Ucr Barbara and Art Culver Center of the Arts

Visualizing Love and Decease Across Cultures
11Th Almanac UCR History of Fine art Graduate Student Conference

Saturday, May 21, 2022
9:00-4:30pm
In-person and via Zoom
Barbara and Art Culver Heart for the Arts
3834 Master Street
Riverside, CA 92501

Linda Montano, Mitchell'southward Death, 1977

Love and death are both uniquely positioned every bit emotional events that significantly impact the human being psyche, individually and collectively. Their distinct experiences are dictated by cultural customs and personal experience. Furthermore, developments in academia, such as the rising of phenomenology, the affective turn, and consciousness of non-Western ideologies, have changed how scholars analyze and relate to emotional stimuli. Dearest and death are prescient topics of contemplation, as COVID-19 has made mass death a global feel: communities appoint in rituals of mourning, practice dear through protest, and navigate companionship across digital media.

What can the arts tell us well-nigh contextual understandings of these two concepts, or how they often be simultaneously, symbiotically or otherwise? These concepts call into question our e'er-shifting relationship with emotions. Our understandings of these emotions, such as dear and infatuation, or trauma and mourning, are dynamic. Love and death occupy a like emotional space: both have the potential to be all-consuming, emotional, physical, restorative, or destructive.

To explore the relationship betwixt love and expiry inside the field, art historians often employ an interdisciplinary approach, turning to queer studies, ethnic studies, and anthropology, among other disciplines. How do our religious community, subjectivities, and ritual practices create a dialogue between dearest and death? This briefing seeks to create a framework for discussion of what relationship love and death could hold by bringing together scholars working on 1 or both of these concepts.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. C. Ondine Chavoya, Williams College

Visit the AHGSA conference website for more data:  https://ahgsaconference.ucr.edu/

PAST CONFERENCES

2021 Graduate Student Conference

Utagawa Yoshitora, Vehicles on the Streets of Tokyo, 1870. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Topic: (Fine art)iculations of Proximity and Mobility

Keynote: Dr. Cheryl Finley, Acquaintance Professor, Department of the History of Art, Cornell University

Held virtually via Zoom
May fourteen and fifteen, 2021

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has separated and grounded people across the globe to varying degrees over time. It has introduced new notions like the "essential worker"—divers by their closeness to the crunch—and "six feet" as a safe amount of nearness. It has illuminated mobility and immobility as both privilege and inequality—when some, for example, take the means to flee high-take a chance environments, while others don't, and some have the option to stay dwelling, while others must continue to movement and engage person-to-person for their livelihood.

The significance of proximity–understood as nearness in space, time, or relation–and mobility–the ability to move or exist moved freely and easily–as both conditions and concepts is perhaps more than apparent than before. In fact, art history as a discipline is impacted by certain ideas of proximity and mobility: from early historians' conventionalities in "distanced" or "objective" narratives; to the methodology of "close-looking"; to the "aura" of the site-specific object; to the importance placed on travel in research. This conference asks: how accept "the arts"—divers broadly and including visual and material civilization—been shaped past proximity or mobility, and how have they articulated their own vision of closeness and movement as conditions or concepts? What tin can they tell us about how proximity and mobility take been valued, ignored, related, defined, interrogated, or challenged across time, places, and peoples? Why do these (fine art)iculations matter? This briefing speaks to these and related questions, and encourages soapbox from across the disciplines and with an expansive notion of the arts.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Cheryl Finley, Acquaintance Professor, Department of the History of Fine art, Cornell University

2019 Graduate Educatee Conference

Topic: Re-vision: Myth, Retentivity, and the Gendered-Self

Keynote: Dr. Charlene Villaseñor Black, UCLA Department of Art History

The goal of the conference is to promote an interdisciplinary dialogue through visual and material civilisation by questioning imposed gendered hierarchies and identities, in order to facilitate inclusive understanding of gendered roles in myth throughout history. This year'southward theme concerns re-vision–revising, re-conceptualizing, and seeing differently –as the human activity of "looking dorsum" to forge new critical directions and critique androcentric globe views and traditions. Concepts of gender within oral histories, literary traditions, cosmologies, and visual arts –and the relevance of gender'south constant fluidity –helps to shape our understanding of the world. This understanding becomes a cultural mythology that affects our contemporary memory. Though these mythic stories shape human experience (by informing cultural identity, world views, social structure, self-prototype), they themselves are not stock-still. Standing in the tradition of rewriting and challenging the historical catechism, the reclamation of the distorted-self (distorted past fixed, limiting, and systematized gender concepts) is necessary for the troubling of myth and fable within the visual arts. Questioning conventions, perceptions, and conceptions of gender in art is necessary to recover the agency that mythic images of identity evoke. This conference will explore the ways in which concepts and representations of gender in myth are revised through art and art history. Such re-visioning takes on urgency when images themselves act as sites of active engagement –a dialogue betwixt viewer and viewed –which will therefore serve to restructure human experience, history, civilization, belief and understanding. Nosotros are interested in the re-evaluation of androcentric mythological imagery, the functionality of gender (theoretically and iconographically), and how gender has been radically reworked inside visual culture, which thereby constructs a gimmicky memory. Additionally, it will consider how myth and gimmicky retentivity are at present beingness shaped through movements such as the #metoo movement, Black Lives Matter, the LGBTQ+ customs, immigration issues, spirituality, modernistic witchcraft, and more. It will look at new disquisitional directions and assertions in cultural history and how visual culture is reworked through time, beyond global traditions –historical to contemporary, mainstream to margin.

View the 2019 Conference Programme

2018 Graduate Student Briefing

Topic: The Fine art of Being in Exile: Alienation & Liberation

Keynote: Dr. Tatiana Flores, Associate Professor in the Departments of Art History at Rutgers University

Exile involves anything that precludes a person from inhabiting or experiencing a condition of establishment. Thus, exile tin can be self- or externally-imposed, natural or voluntary, and come most for a wide variety of reasons such every bit: politics, ecology, economics, safety, ideology, sexuality, organized religion, or expatriation for report/work/security purposes. Although exile often has negative connotations, it can likewise be liberating for some individuals, particularly if they were established in a place or fashion that prevented them from expressing their truthful selves or beliefs.

Exile is a state or status not jump to a specific identify or time. Because of its strong impact on the people living through information technology, exile has inspired works of literature, theater, music, and the visual arts. Ostracism was a penalisation considered worse than decease in Greek literature. Shakespeare inflicted banishment on many of his characters. Napoleon Bonaparte'southward court painter Jacques-Louis David was exiled in Brussels following the Bourbon restoration, and while there, produced boggling portraits of beau exiles, supporters of the deposed emperor. Hungarian-built-in László Moholy-Nagy, a central figure at the German language Bauhaus Schoolhouse in the 1920s, went through several self-imposed exiles as he sought creative liberty and inspiration. In 1935, in response to the rising of National Socialism, he relocated to London, and then again to Chicago. The Argentine Leon Ferrari was forced into exile in Brazil in 1976 considering of his political artworks in opposition to the military dictatorship, which also disappeared his son Ariel the yr later. Nidaa Badwan opted for a year-long voluntary exile in 2013, retreating to her room in Gaza, which she rarely left. There, she created a photographic cocky-portrait serial that leaves the anarchy outside, to the streets of Gaza.

At a time when war, natural disaster, ecological devastation, famine, and intolerance proceed to drive hundreds of millions of people out of their homeland, the conference aims to be a platform of dialogue to explore this phenomenon and its complex implications. Questions we seek to consider include: In what way practice artists engage with the feel of exile, where gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, assume new connotations? Nether which weather can exile art open up a dialogue on problems of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and the status of clearing?

View the 2018 conference program

2017 Graduate Student Conference

Topic: Breaking Conventions: Interdisciplinary Methodologies and Art History

Keynote: Carolyn Dean, Professor in the Department of History of Art and Visual Civilization at the Academy of California, Santa Cruz

CFP: Since the 1970s, "exterior" methodologies derived from fields every bit diverse as anthropology, religious studies, literary theory, media studies, sociology and the sciences take been increasingly absorbed into art historical soapbox, irrevocably altering the perception, reception and fifty-fifty definition of works of art. The introduction of interdisciplinary approaches to the conversation challenged the traditional model where fashion and attribution, cultural context and connoisseurship, iconography and social history were considered the cardinal approaches to analyzing art. This momentous shift away from the more bourgeois canon and methodologies has proven to be a vital ways for expanding the boundaries of art history equally a bailiwick.

In the context of the growing accent on interdisciplinary approaches across academic scholarship, this conference volition consider the continuously evolving nature of art historical inquiry. How take methodologies from other disciplines enhanced, redirected and fruitfully challenged the ways in which art historians view, describe and interpret works of fine art? This multi-disciplinary conference seeks papers that examine the touch on of new and interdisciplinary methodological approaches on our agreement of artworks, visual cultures, and the discipline of art history proper. Papers from all geographical areas, historical time periods, and methodological perspectives are encouraged.

Questions we seek to consider: How accept methods outside of art history affected the art historical canon? How practice current methodological shifts modify the means in which we arroyo art objects? How have non-art historical methods prompted the states to run across "traditional" creative media, such as painting and sculpture, anew? Alternatively, do traditional art historical methods have the potential to encourage an expansion of the art historical canon?

View the 2017 briefing program

2016 Graduate Student Briefing

Topic:Fabric Experience: Thinking With Objects

Keynote:Dr. Daniela Bleichmar, Associate Professor in the Departments of Art History and History at the Academy of Southern California

CFP:
New theories in fine art history, cultural studies, and philosophy have recently called attending to the ability of matter in shaping our perception of the world. Withal, attending to materiality is nix new. For example, in the 12^th century, Abbot Suger defended his extravagant art programme at St. Denis in part by inscribing on its doors that "the dull listen rises to the truth through material things." Suger's statement makes articulate the profound and illuminating potential of cloth objects that has persisted, in varying forms, throughout history.

However, James Elkins has observed recently that fields of visual studies are characterized by an enduring disparity betwixt written theories about objects and the embodied experience of one'due south encounter, indicating more than broadly what he calls a "fear of materiality." At a fourth dimension in which our experience of art, compages, and other objects in visual culture is oft physically removed through their circulation equally digital images, this topic arrives with a detectable urgency. How should we in plough experience the things of the globe? This multi-disciplinary conference will address how the material conditions of objects invigorate social, political, and aesthetic spheres.

Questions we seek to consider: What role does materiality have in shaping our perception of objects? How do emerging or established theories of materiality impact art history, visual studies, and other disciplines? And, accordingly, what are the limits of these theories? Do the means of production and exchange alter our perception of the textile object? And finally, how does art, regarded as material culture, function as historical testify?

View the 2016 briefing program

2015 Graduate Student Conference

Topic: On Whose Potency? (Re)Assessing the Malleable Canon of Visuality

Keynote: Dr. Rafael Cardoso, Getty scholar and Professor at Universidade do Estado exercise Rio de Janeiro

CFP:
Although the term canon implies rigidity, internal and external pressures have oft forced canons to exist re-evaluated and reformed. A look at art and objects on a global scale, from past to nowadays, inevitably reveals the complexity too as the exclusionary quality of canonicity. Equally such, a canon can be shown to accept a malleable nature, ane that yields or resists challenges to authority. Because the concept of a canon in relation to visuality permeates a wide variety of disciplines, this multi-disciplinary conference seeks to explore the relationship betwixt canonicity and the arts, in any of its forms, inside an expanding, global context.

Giorgio Vasari, the author of The Lives of the Near Eminent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors, is commonly regarded as one of the "fathers" of art history. Vasari's sixteenth-century projection aimed to document the technical progress of artists over fourth dimension and to establish the superiority of Florentine art, thus constructing the first canon of art history. As discourses about aesthetics, representation, and politics adult, scholars and artists alike began to question and claiming the seemingly purposeful exclusion of various identity groups from discussions of the visual arts. Investigations of the canon, however, are not limited to who is included or excluded. Rather, the inclusion and valuation of media is likewise an important topic to address. Consider, here, the perceptions of photography upon its invention in the early 19th century. These examples, while not exhaustive, serve to demonstrate our interest in the malleable nature of the catechism inside the context of the arts.

Some of the questions nosotros seek to address include: What role(s) does the catechism play inside a globalized fine art history or report of the arts? What are the implications of reevaluating the canon? Who, or what, determines the canon? How does the canon demonstrate points of intersection and divergence among academic disciplines? How does an examination of the canon illuminate historical and ideological shifts? How have its parameters shifted equally the discipline of fine art history has changed? Approaches to these questions could come in the forms of fine fine art, historical objects and documents, art history, fashion, blueprint, architecture, visual culture, literature, religious objects, artifacts, and many more than.

View the 2015 conference program

2014 Graduate Pupil Conference

Topic: Substitution: Assimilation and Cribbing in the Arts

Keynote: Sofia Sanabrais, Getty Inquiry Institute Scholar and lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California Sabbatum

CFP: From antique and early mod forms of trade, exploration and colonization to more modern forms of cultural contact through immigration and the development of the internet, cultural exchange continues to have an touch on the structure of the arts and art trends effectually the earth. This multi-disciplinary briefing seeks to explore the human relationship between assimilation and cribbing in the arts, in whatever of its forms, from antiquity to the contemporary.

Sophisticated networks of trade, world exploration and cultural sovereignty established and experienced throughout antiquity and the early on modernistic period changed local arts and impacted cultural exchange. This form of contact can exist traced back every bit early as 700 BCE, as influential Greek colonies were established in what is today known as Italia. Similarly, the Dutch invasion and colonization of Indonesia during the seventeenth century too had a major lasting impact on the cultural makeup of the region. Cultural substitution has not been limited to physical avenues, however, and the movement of ideas by visual forms of exchange has fostered artistic inspiration and artful affiliation. For example, upon encountering African masks in Parisian museums, Pablo Picasso appropriated sure African aesthetics for his cubist studies. Similarly, belatedly nineteenth century American artist William Merritt Chase borrowed motifs inspired by Japanese prints and ceramics. These brief examples serve to demonstrate our expanded arroyo to the idea of assimilation and appropriation as integral aspects of artistic and cultural development, absorption or resistance.

Amongst the questions nosotros seek to address are: How may cultural and artful authenticity be threatened by the loss of national identity? How have methods of appropriation and vehicles of distribution changed over fourth dimension through the development of transportation, mechanical reproduction and the cyberspace? What is the overall lasting impact of various forms of exchange, whether experienced through personal travel or cultural invasion, whether accepted or unwelcome, whether voluntary or forced? Approaches to these questions could come in the forms of fine art, fashions, foods, blueprint, architecture, literature, race, religion, and many more.

View the 2014 briefing programme

2013 Graduate Student Conference

Topic: Repetition

Keynote: Britt Salvesen, Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography and the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

CFP: Repetition, as both logic and device, has played a significant role in the history of fine art. As logic, repetition underlies the very possibility of artworks as meaningful objects, equally it is through repeated acquaintance with an object or form that information technology gains meaning in a prescribed context. And as stylistic device, the utilize of repetition has transcended historical periods and visual cultures. From prehistory to the present, the repetition of forms and objects has been used by practically all cultures as a mode to ascertain mutual identities, constitute order, and inscribe sense and meaning into the world. The use of repeated forms stands at the center of, for instance, practices and objects equally distinct as Inca tunic pattern, Buddhist and Hindu mandalas, Outsider fine art and 1960s Minimalism. Yet repetition was also part of painterly strategies in the Renaissance and Baroque periods and pervades the concepts of Early on Modern print civilisation also as sculptural practices. These diverse examples serve to highlight our expanded arroyo to the idea of repetition as an integral aspect of a series of diverse practices, including blueprint design,  seriality, doubling, mirroring, symmetry, recursion, copying and reproducibility.

Moreover, the significance of repetition extends to the present moment every bit the concept has occupied an of import place in the theorizing of mod existence—as commodity or behavior, for case. More specifically inside the visual arts, the advent of photography in the mid-19th century has led thinkers to theorize the effects of the repeated and repeatable image in modernistic life, often with inconclusive or contradictory results. While Benjamin argued in 1936 that, "the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition," making a case for the revolutionary potential of the technology of photography, Adorno and Horkheimer contended some years later that in gimmicky existence, "what is new is that the irreconcilable elements of civilization, fine art and distraction are subordinated to 1 cease and subsumed nether one false formula: the totality of the culture industry. It consists of repetition."

View the 2013 conference program

2012 Graduate Educatee Briefing

Topic: Traversing Borders

Keynote: Steve Hindle, W.M. Keck Foundation Director of Research, Huntington Library, "Representing Rural Society: Surveyors, Surveying and the Surveyed in Seventeenth Century England"

CFP: Academic scholarship rarely fits neatly into the confines of a single disciplinary label. Many academic studies cantankerous between disciplinary, regional and temporal borders. For example, Italian Renaissance studies examine a geographic region fabricated up of independent metropolis-states that were not, at the time, considered a single region. Anthropologists in Latin America and Asia consider cultures that are inextricably linked with other cultures by trade over hundreds of years. Many musicians cite painters as sources of inspiration, and painters are in turn, influenced past operation theory. When because the influence of medicine, anatomy and nature on artists, the divide betwixt the humanities and sciences is also blurred. Information technology is the multiplicity of these academic categories that nosotros wish to celebrate with "Traversing Borders."

Graduate students in whatsoever bailiwick are invited to submit abstracts for "Traversing Borders," the first Almanac UCR Fine art History Graduate Pupil Conference, on May 12, 2012. The conference provides a forum for graduate students to question borders and boundaries—to delineate, critique, motion through or reconfigure their role in the analysis of fine art and art history. Contributions engaging any medium (armor, trip the light fantastic toe, sculpture, print media, photography, architecture, motion picture, painting, performance, etc.), fourth dimension period, race/ethnicity, gender and region are welcome.

Papers may consider the notion of boundaries and borders in relation to creative production, historiography, methodology or reception. How does art create, embody and reply to borders? How do artists transgress and navigate racial, political, economic or gendered boundaries? How are boundaries imbued with an ideology marking objects or gendered boundaries? How are boundaries imbued with an ideology marking objects every bit advisable to the study of art history? What office do boundaries play in the scholar's projection? What is the role of borders in maintaining ideologies, economies and politics? Do borders always locate difference?

View the 2012 conference plan

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Source: https://arthistory.ucr.edu/graduate/annual-graduate-student-conference/

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