Spring Term 2005 Events



A Public Discussion with Wenda Gu and Art Historian David Cateforis

Thursday, January 20, 4PM
Frick Fine Art Auditorium

Wenda Gu, born in Shanghai, uses the most personal of substances, human hair, to create monuments inscribed with pseudo-characters of his own invention. What are we to make of international languages that cannot be read? What are we to make of the mingling of this body substance of many different cultures, races, and genders? Gu's most recent work questions the distinctions between "high art" and popular culture as he transforms the ancient art of calligraphy into a contemporary commercial medium. In Gu's work, the characters for the sounds "you-ni-fu-se-ti and bi-ci-bao-ge" (University of Pittsburgh) translate as "shiny neon floats on colorful silk-green China treasure pavilion".

 

Poetry Reading: Huang Xiang

Thursday, February 3, 4PM
Frick Fine Art Auditorium

Huang Xiang is an internationally known poet. His lifelong support for human rights and civil liberties has resulted in a longstanding ban against publication of his writings in China, as well as several terms in jail. His current residency in Pittsburgh comes as part of the Cities of Asylum Project.

 

Lecture: Alison Mairi Syme
"A Touch of Blossom"

Wednesday, February 23, 5:30PM
Room 204 Frick Fine Arts

Alison Syme is defending her dissertation this spring at Harvard. The dissertation, "Hedgewhores, Wagtails, Cockatrices, Whipsters: John Singer Sargent and his Coterie of Nature's Artful Dodgers," considers Sargent in the context of 19th-century botany, gynecology, and literature. She argues that the artist mobilized ideas of cross-fertilization and the hermaphroditic sexuality of flowers to construct a period poetics of sexual and national "hybridity." She has published on a range of topics from medieval bestiaries to queer theory.

 

Artist's Talk: Xu Bing

Thursday, February 24, 4PM
Frick Fine Art Auditorium

Xu Bing grew up in Beijing, and was sent down to the countryside for two years during China's Cultural Revolution. In an ongoing project, Xu Bing invented his own language in the early 1990's: "New English Calligraphy", or "Square Word" Calligraphy. For a series of projects, Xu Bing created a new alphabet, with English letters and subsequently, words, reconfigured to give the appearance of Chinese characters. Visitors to this exhibition will find a classroom setting that allows them to learn square word calligraphy hands-on, with ink and brush.

 

Lecture: Drew Armstrong
"Tiepolo, Vico and the Venetian Counter-Enlightenment"

Friday, February 25, 4:00PM
Room 203 Frick Fine Arts

Drew Armstrong is a recent PhD from Columbia whose dissertation concerns the architectural theories of Julien-David Leroy and particularly the notion of a mobile spectator, which Armstrong connects to larger issues of navigation and knowledge. Much of this work specifically involves the application of scientific theories to visual/spatial representation. He already has a substantial list of publications to his credit, and several more forthcoming in leading journals, which deal not only with architecture but with sculpture, painting, and cartography as well.

 

Symposium: Florence Cathedral

Saturday, February 26 & March 19, 9:30AM-12:30PM & 2PM-5PM
Room 203 Frick Fine Arts

Symposia: Florence Cathedral

Medieval historians from across the country will address historical issues raised by excavations under the cathedral or Duomo of S. Maria del Fiore in Florence.

Speakers on Saturday February 26:

Ralph Mathisen (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is a classicist specializing on Late-Antique social organization and Barbarian history.

Thomas Noble directs The Medieval Institute at the University of Notre-Dame, and is a specialist on the medieval papacy. One art historian said of his book, The Republic of St. Peter: "all of us still riffle its pages aily."

Speakers on Saturday March 19:

Thomas Head (Hunter College) is an authority on medieval hagiography and the cult of saints.

Patrick Geary (UCLA) wrote Furta Sacra on the theft of holy bodies in the Middle Ages, with implications for the "body-driven" evolution of medieval architecture.

John McDonald Howe, professor of history at Texas Tech University, is the American authority on the 11th-century pre-Gregorian reform, and works on liturgy, sacred space, and medieval music.

The symposia are offered in conjunction with Franklin Toker's current honors undergraduate and graduate seminar on "The Destroyed Cathedral of Early Medieval Florence: Text and Context," which in turn is based on his in-progress Excavations at Florence Cathedral: Mapping the Sacred Center of Florence from the Roman Empire to the Renaissance (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, publication in four volumes, 2006--2008). The historians coming to Pittsburgh will particularly address issues raised in volume four of the work, titled When Stones Speak: The Florence Cathedral Excavation Results in the Light of History. The symposia form part of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at the University, with the participation also of the departments of History and Music. Funding for the symposia comes from the Arts & Sciences Faculty Research and Scholarship Program, and from the University Honors College.

Further information from Frank Toker, 412.648.2419 or ftoker@pitt.edu.

 

Lecture: Stacey Loughrey Sloboda

Monday, February 28, 4:30PM
Room 202 Frick Fine Arts

Stacey Sloboda, a recent PhD from USC, wrote her dissertation on "Making China: Design, Empire, and Aesthetics in Britain, 1745-1851." Her dissertation examines the interconnections between the importing of "china" to Britain and the British imperial project in China, in the process connecting consumerism, imperialism, and aesthetic appropriation.

 

Lecture: Josh Ellenbogen
"Portraits of the Invisible: Galton, Mental Imagery, and the Photography of Types"

Wednesday, March 2, 5:30PM
Room 204 Frick Fine Arts

Josh Ellenbogen, trained in the history of science as well as the history of art, is defending his dissertation this spring at the University of Chicago. His dissertation, "Photography and the Imperceptible: Bertillon, Galton, Marey," deals with the intersection of scientific photography and artistic practice at the end of the nineteenth century in France and Europe; the particular focus is on how photography of imperceptible events shifted perceptual theory and the artistic practices of portraiture.

Fall Term 2004 Events



Colloquium: Marion Dolan
"The Da Vinci Code: Seperating Fiction From Fact"

Monday, October 11, 2004 12-1pm
Room 203 Frick Fine Arts

This year's colloquium series is organized by the graduate students in history of art and architecture and will take place on Mondays at noon.

 

Lecture: Dr. Eleanor Mannikka
"Angkor Wat And The Transformation Of Space Into Time."

Thursday, October 14, 2004 4pm
Frick Fine Arts Auditorium, reception to follow in Frick Fine Arts Cloister. Free to the public.

Uncannily precise alignment of architecture to the location or movement of heavenly bodies--achieved without benefit of modern technology and astronomy--is attributed to the Great Pyramids of ancient Egypt and to the Stonehenge of prehistoric England. But nowhere is this relationship so elaborately coordinated as in the 12th-century Cambodian temple of Angkor Wat -- the largest religious complex ever constructed on the planet. A walk through this sacred precinct is a journey through the geophysical reality of our lunar and solar calendars.

[Co-sponsored by The Architecture Club, the Architectural Studies Program, the Honors College, the Indo-Pacific Council of the Asian Studies Center of the University of Pittsburgh, and the Pittsburgh Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.]

 

Lecture: Nada Hegedusic Jankovic
"Croatian Naïve Art"

Friday, October 15, 2pm
Room 204 Frick Fine Arts

This lecture is in conjunction with an exhibition of Croatian naïve art in the Connie Kimbo Gallery in the William Pitt Union from October 14th-16th. The exhibit will be open to the public 10AM-5PM over the weekend and the art work is for sale. Proceeds from the exhibition will help fund future cultural projects in the United States and Croatia.

 

Colloquium: Ray Anne Lockard, Librarian, Frick Fine Arts Library
"Miss Frick's InfoFantasy: Art Databases and Other Electric Satisfactions"

Monday, October 18, 12-1pm
Room 203 Frick Fine Arts

While I will focus on the newer art databases that were mounted on the ULS Digital Library during Summer 2004 (i.e., Bibliography of the History of Art and 19th Century Index to American Art Periodicals and others), I will also discuss other important art-related topics like using "Zoom," the library's web page of Art Links, Digital Dissertations, online citation manuals and other important ways to do your research.

 

Artist Talk: Zhang Hongtu

Thursday, October 21, 2004, 4pm
Frick Fine Arts Auditorium. Free to the public, reception to follow.

Zhang Hongtu creates paintings and sculptural artwork that mingle past and present, East and West, and challenge viewer's perceptions of history and art history. Zhang blurs the boundaries between East and West by recreating famous Chinese shanshui paintings in the style of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters as seen through the aesthetic of Chinese masters of centuries past. He challenges us to think about how deeply imbedded our cultural expectations of what constitutes landscape are, and of what we expect from language.

Zhang's questioning of boundaries between East and West, high art versus popular culture, and the constitution of reality continue with a series of objects included in this exhibition. Bronze fangding were used during the Han Dynasty during religious ceremonies to offer food to the gods. He pokes fun at the sacred and unique nature of the fangding by creating Bronze Tableware consisting of a cast bronze McDonald's hamburger box, a French fry container, knife, and fork. And our suspicions about the familiar shape of a six-pack of Blue and White Bottles (Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644) are confirmed when we see the accompanying "Coca-Cola" seal. Zhang's sculptural works challenge the hegemony of American pop culture and meld it with Chinese tradition with creativity and humor. More info at vrcoll.fa.pitt.edu/uag

 

Artist Talk: Wang Mansheng

Thursday, October 28, 2004, 4pm
Frick Fine Arts Auditorium. Free to the public.

Wang Mansheng, who majored in classical Chinese literature and served as an editor at the China Central Television Station, uses to shanshui to create narrative. Wang re-imagines shanshui (literally, mountains and water), as well as literature from China's past. His inspiration includes not only Chinese landscape, but also imagined and remembered visions of the American Southwest. More info at vrcoll.fa.pitt.edu/uag

 

Modernity and Contemporaneity
Antinomies of Art and Culture after the Twentieth Century

November 4–6, 2004
Carnegie Museum of Art, Lecture Hall

A major international symposium, “Modernity and Contemporaneity: Antinomies of Art and Culture after the Twentieth Century,” organized by Terry Smith and Okwui Enwezor of the Department of History of Art and Architecture and Nancy Condee from the Culture Studies Program, will take place in Pittsburgh November 4–6, 2004.

Timed to coincide with the Carnegie International exhibition of contemporary art, the symposium “Modernity and Contemporaneity” will bring a number of the most promising young minds working in the arts and culture from all over the world into direct dialogue with the leading thinkers on the key questions of what it is to be in the conditions of modernity, postmodernity, and contemporaneity, and what it is to represent these conditions to each other. Participants include Frederic Jameson, Bruno Latour, Antonio Negri, Sadik J. Al-Azm, and many others. For more details, see www.mc.pitt.edu.

 

Lecture: Claudia Mesch (Arizona State University)
"Recovering and Reconstructing 'Modern Art' in Divided Berlin."

Thursday, November 18, 4pm
Room 202 Frick Fine Arts

AThe overnight erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 intensified the cultural demarcation of the two zones that had already begun in 1949. Over the next years two differing definitions -- one could call them canons -- of modern art would be forwarded by artists, modern art museums, and by art discourse in West Berlin (controlled by the Federal Republic of Germany) and in the Eastern sector or zone (controlled by the German Democratic Republic). This paper will focus on how key East and West German artwork and architecture of the 1960s challenged the developing modernist canon of each respective state.

 

Lecture: Prof. Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt
"Person and Persona in Renaissance Portraits: Some Alternative Approaches"

Friday, November 19, 4pm
Room 202 Frick Fine Arts

A student of Italian Reniassance art and architecture, Prof. Brandt's publications include books on Leonardo, 16th-century sculpture, and Renaissance palaces. As permanent consultant for Renaissance art to the Vatican Museums, Prof. Brandt was a member of the Vatican team for the cleaning, conservation, and study of Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel and which now begins work on the Pauline Chapel.

 

Friends of Frick Fine Arts Lecture: Dr. David Karmon
"Rediscovering the Baths of Diocletian: Approaches to Architectural and Urban Conservation in Renaissance Rome"

Wednesday December 1, 2004 4:30pm
Frick Fine Arts Auditorium, reception to follow in Frick Fine Arts Cloister. Free to the public.

At the end of his life Michelangelo oversaw an unusual design project ? the creation of a new basilica out of the crumbling Baths of Diocletian on the edge of Rome. If there is still disagreement about how to preserve historic buildings today, the ambiguities were just as pronounced in the sixteenth century, but the transformation of the ancient Baths demonstrated how new ways of protecting the past and adapting it to the present emerged during the Renaissance in Rome.

 

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