Art History Professor Kirstin Ringelberg shared their research on gender, sexuality and art history at venues in New York, Chicago, and Dijon, France.
This spring and early summer have been busy for art historian Kirstin Ringelberg, who gave a talk in one panel and was a respondent in another at the 113th Annual College Art Association (CAA) Conference in New York in February, was invited to speak at the First Homosexuals Symposium as part of the Wrightwood 659 exhibition’s opening in Chicago in May, and delivered a paper in June at the “Book of Nature, Nature of Books: Practices of Female Botanists” International conference at the Université Bourgogne Europe.
At CAA, Ringelberg presented on trans in-visibility for the session “Visibility and Visuality after ‘the Transgender Tipping Point”‘ and on the urgency of reckoning directly and honestly with the climate emergency in “No Art History on a Dead Planet” for the “Art History and the Apocalypse” session.
In Chicago, a symposium was held by the Wrightwood 659 as part of their opening of the groundbreaking exhibition “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity, 1869-1939”, curated by Jonathan D. Katz and Johnny Willis. Fifteen art history scholars and curators each addressed a distinct geographic region’s visual and material culture as it represented understanding of gender and sexual identities during that time. Ringelberg was invited to cover the case for queer and trans art and artists in France.
And in June, Ringelberg traveled to Dijon, France, to discuss the work of nineteenth-century French artist Madeleine Lemaire as a botanical illustrator, showing how their floral paintings meld art and science in a way that offers an opportunity to recognize the failure of binary, hierarchical taxonomies to represent the true diversity of plants and humans. Some of Ringelberg’s discussion of plant biology developed from conversations with and materials generously supplied by Carl Niedziela of the Elon Biology Department.
These presentations were made possible through a research residency at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in spring 2024, and the Elon College, College of Arts and Sciences faculty travel funding.