Symposium in Art History

The Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History, sponsored and shared by the departments of art and art history at The University of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, alternates campuses each year. 

The 18th Annual Graduate Student
Symposium in Art History
Friday, March 8, 2013, Gorgas Library Room 205,
The University of Alabama

4:00 p.m.
Keynote Speaker Andrew D. Hottle, associate professor of art history, Rowan University
“Why Are You Doing This? …and Other Questions about Rescuing Art from the Dustbin of History”

Andrew Hottle will discuss his decision to abandon the study of “Old Masters” in order to research the work of pioneering but less celebrated artists of the women’s movement. His talk combines humorous stories with a more serious message about the urgency and importance of preserving the art of our recent past.

Andrew D. Hottle is Associate Professor of Art History at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. He earned his Ph.D. at Temple University, where he studied European art of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Since 2005, his research has focused exclusively on the work of women artists. In addition to published articles on Peter Paul Rubens, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and John Everett Millais, he has written essays about Martha Nilsson Edelheit, Shirley Gorelick, June Blum, Sylvia Sleigh, and the Feminist Art Workers. He recently completed an extensive study of The Sister Chapel (1974-78), a collaborative installation of monumental paintings that commemorated “heroic women.” He is currently writing a monograph on Sylvia Sleigh and preparing the catalogue raisonné of her paintings.

For information about the symposium, check back here, or email rdobson@bama.ua.edu.

    

PAST SYMPOSIA

2012
The 17th Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History was held February 3, 2012, on the campus of the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Art and Art History, Sterne Library Room 174. The keynote speaker was Dr. Sarah Betzer, University of Virginia. The title of her lecture was “Ingres’ Shadows.” Photos here!

2011
The 16th Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History was held March 4, 2011, and hosted by UA’s Department of Art and Art History, on The University of Alabama campus, in Gorgas Library. Keynote speaker was Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The title of his talk was “The Condition of Music: The Aesthetic Movement and the Sister Arts.” View a slideshow of the event

RESEARCH PAPERS AND ABSTRACTS BY OUR GRADUATE STUDENTS

2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005

HISTORY
The Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History, sponsored and shared by the departments of art and art history at The University of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, alternates campuses each year. The event was begun in 1995 by faculty on both campuses to bring their students together to hear and be heard by eminent scholars working in the field of art history. Renowned scholars such as Paul Barolsky in the field of Italian Renaissance art, Allison Kettering in the field of Dutch Baroque art, and young, up-and-coming scholars like Michael Yonan, Krista Thompson, and Graham Boettcher, the William Cary Hulsey Curator of American Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art, have been keynote speakers.

2012 – Seventeeth Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History (slideshow)

• Bethany Bakane (UAB), “Romantic Dream Experiments”
• Mary Benefield (UA), “Making Connections: The Chastelaine de Vergi Fresco and French Medieval Caskets”
• Kelsey Frady (UAB), “Frances Benjamin Johnston: Imaging the New Woman through Portraiture”
• Nicole Jordan (UAB), “The Camera Never Lies: Early War Photography”
• Brandi Moore (UA), “Cindy Sherman: The Many Faces of Woman”
• Stephen Smith (UAB), “Elzie Crisler Segar’s Popeye the Sailor Man and the Elusive Original”
• Annie White (UAB), “From Propaganda to Agony: Different Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Battle Painting”
• Keynote Speaker – Sarah Betzer, University of Virginia, “Ingres’s Shadows”

2011 – Sixteenth Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History (slideshow)

• Mary Benefield (UA), “Gendered Spaces and Places: The Italian Renaissance Studiolo”
• Patricia Causey (UA), “Velázquez: In Search of the Radical”
• Nicole Jordan (UAB), “Depictions of Mythological Women in Nineteenth-Century Art as Contemporary Reflections”
• Linda S. E. Pierini (UAB), “Images Based on the Lotus Sutra: Objects of Worship by Shinran and Nichiren”
• Carrie Knopf (UAB), “The Bayou as Louisiana’s Last Frontier: Alfred Boisseau’s Indians on the Bayou, 1848”
• Kelsey Frady (UAB), “Lilly Martin Spencer and War Spirit at Home: Republican Motherhood in the Civil War”
• Angela Scott (UA), “The Leper Messiah: A Look into the Artistic Performance of Ziggy Stardust”
• Stephen Smith (UAB), “Betty vs. Veronica: American Archie-types”
• Keynote Speaker – Tim Barringer, Yale University, “The Condition of Music: The Aesthetic Movement and the Sister Arts”

2010 – Fifteenth Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History (slideshow)

• Nicole Jordan (UAB), “Giotto, Dane, and the Role of Usury in the Arena Chapel Frescos”
• Jared Hansen (UAB), “The Black Death and Trecento Art” A Case Study of the Triumph of Death Master”
• Jamie Boullt (UAB), “The Life and times of the Birmingham Museum of Art’s ‘Saint Peter’”
• Kelley Wockenfuss (UAB), “The Figure of the Horse in Caravaggio’s ‘Conversion of St. Paul’”
• Patricia Causey (UA), “Caravaggio: Older Than Dirt?”
• Carrie Knopf (UAB), “The Japanese Influence in Mary Cassatt’s ‘The Letter’”
• Mary K. Benefield (UA), “Sally Mann: Childhood Memories”
• Stephen Smith (UAB), “Howard Cruse and the New Narrative”
• Kristin Skees (UA School of Library and Information Studies) “Street Art and the Museum”
• Keynote Speaker – Elizabeth Chew, Curator, Monticello, “Inhabiting the Great Man’s House: Gender and Space at Monticello”

2009 – Fourteenth Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History (slideshow)

• Alicia Cook (UAB) “Ed Harris’s Pollock: A Personalized Portrayal of a Life”
• Emma Fox (UAB) “Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits: Art Biography and Autobiography”
• Jamie Boullt (UAB) “Bibliophile – the Library of Don Diego Hurtado De Mendoza”
• Carissa Rice (UAB) “Outsider Art and Its Leader of the Pack”
• Marylee D. Freeman (UA) “Ganguro: New Diaspora or Stereotypical Imitation? A Look at the Sub-Culture Behind Iona Rozeal Brown’s a3 Series”  click here to read abstract
• Jenny Blount (UAB) “The Black Male Nude: A Study of John Singer Sargent’s Thomas McKeller Nude“
• Laura Page (UA) “A Discussion of Gender as Performance in the Selected Photographs of Catherine Opie”
• Heather Levesque (UA) “A Moment in Time to Heal a Lifetime of Pain”
• Jaime Cantrell (UA) “No Objection: Exploring Abjection in Artistic Representations”
• Keynote Speaker – Dr. Krista Thompson (Northwestern University) “‘The Sound of Light’: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip Hop”

2008 – Thirteenth Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History

• Jason Anderson (UAB), “Analyzing the Chakrasamvara Mandala: The Relevance of Western Context of Eastern Art”
• Mary Anna Brown (UA), “The Pietà in Modern and Contemporary Memorial Images”
• Christina Dick (UAB), “Painting Shakespeare”
• Emma Fox (UAB) “Journey of the Queen of Sheba and Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba: Two Painted Panels by the Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni”
• Amber Henson (UAB), “The Photographs of Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond and the Iconography of Mental Illness”
• Andy Jones (UAB), “Orientalism and Exoticism in Gift Book Illustration
• Keynote Speaker – Michael Yonan (University of Missouri-Columbia) “The Game of Looking: Interpreting Franz Xaver Messerschmidt”

2007 – Twelfth Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History (slideshow)

• Rachel Dobson (UA) “Piety and Status in an Annunciation Tableau in a Fifteenth-Century Woman’s Book of Hours”
• Andrew Stuart Jones (UAB) “William Blake and the Discourse of Bookmaking”
• Mary Anna Hudson (UA) “Chocolate: A Social History Presented by an Examination of a Seventeenth-Century Spanish Still Life Painting”
• Lisa Brumfield (UAB) “Van Gogh’s Sunflower Series: Looking at the Overlooked”
• Valerie Piette (The University of Alabama) “Alberto Giacometti”  click here to read abstract
• Corey Dzenko (UA) “Anxiety, Action, and Ambiguity: Remediation within the Photographic Images of Kerry Skarbakka”
• Amber Henson (UAB) “Justine Cooper’s Rapt I and the Universal Portrait”
• Keynote Speaker – Graham Boettcher (Birmingham Museum of Art) “The Wages of War: National Conflict and ‘Domestic Violence’ in Nineteenth-Century American Art”

2006 – Eleventh Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History

• Krista Chandler (UAB) “The Undoing of Caravaggio’s Madonna of Loreto: An Iconographical and Socio-Historical Assessment”
• Nancy Howell (UAB) “Obsession for Perfection: The Art of Albert Pinkham Ryder”
• Harley Acres (UAB) “Comic Books, Cross-Dressing, and Appropriation: Japan’s Takarazuka Theater”
• Kate Russell (UAB) “Everett Shinn’s Theater Images Analyzed Through the Gaze and the Social Historical Context”
• Thomas M. Shelby (UA) “From Craftsman to Modernism: The Life and Works of Birmingham Architect D.O. Whilldin, 1881-1970″
• Adrian Smythies (UAB) “The Architecture And Iconography of the India Cultural Center and Temple, Eads, Tennessee”
• Corey Dzenko (UA) “Construction of the Decisive Moment”
• Melissa Jones (UAB) “Minkisi, Magic, and Mojo: The Art of Renée Stout”
• Stacey Taylor (UAB) “The Merits of Washing Machines: Pop Art and American Cold War Culture”
• Keynote Speaker - Dr. Andrea Pearson (Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania) “Gendered Subject, Gendered Spectator: Mary Magdalen in the Gaze of Margaret of York”

* * *

2005 – Tenth Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History

• April Wilson (UA) “Promotional Propaganda in the Renaissance: Striking a Pose in Portrait Medals”
• Megan Koza Mitchell (UA) “Igniting Communication: The Gun Powder Drawings of Cai Guo-Qiang”
• Stacey Taylor (UAB) “Earthworks and their Photographs: Problematics of Recording Earth Art”
• Adrian Smythies (UAB) ”Nicolas Poussin’s The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus“
• Katie Sullivan (UAB) ”Legitimacy Through Magnificence: The Consumption Strategies of Borso d’Este”
• Michele Forman (UAB) ”He Wrote Me: Chris Marker’s Use of Fictive Devices in the Documentary Film Sans Soleil“
• Keynote Speaker - Janice Leoshko (University of Texas at Austin) “Enlightenment, Ruins and Devotion”