’s not too late!  Please click on the link to a doodle poll that will allow you to select all or specific events taking place on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 (pre-conference day):  http://doodle.com/rr3pzh5c655vzqrx.  Registration is required by November 10, so we have an accurate count for catering.  The itinerary follows:

ASA Museum Day is a day-long series of workshops, archives and gallery tours, and guided collection storage visits at the National Museum of African Art (NMAfA).  Space is limited to 40 for workshops; 20 for the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives tour.  Collection storage visits are by appointment only and limited to 5 per section (20 total).

Continue reading “CONF: African Studies Association (ASA) Museum Day – pre-ASA Conference”

A MEMORIAL SYMPOSIUM FOR PROF. MARLENE S. PARK (1931-2010)
Friday, October 21, 2011, 1:00-6:00 P.M. in Segal Theater (1st floor)
The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016
212-817-8035 / Ph.D. Program in Art History
www.gc.cuny.edu

The Ph.D. Program in Art History at the Graduate School of the City University of New York is sponsoring a symposium to honor the life, scholarship, and mentoring of Prof. Marlene S. Park (1931-2010). Prof. Park was an art historian who specialized in 20th-century American art and was particularly known for her work on American art of the 1930s, art of the New Deal, and public art. She taught at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY for over thirty years and was a member of the faculty of the CUNY Ph.D. Program in Art History for over twenty of those years. As a member of the CUNY Art History doctoral faculty, she taught a variety of courses and mentored and advised countless students, many of whom have emerged as important scholars, educators, and curators in their own right.

The symposium will feature a dozen presenters, all of them former graduate students who studied with Prof. Park. The speakers will include Mary Abell, Michele Cohen, Russell Flinchum, Ilene Susan Fort, Valerie Ann Leeds, Herbert R. Hartel, Jr., Ruth Pasquine, R. Sarah Richardson, Will South, Susan Valdes-Dapena, and James Wechsler. Gerald Markowitz, Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and William H. Gerdts, Professor Emeritus of Art History at the CUNY Graduate School, were good friends and close colleagues of Prof. Park and will also speak at the symposium.

For more information, please contact co-organizers Michele Cohen at mcohen.art@gmail.com or Herb Hartel at hartel70@aol.com. More information is available at the web site of the CUNY Ph.D. Program in Art History at http://web.gc.cuny.edu/dept/arthi/.

Schedule of the conference:

1:00-1:30 P.M. Welcoming remarks

Kevin Murphy, Professor of Art History and Chair of the Ph.D. Program in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center

Gerald Markowitz, Distinguished Professor of History, John Jay College, CUNY

William H. Gerdts, Professor Emeritus of Art History in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center

Michele Cohen, Co-organizer of the Memorial Symposium

1:30-3:10 P.M. Early Modernism in America

Valerie Ann Leeds, independent curator, “At the Brink of Modernism: Robert Henri and Ireland”

Will South, Chief Curator, Dayton Art Institute, “”Synchromism and Synaesthesia: A Not-So-Lucky Strike””

Ruth Pasquine, independent scholar, “The Theosophical Paintings of Emil Bisttram”

Russell Flinchum, Archivist at The Century Association, “Why Teague Matters”

Mary Abell, Chair of the Department of Art, Dowling College, “The Teaching and Critical Reception of Edwin Dickinson”

3:20 -4:20 P.M. American Art during the 1930s

R. Sarah Richardson, Hollis Taggart Galleries, “Historic America and the Precisionist Impulse”

Ilene Susan Fort, Curator of American Painting and Sculpture, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “The United States Education of a Mexican Surrealist: Bridget Tichenor”

James Wechsler, independent scholar, “Reddening the Record: Revolutionary Art Between the World Wars”

4:30-5:30 P.M, Issues in Public Art

Susan Valdes-Dapena, independent scholar, “‘Painting Section’ in Black and White: Ethel Magafan’s ‘Cotton Pickers'”

Michele Cohen, independent scholar and public art consultant, “Civilization: Its Rise and Fall in New Deal Murals”

Herbert R. Hartel, Jr., John Jay College, CUNY, “The Sculptural Paintings of Abraham Joel Tobias: The Shaped Canvas in 1930s New York”

5:30 P.M. Closing remarks

 

Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas.

Indigenous Visions:
Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas

Thursday, September 15, 2011
Beinecke Library

Friday and Saturday, September 16-17, 2011
Luce Hall Auditorium, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut

Mediamorphosis: Print Culture and Transatlantic Public Sphere(s), 1890-1940
September 9 and 10, 2011

http://www.udel.edu/mediamorphosis/

This two–day symposium will provide a forum for literary scholars, historians, media historians, and art historians to share works–in–progress on the transformations of print media and transatlantic public spheres at the turn of the twentieth century. The symposium will feature work that probes artificial literary and art historical boundaries, challenges national divisions and the divide between nineteenth– and twentieth–century print culture studies, and links texts and writers across different genres or sectors of the print media of the period. There will be ample time for open discussion; there will be no concurrent panels. Presentations will engage substantially with the following areas of common interest:

• advancing our understanding of print culture’s role in the period’s movements for racial, class, and gender equality;

• identifying and theorizing the relationship between print culture, empire, and cross-cultural (transatlantic, transnational) writing, reading, and publishing;

• bringing the theories and methods of material culture studies to bear on the analysis of print artifacts as “objects” or “things”;

• grasping the increasing textual hybridity of the period’s print artifacts, by examining such phenomena as the interactions between illustration and text and the complex collage effects created by advances and experiments in typography and image reproduction;

• developing our knowledge of Anglo-American links, interactions, and networks among writers, publishers, editors, agents, and other participants in the period’s print culture;

• analyzing and theorizing the relationship between transformations in print culture and evolving notions of authorship and the literary, including the role of the nascent academic field of English, in Britain, the United States, and/or the colonies/commonwealth.

This symposium is hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences’ Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center and supported by: the Center for Material Culture Studies, the Departments of Black American Studies, English, and Women’s Studies, the University of Delaware Library, the Institute for Global Studies, the University Faculty Senate Committee on Cultural Activities and Public Events (CAPE), and the Delaware Humanities Forum.

Ireland, America and the Worlds of Mathew Carey
Philadelphia
27-29 October 2011

Cosponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies,
The Program in Early American Economy and Society,
The Library Company of Philadelphia, and
The University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

This first part of a trans-Atlantic conference will feature
presentations and discussion about printer and editor of influential
periodicals, on Mathew Carey (1760-1839). By the mid-1790s, he had
transformed himself from printer to publisher, from artisan to
manufacturer, and into one of the early republic’s foremost political
economists.  Carey’s identity as an Irish-American and a Catholic, and
his contributions to the economy and politics are inseparable from the
trans-Atlantic print culture of the early national era.  This conference
is free and open to everyone interested in its themes.  To review the
program and read pre-circulated papers for this conference, which will
be posted in late September, please register electronically at:
http://www.librarycompany.org/careyconference/

The second part of this trans-Atlantic conference will be
held at Trinity College Dublin, on November 17-19, 2011.  It will hosted
by the Centre for Irish-Scottish and Comparative Studies and Trinity
College Dublin, and the Trinity Long Room Hub in association with the
National Library of Ireland, University College Dublin, and the
University of Aberdeen.  For further information please contact Johanna
Archbold at: johanna.archbold@tcd.ie