The University of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham Joint Program for the MA in Art History announces a call for papers for its 24th Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History. This year, the symposium will be hosted by the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Alabama on Friday, March 1, 2019 and will take place on The University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa. The symposium’s keynote speaker will be Dr. Catherine Zuromskis, Assistant Professor of Fine Art in the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology. MA students in all fields of art history are invited to submit paper proposals on completed research as well as works in progress. Presentations are limited to 20 minutes and will be followed by discussion. Please submit a 250-word abstract and a one-page c.v. on or before Friday, December 14, 2018 (by e-mail) to both: Dr. Lucy Curzon (lcurzon@ua.edu) and Dr. Cathleen Cummings (ccummings@uab.edu). Notification of acceptance will be made by January 7, 2019. Please do not hesitate to contact Dr. Curzon or Dr. Cummings with questions. In addition, a call for Undergraduate Poster Session Proposals is also announced. To encourage the work of emerging scholars in the discipline, the faculty of the Joint Program invite undergraduate art history majors to submit proposals for presentations of senior-level or thesis work in a poster session, to be held during the day of the symposium. Proposals should consist of a 250-word abstract regarding the project and be accompanied by a letter of recommendation from the student’s advisor or major professor. Please submit completed proposals Friday, December 14, 2018, (by e-mail) to Dr. Tanja Jones (tljones10@ua.edu). Notification of acceptance will be made by January 7, 2019. Please do not hesitate to contact Dr. Jones with questions. Every year, the Joint Program for the MA in Art History presents the Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History, which provides a forum for the presentation of graduate student research drawn from all areas of art history, as well as an undergraduate poster session. The symposium also features a keynote lecture by a leading scholar of art history. Previous speakers have included Paul Barolsky (Italian Renaissance art), Allison Kettering (Dutch Baroque art), Michael Yonan (18th-19th century European art), and Graham Boettcher, the William Cary Hulsey Curator of American Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art.
Curator To Discuss Aboriginal Art Exhibition
Tuscaloosa – Contemporary Australian Aboriginal art is one of the most significant art movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, according to Anne Keener, curator of the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art's upcoming exhibition, Pattern Thinking: Australian Aboriginal Art from the Collection of Tom and Cynthia Schneider. Keener will speak about the exhibition and the art on Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018 at 3:30 p.m., in Lloyd Hall 226. Join us for a reception after the lecture from 5-7 p.m., in Garland Hall 103. The exhibition runs Oct. 11 – Nov. 16. “The indigenous Australian paintings express stories of patterns of interrelation of the forces of all of life, laid down by creator beings,” Keener said. She will talk about the Aboriginal artists in this exhibition and the ideas behind their work. Keener, who received her MFA in painting and drawing, and her BA in comparative studies/religious studies from The Ohio State University, said that she learned the term “pattern thinking” while listening to a talk by the influential Aboriginal elder David Mowaljarlai. Pattern thinking embodies the interconnectedness of all life that the indigenous people of Australia see in the world around them. Mowaljarlai said, “Indigenous elders from all over Australia, from the top end down to the cold country, believe that culture is the lifeblood of the people – the source of inner strength in an individual.” Pattern thinking, an integral part of indigenous Australian culture, according to Mowaljarlai and other Aboriginal leaders, contributes to a balanced life and good mental health and creates and encourages cross cultural dialogue. Image credit left: Johnny Possum Tjapaltjarri, Possum Dreaming, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 24.4 x 23.6 inches. Image credit right: Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Snake and Kangaroo Dreaming, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 32 x 51.9 inches The Sarah Moody Gallery of Art is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Art and Art History. For more information, contact the gallery at (205) 348-1891. Lloyd Hall is a five-minute walk from the Campus Drive Parking Deck and Bus Hub on Hackberry Lane. Information about visitor parking is available here: http://bamaparking.ua.edu/visitor-information/.
Lucy Curzon Named A&S Leadership Board Faculty Fellow
Dr. Lucy Curzon, associate professor of art history, was named to a three-year term as a College of Arts and Sciences Leadership Board Faculty Fellow. The Leadership Board of the College of Arts and Sciences recognizes its most promising or most accomplished teacher/scholars, individuals early in their careers who demonstrate exceptional promise or faculty members who have brought distinction to the College and University throughout their careers. Curzon will receive a $5,000/year stipend for three years. Curzon teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on modern and contemporary art, and contemporary practice and community engagement. Her current research focuses on national identity and visual culture, particularly relating to the interwar, wartime and early postwar periods in Great Britain. She has also published on contemporary portrait painting. In 2018, Curzon received the Historians of British Artist Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period after 1800 for her book, “Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain” (Routledge, 2017). For more information about UA Department of Art and Art History programs, click here: https://art.ua.edu/academics/.
UA Professor Researches Medieval Cathedral Sculpture
In medieval art, it is rare to know the name of an artist, but the names of the clergy who managed payment for construction projects are often in the records. Thanks to a UA College Academy of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity (CARSCA) grant, this past June, Assistant Professor Dr. Jennifer Feltman traveled to Paris and Amiens, France, to study the books read and written by the clergy of the Cathedral of Amiens for a new project that proposes a way to understand how sculptural programs were designed. “I primarily consulted twelfth- and early-thirteenth century biblical manuscripts, but also some sermons and commentary—all of these manuscripts are unillustrated, which may seem a strange source for an art historian. But I was studying them not only for their textual context, but also for the layout of text and commentary on each folio. Bibles of the twelfth century were often organized into columns with a main text and commentary in the margins. It is my supposition that the façade of Amiens preserves a pattern of thought, shaped by the layout of texts; it also brings together a variety of texts available in the cathedral library. So, while sculptures certainly aren’t the same as a manuscript of the Bible, they might be called a stone Biblia, using the original sense of the word for Bible—a collection of texts.” Dr. Feltman is currently completing a book manuscript, Moral Theology and the Cathedral: Sculptures of the Last Judgment in Thirteenth-Century France. The book illuminates the ways in which Parisian moral theology was disseminated through clerical networks across the dioceses of France and made visible in sculptural programs at the cathedrals of Chartres, Paris, Reims and Amiens. With the support of the NEH, she has developed a companion website: Portals of the Last Judgment - Chartres, Paris, Reims, Amiens. Dr. Feltman teaches courses in medieval, Early Christian, Byzantine, and ancient art history. For more information about UA Department of Art and Art History programs, go here: https://art.ua.edu/academics/.
Renowned Scholar To Speak on Apocalyptic Images
Tuscaloosa. — Explore the visionary landscape of the medieval Book of Revelation with one of its eminent scholars, Dr. Richard K. Emmerson. Dr. Emmerson will deliver a public lecture, “Apocalypse Illuminated,” on Tuesday, September 11, 2018 at 6:30 pm in Smith Hall 205 on UA campus. Richard K. Emmerson is Dean Emeritus of the School of Liberal Arts at Manhattan College, former Professor and Chair of Art History at Florida State University, and currently Visiting Distinguished Professor at FSU. He has served as Deputy Director of Fellowships at the National Endowment for the Humanities and as Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America, and has edited Speculum, Studies in Iconography, and Traditio. A Fellow of the Medieval Academy, he received the Medieval Academy Award for Excellence in Teaching Medieval Studies in 2009. Dr. Emmerson’s research focuses on medieval apocalypticism and its representation in art, drama, and visionary poetry. He has published seven books, including Antichrist in the Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Apocalypticism, Art, and Literature (1981), The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature (1992, with Ronald B. Herzman), and The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (1993, with Bernard McGinn). His most recent book, studying the seven-hundred year history of medieval Apocalypse manuscripts, is Apocalypse Illuminated: The Visual Exegesis of Revelation in Medieval Manuscripts, published by Pennsylvania State University Press in 2018. He has authored more than fifty articles, many studying word-image relationships in medieval illustrated manuscripts. Recent essays include “On the Threshold of the Last Days: Negotiating Image and Word in the Apocalypse of Jean de Berry,” in Exploring the Threshold of Medieval Visual Culture (2012); “Visualizing the Visionary: John in his Apocalypse,” in Looking Beyond: Visions, Dreams and Insights in Medieval Art and Thought (2010); “Framing the Apocalypse: The Performance of John’s Life in the Trinity Apocalypse,” in Visualizing Medieval Performance (2008); “Visualizing the Vernacular: Middle English in Early Fourteenth-Century Bilingual and Trilingual Manuscript Illustrations,” in Studies in Manuscript Illumination: A Tribute to Lucy Freeman Sandler (2008); “A ‘Large Order of the Whole’: Intertextuality and Interpictoriality in the Hours of Isabella Stuart,” Studies in Iconography (2007); and “The Representation of Antichrist in Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias: Image, Word, Commentary, and Visionary Experience,” Gesta (2002). Image credit: Silos Apocalypse: Northern Spain, c.1100, British Library Add. MS 11695, ff.147v-148. Richard K. Emmerson's lecture is part of the Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series, sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History, the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Continuing Studies at The University of Alabama. To see our past and future visiting artists and scholars, go here: https://art.ua.edu/resources/visiting-artists/. Smith Hall, 427 Sixth Avenue, Tuscaloosa, is a four-minute walk from the Campus Drive Parking Deck and Bus Hub on Hackberry Lane. Information about visitor parking is available here: http://bamaparking.ua.edu/visitor-information/. For more information on this or the other speakers in our upcoming Visiting Artist and Scholar Series, contact Rachel Dobson (rachel.dobson@ua.edu) or Pete Schulte (pschulte@ua.edu).
UA Professor’s Book Spotlights Andrew Jackson’s Portraits
When President Trump hung a portrait of President Andrew Jackson in a prominent spot in the Oval Office, in hopes that Americans would associate Trump with the controversial president who fought for the “common man,” it helped put Jackson back in the public discourse. Jackson – unusually for his day – carefully crafted his public image – one thing the two presidents have in common. And UA assistant professor of art history Dr. Rachel Stephens is helping to clarify that conversation. Stephens’ monograph – the first book-length study of Andrew Jackson's personal portrait artist – has recently hit the bookshelves. Selling Andrew Jackson: Ralph E. W. Earl and the Politics of Portraiture, from the University of South Carolina Press was published in June 2018. In it, Dr. Stephens examines the role of Earl, Jackson’s “Court Painter,” in Jackson’s inner circle and the influence of his portraits on Jackson’s political career and historical legacy. We asked Dr. Stephens a few questions about what she hopes her book will bring to readers. Here are her answers: What will we learn about Andrew Jackson by reading your book that we didn’t know before? RS: Andrew Jackson's reputation precedes him, but few realize that he actually hired a full-time artist. Artists were always clamoring to paint the early presidents, and dozens of artists painted Jackson, but in order to control his own visual message, he hired Earl's services full time, and Earl even lived at Jackson's plantation and at the White House. I believe that Earl and Jackson collaborated on the portraits, and that each one was intended to respond to the current events of Jackson's life. Earl and Jackson became very close friends over the course of their 21-year friendship, and Earl is buried in the Jackson family cemetery at the Hermitage. How many paintings total did Earl paint of Andrew Jackson? RS: Earl painted untold numbers of portraits of Jackson. He painted him almost daily for fifteen or more years. An unfinished portrait of Jackson was on his easel when he died. The exact number is impossible to calculate because Earl didn't sign his works and records for them do not exist, but there are dozens of them! How many times a day did Earl paint images of AJ? RS: Seemingly, Earl was employed full time in painting Jackson. Visitors to Jackson's White House regularly mention Earl at his easel in the background or in his studio. Depending on the nature of the portrait, it might take Earl anywhere from a few days, to over a year to complete a portrait. What’s the most important thing you hope to communicate to readers with this book? RS: I'm so happy to see the book in print! I hope it will educate readers about the significant impact that Ralph E. W. Earl had on Jackson's career and also the importance of his contribution to American Art. Rachel Stephens is an assistant professor of art history in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Alabama. Her research investigates the art and visual culture of the antebellum era, particularly in the South. For more information about The University of Alabama’s programs in studio art and art history, go here: https://art.ua.edu/academics/graduate-programs/art-requirements/.
Senior Art History Major Receives Randall Research Award
Senior art history major Nadia DelMedico received the Randall Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award from President Bell during ceremonies April 4, 2018, on UA campus. DelMedico received the award as the result of her work, mentored by Dr. Rachel Stephens, on the history of slavery on the UA campus. In the spring of 2017, DelMedico, who is enrolled in UA’s Randall Research Scholars Program, presented her preliminary research on slave dwellings on the antebellum campus of The University of Alabama at the undergraduate poster session during the 22nd Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Art History and at the Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity Conference (URCA) at UA. In October 2017, Dr. Stephens, and DelMedico presented their research during a symposium, “Universities, Slavery, Public Memory, and the Built Landscape,” sponsored by the University of Virginia and the Slave Dwelling Project. DelMedico’s and Stephens’ paper, “Slavery and its Built Environment at The University of Alabama as Revealed in the Basil Manly Diaries,” discusses typical activities of the University administrators, faculty and students as seen through the daily writings of the second president of UA. For more about the research findings, go here.
Art Historian to Talk on Black Arts Movement
Tuscaloosa. — Dr. Rebecca Zorach will deliver a public lecture, “‘The Time is Now!’ The Black Arts Movement in Chicago, circa 1968,” on Wednesday, March 21 at 6:30 p.m., in 205 Gorgas Library. Please join us for a pre-lecture reception at 5:30 p.m. in 205 Gorgas Library sponsored by the College of Arts & Sciences Diversity Committee. Rebecca Zorach (Ph.D., Univ. of Chicago) is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and Art History at Northwestern University where she teaches and writes on early modern European art (15th-17th century), contemporary activist art and art of the 1960s and 1970s. Particular interests include print media, feminist and queer theory, theory of representation and the multiple intersections of art and politics. Included among her many publications is the award-winning book, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Before joining the faculty at Northwestern she taught at the University of Chicago for fourteen years. She has been a visiting faculty member at Yale University, the École des Hautes Études in Sciences Sociales and Williams College, where she was Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor in 2013-14. Her books include The Passionate Triangle (University of Chicago Press, 2011); the edited volumes Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis (with Amy Bingaman and Lisa Shapiro Sanders, Routledge, 2002); The Idol in the Age of Art (with Michael Cole, Routledge, 2009) and Art Against the Law (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2014). Recent articles have addressed AfriCOBRA's gender and family politics; Claes Oldenburg's lawsuit challenging the copyright of the Chicago Picasso and the experimental art center Art & Soul, founded on the west side of Chicago in 1968 by the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Conservative Vice Lords, a former street gang. She is currently completing a book on Art & Soul and the landscape of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago (late 1960s-1970s), and undertaking a new project that will consider the relationship of artistic and political agency to natural and social ecologies. She is a member of Feel Tank Chicago, is on the board of the South Side Community Art Center and South Side Projections and co-organizes the archive and oral history project Never The Same with Daniel Tucker. Image credit: Darryl Cowherd, Be Black, Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Dr. Zorach's lecture is part of the Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series, sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History, the Visiting Artist and Scholar Committee, the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Continuing Studies at The University of Alabama. To see our past and future visiting artists and scholars, go here: https://art.ua.edu/resources/visiting-artists/. Gorgas Library, 711, Capstone Drive, Tuscaloosa, is a four-minute walk from the Campus Drive Parking Deck and Bus Hub on Hackberry Lane. Information about visitor parking is available here: http://bamaparking.ua.edu/visitor-information/. Parking is free on campus in a legal space after business hours. For more information on this or the other speakers in our upcoming Visiting Artist and Scholar Series, contact Rachel Dobson (rachel.dobson@ua.edu) or Pete Schulte (pschulte@ua.edu).
Art History Professor Wins Book Award
Associate Professor of Art History Lucy Curzon's new book, Mass-Observation and Visual Culture: Depicting Everyday Lives in Britain, has been awarded the Historians of British Artist Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period after 1800. The prize committee found Curzon's book, published by Routledge in 2017, "theoretically sophisticated and convincingly argued, a timely and important volume on the anthropological research group Mass-Observation and its attitudes towards visual culture." It is the first full-length study of the art produced under the auspices of the group. The committee praised Curzon for her in-depth research in an "understudied" area of British art and culture. "The social research organization known as Mass-Observation was founded in 1937 to document everyday life. Due to the diverse nature of interests and projects undertaken by the group, they remain under-studied in an art historical context. Lucy Curzon corrects this oversight, providing an account of the movement in relation to visual culture, a timely and important theme. She brings an art historian’s interpretive skill to the sociological and visual culture project of Mass-Observation, examining the use of painting, collage, photography, and visual media within their word, providing an account of the important role of these visual elements in Mass-Observations project to understand national identity in the 1930s. In so doing, Curzon provides an important model of compatibility of art history and visual culture as related, fields of inquiry." Curzon's research focuses on issues of identity politics as they concern the production of visual culture in twentieth-century Britain. She has previously published work on LGBTQ+ portraiture, as well as articles or chapters on the Ashington Group and Humphrey Spender’s photographs of Blackpool in the 1930s. She regularly presents her work at national and international conferences. To read more about Dr. Curzon and her new book, go here. Since 1997, Historians of British Art (HBA) has awarded three prizes each year for books on British art in the following categories: pre-1800, post-1800 and multi-authored book. HBA is an affiliate society of the College Art Association and was formed to promote scholarship and other professional endeavors related to British art and architecture. For more information about The University of Alabama’s Department of Art and Art History degree programs, go to our website.