Exhibition: Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World
From LACMA:
Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 6 November 2011 — 29 January 2012
Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City, 6 July — 7 October 2012
"The Apparition of San Miguel del Milagro to Diego Lázaro," first half of the 18th century (Museo Universitario Casa de los Muñecos, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico)
Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World examines the significance of indigenous peoples within the artistic landscape of colonial Latin America. The exhibition offers a comparative view of the two principal viceroyalties of Spanish America—Mexico and Peru—from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Under colonial rule, Amerindians were not a passive or homogenous group but instead commissioned art for their communities and promoted specific images of themselves as a polity. By taking into consideration the pre-Columbian (Inca and Aztec) origins of these two vast geopolitical regions and their continuities and ruptures over time, Contested Visions offers an arresting perspective on how art and power intersected in the Spanish colonial world. The exhibition is divided into themes:
Contested Visions
Tenochtitlan and Cuzco Pre-Columbian Antecedents
Ancient Styles in the New Era
Conquest and New World Orders
The Devotional Landscape and the Indian as Good Christian
Indian Festivals and Sacred Rituals
Memory, Genealogy, and Land
A checklist of the exhibition is available here»
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Exhibition catalogue: Ilona Katzew, ed., Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 320 pages, ISBN: 9780300176643, $70.
Contested Visions offers a comparative view of the two principal viceroyalties of Spanish America: Mexico and Peru. Spanning developments from the 15th to the 19th century, this ambitious book looks at the many ways and contexts in which indigenous peoples were represented in art of the early modern period—by colonial artists, European artists, and themselves. More than two hundred works of art, including paintings, sculptures, illustrated books, maps, codices, manuscripts, and other materials such as textiles, keros, and feather works, are reproduced in full-color illustrations, demonstrating the rich variety of these artistic approaches.
A collection of essays by an international team of distinguished scholars in the field uncovers the different meanings and purposes behind these depictions of native populations of the Americas. These experts explore
the role of the visual arts in negotiating a sense of place in late pre-Columbian and colonial Latin America. They address a range of important topics, such as the construct of the Indian as a good Christian; how Amerindians drew on their pre-Columbian past to stake out a place within the Spanish body politic; their participation in festive rites; and their role as artists. Lavishly illustrated, this ambitious book provides a compelling and original framework by which to understand the intersection of vision and power in the Spanish colonial world.
Ilona Katzew is curator and co-department head of Latin American art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
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Symposium: Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2-4 December 2011
LACMA and UCLA are co-sponsoring a major international three-day symposium in conjunction with the special exhibition Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, which brings together thirty of the most distinguished scholars in the field from Mexico, South America, Europe, and the United States.
Free, no reservations | Printable Schedule | View Abstracts
Exhibition: Collective Creativity in 18th-Century Japanese Painting
From The Princeton University Art Museum:
Multiple Hands: Collective Creativity in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Painting
Princeton University Art Museum, 8 October 2011 — 22 January 2012
Curated by Xiaojin Wu
The study of individual artists has dominated modern art history, to the neglect of the collective creativity that contributed to countless important works of art. In Japan, as in many other cultures, collective creativity played—and still plays—a significant role in art-making. The exhibition Multiple Hands: Collective Creativity in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Painting, through a selection of paintings from the Princeton University Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a private collection, provides a thoughtful consideration of the collective art-making process by focusing on two kinds of collective painting practices—workshop and collaborative— in eighteenth-century Japan.
Kano Tsunenobu, "Four Accomplishments," ca. 1700. Hanging silk scroll, 224.8 x 190.5 cm.
Interrelated but not identical, both practices involved multiple artists in the production of single works. In a workshop system, the head of the studio designed the composition of a painting, often a large-format work, and his assistants executed the details and applied colors. Only the master’s name was signed, however, making the presence of multiple hands in the paintings’ creation sometimes difficult to discern. Representative of the Kano school workshop—a prodigious hereditary apprentice system organized by generations of the Kano family from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century—is a pair
of large hanging scrolls, Four Accomplishments.
Kano Tsunenobu, "Four Accomplishments," ca. 1700. Hanging silk scroll, 224.8 x 190.5 cm.
Signed by the head of the workshop, Kano Tsunenobu (1636–1713), the two paintings exhibit the brushwork styles of more than one artist, particularly evident in the background. This signals the involvement of multiple workshop members in producing Four Accomplishments. Another important feature of the Kano workshop operation is the use of style manuals: workshop assistants had limited access to original paintings, so copies made by the head of the workshop served as style manuals that the assistants studied and relied on in collectively producing one work. Consequently, certain
motifs in a similar style are used repeatedly in different works, as
demonstrated by a painting of a long-tailed bird by Kano Tsunenobu
and a similar passage in his Four Accomplishments. (more…)
Call for Papers: Histories of British Art
Histories of British Art, 1660-1735: Reconstruction and Transformation
King’s Manor, University of York, 20-22 September 2012
Proposals due 2 March 2012
We welcome proposals from graduate students, academics working in History of Art and other Humanities disciplines, curators and all others engaged in research on the field. The conference is a key output of a major AHRC-funded project on art of the period, Court, Country, City: British Art, 1660-1735. This project is ran in collaboration between Tate Britain and the University of York, and led by Professor Mark Hallett (York), Professor Nigel Llewellyn (Tate), and Dr. Martin Myrone (Tate).
Conference costs will be heavily subsidized thanks to AHRC funding, however spaces for the conference are limited and priority will be given to speakers. A number of graduate student bursaries will be available. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to claudine.vanhensbergen@tate.org.uk
A PDF of the poster is available here»
Call for Papers: Knowledge in a Box
Knowledge in a Box: How Mundane Things Shape Knowledge Production
Kavala, Greece, 26-29 July 2012
Proposals due by 15 January 2012
Organizers: Susanne Bauer (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany), Maria Rentetzi (National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece), and Martina Schlünder (Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen, Germany)
We invite proposals from scholars in the history of science, technology, and medicine, science and technology studies, the humanities, visual and performing arts, museum and cultural studies and other related disciplines for a workshop on the uses and meanings of mundane things such as boxes, packages, bottles, and vials in shaping knowledge production. In keeping with the conference theme, we are asking contributors to include specific references to the ways in which boxes have played a role—commercial, epistemic or otherwise—in their own particular disciplinary frameworks.
Boxes have always supported the significance of the objects they contained, allowing specific activities to arise. In the hands of natural historians and collectors, boxes functioned as a means of organizing their knowledge throughout the eighteenth century. They formed the material bases of the cabinet or established collection and accompanied the collector from the initial gathering of natural specimens to their final display. As “knowledge chests” or “magazining tools” the history of box-like containers also go back to book printing and the typographical culture. The artists’ boxes of the early nineteenth century were used to store the paraphernalia of a new fashionable trend. In the late nineteenth century the box became the pharmacist’s laboratory and a device for standardizing and controlling dosage of oral remedies. In the twentieth century radiotherapy the box was elevated to a multifunctional tool working as a memory aid to forgetful patients or as “knowledge package” that predetermined dosages, included equipment, and ready-made radium applicators.
Focusing on medicine, boxes have played a crucial role since the eighteenth century when doctors ought to bring instruments to their patient’s house for surgical or obstetrical interventions. In modern operating rooms boxes organize the workflow and build an essential part of the aseptical regime. Late twentieth century biomedical scientists store tissue samples in large-scale biobanks, where samples contained in straws are placed in vials, then the vials in boxes which in turn are stacked up in “elevators.” This storage system facilitates retrieval with barcodes, indexing each individual sample so that additional variables can be retrieved from a database. Thus the container and its content are tied up in a close epistemic and material relationship. (more…)
Exhibition: Daniel Sarrabat
From the Centre des monuments nationaux website:
Daniel Sarrabat (1666-1743) l’éclat retrouvé
Monastère royal de Brou, Bourg-en-Bresse (near Lyon), 15 October 2011 — 29 January 2012
Curated by François Marandet
Cette exposition révèle l’art d’un des plus grands peintre d’histoire à Lyon et dans sa région, pendant la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle : Daniel Sarrabat (1666-1743). Alors que le style rocaille triomphe en France, il poursuit l’idéal artistique de Nicolas Poussin, et montre combien la peinture d’histoire s’est maintenue à Lyon et dans sa région depuis la disparition de Jacques Stella (1596-1657) et Thomas Blanchet (1614-1689).
Cette toute première rétrospective rassemble près de 50 œuvres de l’artiste, dont 36 tableaux. Sont présentées des réalisations inédites aux cotés d’œuvres de collections privées, notamment le décor mythique de l’Hôtel de Sénozan, à Lyon, complété par un groupe de tableaux provenant du patrimoine religieux de la région, avec le cycle illustrant l’histoire de Marie-Madeleine de l’église de Thoissey. Le parcours de l’exposition restitue les étapes successives de la carrière de Daniel Sarrabat : l’époque de son apprentissage à Paris, le séjour à
Rome (1685-1694), son implantation à Lyon en 1695, jusqu’à sa consécration
(1716-1732).
Additional information is available from the exhibition brochure (PDF).
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Catalogue: François Marandet, Daniel Sarrabat, 1666-1748 (Saint-Étienne: I.A.C. Éditions d’Art, 2011), 128 pages, ISBN: 9782916373478, $42.50. [Available from Artbooks.com]
Call for Papers: Design History
Design/History/Revolution
The New School, New York, 27-28 April 2012
Proposals due by 7 December 2011
Keynote speaker: Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture & Design, MoMA
Whether by providing agitprop for revolutionary movements, an aesthetics of empire, or a language for numerous avant-gardes, design has changed the world. But how? Why? And under what conditions? We propose a consideration of design as an historical agent, a contested category, and a mode of historical analysis. This interdisciplinary conference aims to explore these questions and to open up new possibilities for understanding the relationships among design, history and revolution. Casting a wide net, we define our terms broadly. We seek 20-minute papers that examine the roles of design in generating, shaping, remembering or challenging moments of social, political, economic, aesthetic, intellectual, technological, religious, and other upheaval. We consider a range of historical periods (ancient, pre-modern, early modern, modern, post- and post-post-modern) and geographical locations (“West,” “East,” “North,” South,” and contact zones between these constructed categories). We examine not only designed objects (e.g., industrial design, decorative arts, graphic design, fashion) but also spaces (e.g., architecture, interiors, landscapes, urban settings) and systems (e.g., communications, services, governments). And we welcome a diversity of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary approaches.
This conference brings together scholars from the humanities, sciences, and social sciences with designers, artists, and other creators. We hope not only to present multiple methodological approaches but also to foster conversations across traditional spatial, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries.
We list some possible subject areas, and encourage you to propose others:
- Design and political / cultural / economic revolution….. Design and technological revolution…. Design and the print revolution
- Design and government…. Design and social movements…. Design and surveillance…. Design and empire….
- Design and historicity…. Design and the sacred……Design and the avant-garde…..
- Design and memory…. Design and philosophy/philosophies of design…. Design and literature / literature of design….
- Design and the everyday…. Design and consumerism… Design and education….
- Designed landscapes…. Design and the environment…Design and the city….
- Design and science … Design and cybernetics ….
Please submit a 250-word abstract (maximum) and 1-page CV to: designhistoryrevolution@gmail.com
Laura Auricchio, Associate Professor of Art History and Chair of Humanities, The New School, NYC
Conference: Art Against the Wall
From The Courtauld:
Art against the Wall
The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, London, 19 November 2011
Organized by Thomas Balfe and Jocelyn Anderson
Art against the Wall is the third symposium of The Courtauld’s Early Modern department. The symposium will provide an occasion for established and emerging scholars to present and discuss their research together. This one-day symposium will explore the relationship between walls and art in early modern visual culture. During the period 1550-1850 the interplay between work and wall became increasingly complex as art objects began to pull away from the walls which had previously defined them. The enduring association between artistic skill and craft production meant that many art works were often still regarded as elements in overarching decorative schemes; paintings installed in eighteenth-century English domestic interiors, for example, continue to be described as part of the ornamentation, even as the furniture, of a room. Conversely, walls now had the power to redefine art works, giving them a new meaning through a new context; thus, in late sixteenth-century debates on the status of the religious image, walls – which map the division between sacred and secular space – take on crucial importance. Yet the wall could also become art, as the numerous examples of trompe l’oeil wall illustration to be found in seventeenth-century architecture and garden design suggest. Taking as its point of departure Derrida’s insight that there can be no clear separation of ergon (work) from parergon (not-the-work, ‘wall’), the symposium will attempt to investigate the rich questions raised by the phenomenon of art against the wall.
To book a place: £15 (£10 students) Please send a cheque made payable to ‘Courtauld Institute of Art’ to: Research Forum Events Co-ordinator, Research Forum, The Courtauld Institute of Art , Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN, clearly stating that you wish to book for the ‘Art against the Wall’ symposium. For credit card bookings call 020 7848 2785 (9.30 – 18.00, weekdays only). For further information, send an email to ResearchForumEvents@courtauld.ac.uk
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P R O G R A M M E
9:30 Registration
10:00 Introduction – Jocelyn Anderson and Thomas Balfe (The Courtauld Institute of Art)
SESSION 1: Work, Wall and Space: How Does Art Fit In?
10:15 Rodrigo Cañete (The Courtauld Institute of Art), Velazquez’s Wall Hermeneutics or How Only His Role as Palace Superintendent Can Allow Us to Unlock The Meaning of His Paintings
10:35 Dario Donetti (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), ‘Quattordici cappelle a canto al muro’: Some Architectural Issues Concerning Santa Croce in Florence under Cosimo I de’ Medici
10:55 Catherine McCormack (UCL), Caravaggio’s Madonna of the Pilgrims or Just Another Brick in the Wall?
11:15 Discussion
11:30 COFFEE/TEA BREAK
SESSION 2: Domestic Displays: Art in London Residences
12:00 Adriano Aymonino (Getty Research Institute), The Integration of the Arts in British Neoclassical Interiors: Aesthetics and Meaning
12:20 Susannah Brooke (Queens’ College, Cambridge), Issues of Display: a Private Picture Collection in London, c. 1795-1820
12:40 Gerry Abalone (Tate), Painting, Frame and Setting
13:00 Discussion
13:15 LUNCH (not provided)
SESSION 3: The Wall Transformed: Monumental Illusionism
15:15 Meriel May Geolot (independent scholar), Unravelling the Tapestries: The Gobelin’s Tentures de Boucher in the Late Georgian English Country Home
14:35 Marika T. Knowles (Yale University), Pierrot and the Wall-Mask, or How the Wall Became a Character
14:55 Kristina Kleutghen (Washington University, St Louis), Contradictions of Illusion and Immateriality: Psycho-Pictorial Disjunctions in Early Modern Chinese Wall Paintings
15:15 Discussion
15:30 COFFEE/TEA BREAK
SESSION 4: Ergon/Parergon: Grand Schemes in Palaces
16:00 Kevin Childs (British School at Rome), ‘…piena di grazia, di bellissime fantasie e di molte capricciose…’ Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling and the Wall that is no Wall in late sixteenth-century Roman Fresco Decoration
16:20 Francesco Freddolini (Getty Research Institute), The Eloquent Walls: Stucco Decoration and Display of Art in Seventeenth-Century Rome
16:40 Friederike Drinkuth (Stately Palaces and Gardens Mecklenburg) and Tobias Locker (Technische Universität, Berlin), Reconsidering the Frederican Rococo: The Discovery of Mirow Palace
17:00 Discussion and concluding remarks
17:30 RECEPTION
Abstracts of the talks are available as a PDF file here»
Call for Papers: Graduate Student Symposium in Vancouver
Graduate Student Symposium in Vancouver: The Unseen
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 30-31 March 2012
Proposals due 6 January 2012
The Unseen proposes a blind engagement with the visual. While traditional art historical practice assumes the task of making the art object or artifact whole through observation, description, and interpretation, this symposium instead sets out to embrace a trace that may be fractured, destroyed, moved, translated, historicized, censored, extolled or ignored. The 31st annual University of British Columbia Art History, Visual Art and Theory Graduate Symposium will attend to a critical reassessment of what resists representation, description, articulation or documentation. We seek innovative submissions that investigate and conceptualize the notion of the unseen as it intersects with historical, perceptual, political and philosophical claims concerning the production and circulation of meanings and forms of knowledge.
Unseeing describes both a category of historical analysis and a critical action. Recent studies on visuality and visual culture have asserted the primacy of the visual as a “social fact” constituting historical and contemporary modes of perception and lived experience. By challenging what is or has once been at the boundaries of visuality and visibility, the unseen alternately aims to grasp the unseizable and its potentiality as a form of non-knowledge. This methodological reevaluation further underscores the historiographical problematic of the unwritten or the unwriteable, discerning what has been occluded from or has escaped being written into histories of the visual, or what has become embedded in and normative of others.
Current and recently graduated Master of Arts, Masters of Fine Arts, Doctoral and Post Doctoral scholars are encouraged to submit an abstract of no more than 300 words by January 6, 2011. Include your full name, affiliation and contact information and send your abstract to gradsymp@interchange.ubc.ca.
The 31st Annual AHVAT Graduate Symposium includes a two-day symposium on March 30 and 31, 2012, and a concurrent exhibition, dates to be confirmed. For more information please visit: http://www.ahva.ubc.ca.
Francesco Vezzoli Transforms Hip-Hop Star into Rococo Icons
From the November 2011 issue of W Magazine:
Agents Provocateurs: Nicki Minaj Transformed by Francesco Vezzoli
Klaus Biesenbach interviews Francesco Vezzoli
Francesco Vezzoli (styled by Edward Enninful), "Rococo Portrait of Nicki Minaj as Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour," 2011
In the space of two years, hip-hop star Nicki Minaj has made the leap from little known Lil Wayne protégée to object of national obsession, via a number-one album, seven singles simultaneously on the Billboard Hot 100—a first for any artist—and a series of scene-stealing cameos, including an epic verse on the Jay-Z and Kanye West track “Monster.” Along the way, she’s established a zany look (all neon, all the time), introduced countless alter egos, and become the first female rapper since Missy Elliott to be cast not as a sidekick but as a bona fide swaggering leading lady.
Powerful female figures have always been a draw for the artist Francesco Vezzoli, who has produced a trailer for a mock remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula featuring Courtney Love and made a fake-fragrance commercial starring Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams. Through film, performance, and images often enhanced with embroidery, the 40-year-old Italian links contemporary icons to historic representations of women in art. He transformed Eva Mendes into Bernini’s masterpiece The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa for his Prada Foundation installation at this year’s Venice Biennale and, for MOCA’s 30th-anniversary gala in 2009, he reimagined Lady Gaga as a latter-day Ballets Russes star. Now Vezzoli has remade Minaj as an 18th-century courtesan. To discuss the project, he sat down for a lively tête-à-tête with Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA PS1, who is organizing a touring retrospective of Vezzoli’s work that will land at the New York venue in 2013.
BIESENBACH (W Magazine): How have you transformed [Nicki Minaj]?
VEZZOLI: In her performances, Minaj makes very explicit and challenging use of her beauty and her body, so I thought of comparing her to some of the most famous courtesans in history: the Marquise de Montespan, Comtesse du Barry, Madame de Pompadour, and Madame Rimsky-Korsakov. My idea was to reproduce four iconic portraits of some of the most fascinating females of the past in a series starring an American pop-culture role model. We tried to re-create those original portraits using similar furniture, props, and clothing, à la Visconti. Luckily enough, the result came out as surreal as it could be, just as I wished. . . .
To see the slideshow of Minaj in the guise of eighteenth-century women of the court, read the full interview here»
Exhibition: Mexican Miracle Paintings at the Wellcome
From the Wellcome Collection:
Infinitas Gracias: Mexican Miracle Paintings
Wellcome Collection, London, 6 October 2011 — 26 February 2012
Mexican votives are small paintings, usually executed on tin roof tiles or small plaques, depicting the moment of personal humility when an individual asks a saint for help and is delivered from disaster and sometimes death. Infinitas Gracias will feature over 100 votive paintings drawn from five collections held by museums in and around Mexico City and two sanctuaries located in mining communities in the Bajío region to the north: the city of Guanajuato and the distant mountain town of Real de Catorce. Together with images, news reports, photographs, devotional artefacts, film and interviews, the exhibition will illustrate the depth of the votive tradition in Mexico.
Usually commissioned from local artists by the petitioner, votive paintings tell immediate and intensely personal stories, from domestic dramas to revolutionary violence, through which a markedly human history of communities and their culture can be read. The votives displayed in Infinitas Gracias date from the 18th century to the present day. Over this period, thousands of small paintings came to line the walls of Mexican churches as gestures of thanksgiving, replacing powerful doctrine-driven images of the saints with personal and direct pleas for help. The votives are intimate records of the tumultuous dramas of everyday life – lightning strikes, gunfights, motor accidents, ill-health and false imprisonment – in which saintly intervention was believed to have led to survival and reprieve.
Infinitas Gracias will explore the reaction of individuals at the moment of crisis in which their strength of faith comes into play. The profound influence of these vernacular paintings, and the artists and individuals who painted them, can be seen in the work of such figures as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, who were avid collectors. The contemporary legacy of the votive ritual will be present in the exhibition through a wall covered with modern-day offerings from one church in Guanajuato: a paper shower of letters, certificates, photographs, clothing and flowers, through which the tradition of votive offering continues today. The sanctuaries at Guanajuato and Real de Catorce remain centres of annual pilgrimage, attracting thousands of people to thank and celebrate their chosen saints.
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