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Since 2003, Elon’s art history program sponsors a speaker series that has brought world-renowned art historians to campus. With four talks scheduled per year, the series gives students an opportunity to interact with the major scholars in the field. past speakers include: Timon Screech, Norman Bryson, Terry Smith, Carol Duncan, Barabara Abou-el-Haj, Frank K. Lord, esq., Rebecca Brown, Carol Mattusch, John Neff, Gennifer Weisenfeld, Rebacca Martin Nagy, Dorothy Verkerk, Judith Rodenbeck, Rachael Ziady DeLue, David M. Lubin, Mary D. Sheriff, James Elkins, and Jaroslav Folda. Students are encouraged to recommend scholars they wish to meet.
Dr. Jonathan D. Katz, "Queer Before Stonewall: Art, Eros and The Sixties"
Tuesday, October 2
Yeager Recital Hall, 6pm
Dr. Katz is co-curator of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the first queer exhibition ever mounted at a major US museum. He directs the doctoral program in Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo and is presently completing a new book, The Silent Camp: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and the Cold War, to be published by the University of Chicago Press. This lecture explores why in the art world of the late 50s and 60s, before difference was particularized, specified, embodied, and made over into artistic identity, a single, universal human capacity—Eros—was elevated to determining status and made ground for a global politic of social liberation. For a few short years, a diverse group of artists, female and male, queer and straight, as different as Richard Hamilton, Lygia Clark, Franz West, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneemann produced an art that, in politicizing the body while obfuscating its signs of differentiation, paradoxically engendered the very specific contemporary social categories like feminist and queer that now obscure Eros’ formative and foundational role.
Art History Speaker Series
Admission is free and open to the public.
April 3rd
Martin Kemp: Lost Works by Leonardo? Questions of Attribution.
Arts West, Room 126
Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor in the History of Art, Trinity College, Oxford and author of Leonardo and Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon, will discuss intersections of art history and forensic science in the attribution of recently discovered works to Leonardo da Vinci.
A light reception will follow the talk.
February 17th
"Art History @ Elon: A Symposium"La Rose Digital Theatre, Koury Business Center, Room101, 4:00 p.m.
A presentation of recent scholarship by Elon's Art History faculty:
A reception will follow. This event is free and open to the public.
September 27
Art History Speaker: Sigrid Danielson
"Hands and Temperaments: Art History and the Early Medieval Artist"
Yeager Recital Hall, 6 p.m.
Is it possible to discuss early medieval artistic identity? Danielson explores the ways scholars have worked to attribute early medieval objects with their makers and centers of production. During the first decades of the twentieth century, art historians regularly employed the themes of nationalism and authenticity to characterize those relationships. Far more than exercises in connoisseurship, these elaborate schemas often replaced the absent biography with narratives that served a variety of regional interests.
October 24
Art History Speaker: Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
"Righting Biography: Race, Religion, and the Internet in the Revision of American Art History"
Yeager Recital Hall, 6 p.m.
How has the internet age changed the possibilities for the writing of American art history? Can ever-increasing access to census records, maps, and books significantly change our approaches to studying works of art and the lives of the artists who made them? This talk investigates the ways that newly digitized archives and reference materials can change our understanding of artists who might otherwise have remained enigmas and works that have existed without explanation through an in-depth discussion of the Harlem Renaissance-era artist Sargent Johnson and his 1940 lithograph "Singing Saints."
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