Happening @ Michigan https://events.umich.edu/list/rss RSS Feed for Happening @ Michigan Events at the University of Michigan. Tappan Talks: Jennifer Gear and Grant Mandarino (March 31, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/39508 39508-8112293@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 31, 2017 4:00pm
Location: Tappan Hall
Organized By: History of Art

History of Art graduate students give short presentations followed by discussion.

Jennifer Gear, "Audience for an Epidemic: Memorializing Plague in Seventeenth-Century Venice"

Thirty-five years after the devastating plague of 1630-31 in Venice, Antonio Zanchi completed his commemorative work for the stairway of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, The Virgin Appears to the Plague-Stricken. This painting, with its scattered corpses and accumulation of contaminated goods, fear-inducing pizzigamorti (body clearers), and triumphant sacred intercessors, is an exercise in dramatic effect. It seeks to elicit a visceral response in viewers, evoking fear and revulsion, pity and piety. This paper will examine the ways in which Zanchi created an embodied viewing experience on the stairwell through his incorporation of the built environment and use of staging techniques developed in the visual and performance arts in seicento Venice.

Grant Mandarino, "Grosz's Haß or: The Art of Class Consciousness"

George Grosz's drawings of the 1920s are heralded for their incisive social commentary and economy of means. Yet they tend to be viewed today as the product of a misanthropic personality rather than a hatred born of political commitment. Originally conceived for an audience radicalized by the turmoil of the immediate post-WWI period and deployed in the pages of Communist-oriented publications, Grosz's images spoke to a moment of profound social polarization. Their ability to translate structural foes into indentifiable enemies made them, in the eyes of partisan critics, uniquely able to foster class conscious ways of seeing. This talk explores the development of an explicitly Communist form of graphic satire during the Weimar Republic and its relationship to the vicissitudes of partisan ideology by looking at how the sardonic vision of artists like Grosz became the very image of class hatred.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 09 Mar 2017 09:50:44 -0500 2017-03-31T16:00:00-04:00 2017-03-31T18:00:00-04:00 Tappan Hall History of Art Lecture / Discussion Grosz and Zanchi
Practical Advice for Publishing in Art History (April 14, 2017 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/40474 40474-8575952@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, April 14, 2017 1:00pm
Location: Tappan Hall
Organized By: History of Art

Ellie Goodman, Executive Editor of one of the most active and successful university presses now publishing in the domain of art history, will discuss the state of publishing today and answer questions about the nuts and bolts of getting an art history book published.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 11 Apr 2017 09:49:17 -0400 2017-04-14T13:00:00-04:00 2017-04-14T14:30:00-04:00 Tappan Hall History of Art Workshop / Seminar Penn State Books
Tappan Talks: Grant Mandarino, "Grosz's Haß or: The Art of Class Consciousness" (April 17, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/40563 40563-8625871@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Monday, April 17, 2017 4:00pm
Location: Tappan Hall
Organized By: History of Art

George Grosz's drawings of the 1920s are heralded for their incisive social commentary and economy of means. Yet they tend to be viewed today as the product of a misanthropic personality rather than a hatred born of political commitment. Originally conceived for an audience radicalized by the turmoil of the immediate post-WWI period and deployed in the pages of Communist-oriented publications, Grosz's images spoke to a moment of profound social polarization. Their ability to translate structural foes into indentifiable enemies made them, in the eyes of partisan critics, uniquely able to foster class conscious ways of seeing. This talk explores the development of an explicitly Communist form of graphic satire during the Weimar Republic and its relationship to the vicissitudes of partisan ideology by looking at how the sardonic vision of artists like Grosz became the very image of class hatred.

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 17 Apr 2017 11:12:45 -0400 2017-04-17T16:00:00-04:00 2017-04-17T18:00:00-04:00 Tappan Hall History of Art Lecture / Discussion George Grosz drawing
Helicon Presents: Outdoor Film Screening of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" (September 27, 2017 8:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/44229 44229-9900419@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, September 27, 2017 8:30pm
Location: Tappan Hall
Organized By: History of Art

Join Helicon, the History of Art undergraduate student organization, for an outdoor movie on Tappan Court (courtyard behind UMMA). Snacks and cushions will be provided.

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Film Screening Wed, 20 Sep 2017 11:37:25 -0400 2017-09-27T20:30:00-04:00 2017-09-27T22:30:00-04:00 Tappan Hall History of Art Film Screening Brazil
"Eating the Face of Christ, and Other Ways of Interacting with Medieval Manuscripts" (September 29, 2017 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/44800 44800-9980569@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, September 29, 2017 4:00pm
Location: Tappan Hall
Organized By: History of Art

As literacy grew during the three centuries before the printing press, people learned not only how to read, but also how to handle their manuscripts. Certain physical gestures that readers enacted with illuminated manuscripts—including kissing or laying hands on certain images, and rubbing out the faces of others—imparted a ritual significance to books. Just as our twenty-first-century culture of ever-smaller screens has created a set of gestures and habits that had not previously existed (typing with two thumbs, scrolling, clicking, tapping), reading manuscripts, which were increasingly available in the late Middle Ages, also gave people a new set of physical gestures. In this talk I consider the settings and circumstances by which readers learned to handle—and deface!—their manuscripts. I argue that people in authority, including priests, teachers, parents, and legal officials, touched books publicly to carry out rituals. In so doing, they inadvertently taught audiences how to handle books in highly physical ways. Cumulative wear in books testifies to how they were used and handled.

Kathryn Rudy is a renowned specialist in western medieval manuscripts who came to St Andrews in 2011 from the Royal Library in The Hague, where she had been Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts for several years. Much of her current research focuses on the social lives of late medieval books, including their customization for specific sets of owners and their physical use (for instance through ritual touching and kissing) by different groups of viewers. To determine how users interacted with their books she uses modern forensic tools and methods, such as densometers and UV light, which yield important information as to how often specific books were interacted with and which kinds of images or texts were singled out for particular tactile or oscular attention. Rudy has published five books, including Postcards on Parchment: The Social Lives of Medieval Books (Yale University Press, 2015), and Rubrics, Images and Indulgences in Late Medieval Netherlandish Manuscripts (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 19 Sep 2017 15:28:10 -0400 2017-09-29T16:00:00-04:00 2017-09-29T17:30:00-04:00 Tappan Hall History of Art Lecture / Discussion face of Christ rudy
Meetings of the Mind and Heart: A Conversation with Art Law Pioneer Scott Hodes (October 6, 2017 1:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45168 45168-10104528@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 6, 2017 1:30pm
Location: Tappan Hall
Organized By: History of Art

Internationally recognized for his pioneering contributions to the field of art law, including the art market, arts legislation, public art and his collaboration with Christo and Jeanne-Claude spanning over 40 years, Chicago attorney and U-M alumnus Scott Hodes shares his insights in conversation with Joan Kee, Associate Professor in the History of Art and the author of the forthcoming book, Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America. A founder of the Lawyers for the Creative Arts, Hodes was a trustee of the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, a consultant to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation and is the author of numerous books and articles on art and the law, including The Law of Art & Antiques.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 28 Sep 2017 10:44:51 -0400 2017-10-06T13:30:00-04:00 2017-10-06T15:00:00-04:00 Tappan Hall History of Art Lecture / Discussion Scott Hodes
Tappan Talks (October 6, 2017 3:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/42826 42826-9661766@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 6, 2017 3:30pm
Location: Tappan Hall
Organized By: History of Art

Allison Martino and Elizabeth Rauh, U-M History of Art doctoral candidates, gives short talks followed by Q & A.

Allison Martino, "Cloth, Chairs, and Key Chains:
The Re-Invention of Gye Nyame as a National Symbol of Ghana"

Adinkra is best known as a mourning cloth among the Akan of Ghana. Yet the role of adinkra in practices of remembrance extends far beyond funerals. Since at least the early 19th century, the Akan have printed adinkra cloth with distinct graphic designs evoking multiple meanings related to proverbs, historical narratives, and moral beliefs. Joining visual and verbal arts, adinkra is a dynamic form of communication that oscillates between expressing personal, cultural, and national identities. Ghanaians have innovated the form and meaning of adinkra over time to mark changing relationships to the past and envisions of future aspirations.

This presentation examines how Ghanaians have re-invented adinkra from a precolonial Akan cultural practice to represent national culture. Specifically, it analyzes the shifting meanings and contexts of gye Nyame, one of the most popular adinkra symbols. Often translated as “Except God,” gye Nyame is ubiquitous in Ghana today – ranging from plastic chairs and key chains to churches, currency notes, and tourist souvenirs. In tracing one motif across time and space, this talk reveals how Ghanaians have transformed gye Nyame and revitalized adinkra to resonate deeply in contemporary life.

Elizabeth Rauh, "The Colored Horizons of Karbala: Rafa Nasiri and Contemporary Printmaking in Late 1960s Iraq"

This presentation looks to Rafa Nasiri’s (1940-2013) printmaking practice and its early experimentation with printed Arabic script as the locus from which he stimulated and historicized the contemporary graphic arts movement in Iraq. Although conversant in pan-Arab and international socialist realist strategies from his training in printmaking at the Institute of Fine Arts in Beijing (1958-1963), Nasiri’s work in the 1960s offers experiments with global abstract expressionism and local religious prints. The need for educational programs and publications on the arts of Arab printing led Nasiri to travel around Iraq gathering popular printed textiles. Nasiri collected block printed (hafir al-tarsh) black and white calligraphic banners, which are carried in the streets during ‘Ashura and the holy month of Muharram, when mass pilgrimage processions overtake Shi‘i Muslim shrines in the cities of Karbala and Najaf. He then cut these popular prints and their pious poetic verses into separate cartouches and adhered them directly onto his abstract works.

Drawing upon communal rituals and public ceremonies moored Nasiri’s contemporary graphic art practice within Iraq’s historic printing technologies and social and religious practices. The collage-print series offered visual venerations of the Battle of Karbala (680 AD) as colorfully abstracted desert landscapes. Nestled within their references to that catastrophic landscape, the Shi‘i readymade prints associated Nasiri’s works with the ancient battle and its religious performances of dissent against injustice and oppression. By imprinting his compositions with prefabricated calligraphic texts, Nasiri elicited collective memories of Karbala and created a representational strategy counter to the new Baathist regime’s use of populist imagery. These works thus show how Rafa Nasiri marshaled Iraq’s historic printing technologies and social traditions to depict popular expressions of the metaphoric horizons of Karbala.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 28 Sep 2017 09:51:02 -0400 2017-10-06T15:30:00-04:00 2017-10-06T17:30:00-04:00 Tappan Hall History of Art Lecture / Discussion Tappan Hall
MEMS Lecture Series. Pisanello, Adrian Stokes, and the Image of the Threshold (October 20, 2017 3:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/43880 43880-9852279@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, October 20, 2017 3:00pm
Location: Tappan Hall
Organized By: Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS)

In his mind-bending early essay, “Pisanello” (1930), Adrian Stokes laid the groundwork for the project that claimed the “Quattro Cento” as the period that contained the beating heart of humanist culture. Central to the essay is an elaborate ekphrasis loosely evoking the arch fresco that Pisanello painted circa 1438 in Church of Sant’Anastasia in Verona. In constructing his own image Stokes both stages a passage and holds it in suspension, as a threshold. My paper explores the potential of Stokes’ threshold as a means of formulating a critical position capable of engaging the unruly, sometimes disturbing aspects of Pisanello’s art, those aspects that the central discourses of modernist art history found difficult to accommodate.

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 19 Sep 2017 13:31:22 -0400 2017-10-20T15:00:00-04:00 2017-10-20T17:00:00-04:00 Tappan Hall Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) Lecture / Discussion Scala Archive image
"Lebensraum on the Pacific: Anton Wagner and the Urban Geography of Los Angeles" (November 15, 2017 5:30pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/45710 45710-10265444@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, November 15, 2017 5:30pm
Location: Tappan Hall
Organized By: History of Art

In 1971 British architectural historian P. Reyner Banham reacquainted the scholarly world with German geographer Anton Wagner's 1935 book Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Form of the City of Two Million in Southern California. Based on extraordinary archival research, field work, and walks across the cityscape, Wagner's encyclopedic study seeks to explain how a small town in a desert region located far from major transport routes and markets become a major metropolis. No less fascinating than Wagner's geography of Los Angeles is his own biography, a tale of travel and international scholarly collaborations set against the background of German-American relations in the twentieth century.

Edward Dimendberg is Professor of Humanities and European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Harvard University Press, 2004) and Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and a co-editor(with Anton Kaes and Martin Jay) of The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (University of California Press, 1994). He is currently completing a monograph entitled The Los Angeles Project: Architectural and Urban Theories of the City of Exception and editing critical edition of Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Form of the City of Two Million in Southern California by Anton Wagner for publication by the Getty Research Institute. Dimendberg serves on the editorial boards of the Weimar and Now German Cultural Criticism and FlashPoints book series, on the Faculty Editorial Committee of the University of California Press, and on the Book Publication Committee of the Modern Language Association. He works with individual scholars and offers publishing workshops as the principal of Dimendberg Consulting LLC.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 26 Oct 2017 13:50:34 -0400 2017-11-15T17:30:00-05:00 2017-11-15T19:00:00-05:00 Tappan Hall History of Art Lecture / Discussion Wall Street between 8th and 9th streets in Downtown Los Angeles, 1933, photograph by Anton Wagner
Copyright, Image Use, and Permission to Publish (November 17, 2017 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/46159 46159-10407015@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 17, 2017 1:00pm
Location: Tappan Hall
Organized By: History of Art

An illustrative workshop in which you will learn how to interpret rights statements, Creative Commons licenses, what Fair Use covers, and what museums have open access images.

Students and faculty are encouraged to attend.

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Workshop / Seminar Wed, 25 Oct 2017 12:33:36 -0400 2017-11-17T13:00:00-05:00 2017-11-17T14:00:00-05:00 Tappan Hall History of Art Workshop / Seminar copyright workshop poster
History of Art Honors Symposium (November 30, 2017 6:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/44802 44802-9980571@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, November 30, 2017 6:00pm
Location: Tappan Hall
Organized By: History of Art

History of Art honors students give twenty-minute presentations followed by Q & A.

Thursday, November 30, 6:00-8:00 PM, 180 Tappan Hall

+Olivia Raykovich, “On the Street: Reality According to the Sartorialist”
+Ben Weil: “Envisioning Empire: City Personifications in the Calendar of 354”
+Emma Patterson: “Boucher’s Chinoiserie”
+Julia Pompilius, “Socialism, Feminism, and the Satiric Press in 19th Century France”

Friday, December 1, 3:00-5:00 PM, 180 Tappan Hall

+Allie Scholten: “Femme Fatale”
+Molly Leonard, “Kitty Fisher, Superstar”
+Katie: “Jeff Koons and Real Estate: A Love Story”

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Conference / Symposium Tue, 28 Nov 2017 13:17:21 -0500 2017-11-30T18:00:00-05:00 2017-11-30T20:00:00-05:00 Tappan Hall History of Art Conference / Symposium Honors Symposium 2017
History of Art Honors Symposium (December 1, 2017 6:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/44802 44802-9980572@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, December 1, 2017 6:00pm
Location: Tappan Hall
Organized By: History of Art

History of Art honors students give twenty-minute presentations followed by Q & A.

Thursday, November 30, 6:00-8:00 PM, 180 Tappan Hall

+Olivia Raykovich, “On the Street: Reality According to the Sartorialist”
+Ben Weil: “Envisioning Empire: City Personifications in the Calendar of 354”
+Emma Patterson: “Boucher’s Chinoiserie”
+Julia Pompilius, “Socialism, Feminism, and the Satiric Press in 19th Century France”

Friday, December 1, 3:00-5:00 PM, 180 Tappan Hall

+Allie Scholten: “Femme Fatale”
+Molly Leonard, “Kitty Fisher, Superstar”
+Katie: “Jeff Koons and Real Estate: A Love Story”

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Conference / Symposium Tue, 28 Nov 2017 13:17:21 -0500 2017-12-01T18:00:00-05:00 2017-12-01T20:00:00-05:00 Tappan Hall History of Art Conference / Symposium Honors Symposium 2017
Strengthening the Foundations of Art History. The Discipline’s Changing Assumptions and the Relevance of Neuroscience: A Reassessment (January 24, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/48144 48144-11180771@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, January 24, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tappan Hall
Organized By: History of Art

Each of the new assumptions adopted by successive generations of art historians, whether Positivist, Marxist, Structuralist, Post-Structuralist, Freudian, Feminist or Post-Colonialist, has illuminated some previously under-appreciated aspect of the production and consumption of art. Often those assumptions have included an explicit acknowledgement of the relevance of the principles governing the operation of the brain, as in the case of Winckelmann, Taine, Wölfflin, Warburg, Gombrich and Baxandall. Sometimes acknowledgement of such principles has only been implicit, as in earlier Positivist analyses of ‘influence’ or the more recent identification of recurrent patterns of mental behaviour by Freudians, Structuralists and Post-Structuralists. However, now that the structure of the brain and the principles governing its operation have been revealed with a new clarity by the latest technologies, all those earlier assumptions are in need of reassessment.
This lecture explores the relevance of the new neuroscientific knowledge to an understanding of the whole history of art, moving from the Chauvet Cave to the origins of Gothic architecture, and ending with reflections on the work of major twentieth century artists, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

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Lecture / Discussion Mon, 22 Jan 2018 15:52:09 -0500 2018-01-24T16:00:00-05:00 2018-01-24T17:00:00-05:00 Tappan Hall History of Art Lecture / Discussion St Denis Vault
Modern Postural Yoga in an Expanded Field (March 9, 2018 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/50180 50180-11656163@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, March 9, 2018 4:00pm
Location: Tappan Hall
Organized By: History of Art

"Modern Postural Yoga in an Expanded Field" a talk by History of Art faculty, Nachiket Chanchani

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Lecture / Discussion Fri, 16 Feb 2018 13:40:34 -0500 2018-03-09T16:00:00-05:00 2018-03-09T18:00:00-05:00 Tappan Hall History of Art Lecture / Discussion Nachiket