Collaborations
Local partnerships
The Department of History of Art and Architecture department has been actively partnering with the Carnegie Museum of Art to create academic symposia of national and international significance:
- In the spring of 2006, the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Carnegie Museum co-sponsored a national graduate student symposium on the theme Natural Selections: Art and Exchange with the Natural World. The symposium coincides with the Carnegie exhibition Fierce Friends: Artists & Animals in the Industrial Era, 1750-1900. Curator Louise Lippincott and faculty from the Department of History of Art and Architecture and other departments will participate in the symposium as discussants. Professor Claudia Swan of Northwestern will be the keynote speaker.
- In November 2004 the Department of History of Art and Architecture, in conjunction with Pitt’s Cultural Studies Program and the Carnegie Museum, organized the major international symposium Modernity and Contemporaneity: Antinomies of Art and Culture after the Twentieth Century. The symposium assembled 600 people from dozens of countries and featured world-renowned participants such as Frederic Jameson, Bruno Latour, Antonio Negri, and others. Read more about the symposium.
- The Department of History of Art and Architecture is jointly sponsoring a lecture series with Chatham College on historic preservation and urban design titled “Designing the Future, Preserving the Past.” Speakers include Roy Graham of the University of Florida and Judy Scott Feldman of the National Coalition to Save Our Mall. Read more about the lecture series.
- Professor Alison Stones collaborated with the university’s Digital Research Library to create the world’s most comprehensive online database of images of Chartres Cathedral. Read more about the image database.
- Several faculty from the Department of History of Art and Architecture have taught courses in close collaboration with local museums. Professor Kirk Savage has taught two graduate seminars in the collections of the Warhol Museum, each of which culminated in a public symposium at the museum. Professor Ann Sutherland Harris’s graduate seminar on European drawings helped produce the catalog for the exhibition Pittsburgh Collects: European Drawings, 1500-1800 at the Frick Art and Historical Center.
National and international partnerships
- Profossor Kathryn Linduff helped organize “Early Complex Societies in Northeast China: The Chifeng International Collaborative Archaeological Research Project,” a collaborative project among the University of Pittsburgh, Jilin University, the Inner Mongolia Institute of Archaeology, and the Hebrew University. Linduff and her partners are conducting a regional surface survey and excavation near Chifeng, Aohan Qi, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. They are looking at the emergence of complex society in eastern IMAR from the period including the Neolithic through the Han Empire (c. 6000 B.C.E.–200 C.E.), at the same time the first Chinese states were developing. For more information see Linduff’s article (co-authored with R.D. Drennan and G. Shelach) “Early Complex Societies in Northeast China: The Chifeng International Collaborative Archaeological Research Project,” Journal of Field Archaeology, 2004, pp. 45–73.
- Professor Terry Smith has helped to organize “Autonomy, Ascription, and Multi-Temporality within Interactive Narrative,” a joint international research project bringing together the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at the University of New South Wales, Sydney; International University Bremen; the Zentrum fur Media und Kunst, Kalrsruhe; and the University of Pittsburgh. The collaboration is devoted to developing languages for use within digital art projects and within the discursive interpretation of these projects. A primary goal is to produce several substantial publications through the Digital Arts Edition series that will encapsulate the best research on digital arts in the world.
- Professor Gao Minglu’s exhibition The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art is the first collaboration between U.S. art museums and a significant Chinese art museum to focus on contemporary Chinese art. Read more about the exhibition.
- Professor Kathleen Christian’s graduate seminar on 16th-century Venetian painting will be participating in a symposium for scholars by invitation at the National Gallery in Washington in September 2006.