Marin R. Sullivan, ABD, University of Michigan (SMU M.A. in Art History)
| Date: | Friday, January 28, 2011 |
| Time: | 4:30 PM |
| Location: | Meadows Museum – Smith Auditorium |
| Cost: | FREE |
| Description: | Events, Environments, and Experiments: Sculpture and Photography in Italy, 1962-1972 |
In the 1960s sculpture became a vital domain for radical experimental practices. Most art historical narratives paint this moment as short-lived, quickly overtaken by the rise of dematerialization and postmodernism – tendencies ill-suited to sculpture’s inescapable materiality. This lecture will focus on a selection of sculptural projects by international artists working in Italy between 1962 and 1972 as a means to examine how the terms of sculpture were being transformed. Though diverse in form and intent, these projects were highly collaborative events that increasingly called attention to the role of photography and to new modes of installation. Too often overlooked as mere documentary supplement, photography became a crucial component of this radical reformulation of sculpture.
Dr. Jack Greenstein
| Date: | Friday, February 25, 2011 |
| Time: | 4:30 PM |
| Location: | Meadows Museum – Smith Auditorium |
| Cost: | FREE |
| Description: | Artistic Invention and the Iconography of the Creation of Eve in Early Renaissance Italy |
The Creation of Eve raised special problems for Italian artists of the early Renaissance. The traditional iconography with Eve rising weightlessly from Adam’s side, alive and moving in a half-formed state, was not compatible with their commitment to rendering the human figure as an organic weight-laden body whose actions originate from within.
This lecture looks at how four relief sculptors revised the traditional iconography to accommodate a naturalistic Eve. All were famous artists working on important public commissions, but only the composition of Jacopo della Quercia for the main portal of San Petronio, Bologna, became a standard iconographical option for later artists, widely adopted even before it was enshrined on the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo.
Dr. Alessandra Comini, SMU University Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita
| Date: | Thursday, March 24, 2011 |
| Time: | 6:00 PM |
| Location: | SMU Dallas Hall – McCord Auditorium |
| Cost: | FREE |
| Description: | Igniting Scholastic Feminism in the 1960s and Beyond |
As a young assistant professor of art history at Columbia University in the turbulent 1960s, when the university was brought to a standstill by student strikes, Alessandra Comini confronted the sexism dimension of her own discipline. Rebelling, she dared to give equal time to Rosa Bonheur when teaching about Realism and Gustave Courbet. Along with Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, she was among the first scholars to apply revisionist principles to teaching and publishing. When she and fellow feminist Eleanor Tufts arrived at SMU in 1974, quiet but jolting shock waves were felt round the university and beyond. Now two generations of students are still making waves as they work to right the balance.
Dr. Julian Stallabrass, Reader at the Courtauld Institute in London
| Date: | Friday, April 8, 2011 |
| Time: | 6:00 PM |
| Location: | Meadows Museum – Smith Auditorium |
| Cost: | FREE |
| Description: | Writer, curator and photographer, Julian Stallabras works on political aspects of the globalised contemporary art world, postwar British art, the history of photography and new media art. He is the author of Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, (1996); the co-editor of Ground Control: Technology and Utopia (1997), Occupational Hazard: Critical Writing on Recent British Art, (1998), and Locus Solus, a book about the Newcastle-based artist-led curatorial organisation Locus+. |