Art History

The Alexander Klebanoff Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Art History senior project was awarded to Patricia Manos.  Her project, “Strong in Our Weakness:” Yael Batana’s Strategies for Living with Ghosts (Advisor: Julia Rosenbaum) demonstrated extensive scholarship and daring originality in the area of modern art in the class of 2012.  The project is a study of the Israeli-Dutch artist Yael Bartana’s video trilogy “…and Europe will be Stunned,” which was completed for the 2011 Venice Biennale. Yael Batana was the first non-Polish artist chosen to represent Poland at its national pavilion.

Art History major Christopher Richards ’12 won two of the most prestigious awards at Bard College for his senior project titled The Age of Tears: Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross and its Lachrymose Contexts (Adviser, Susan Merriam).  Christopher received the  Cristina Duarte Prize for Medieval Literature and the Wilton Moore Lockwood Prize for Best Critical Senior Project. Congratulations to Christopher on this spectacular achievement!

The Jean M. French Travel Award was established in 2011 to assist second semester juniors in researching their senior project.  Money for this award was generously donated by Bard art history alumni in honor of Prof. Jean M. French, who retired in 2011.  It was her wish that juniors could use the summer before their senior year to do valuable research at archives, libraries and locations both in the United States and abroad.  The first of what will be an annual award went to Sebastian Sarmiento-Moreno. Sebastian will travel to Paris this summer to conduct artist interviews.   His senior project will deal with Latin American kinetic art.

On Thursday, May 19th, art history seniors presented their projects to their peers and faculty and then participated in a celebratory dinner.

Here is the Program, please enjoy!

Curated by Luc Sante, May 12-August 4, 2012  On View at the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library Vitrines. The populist avant-garde. In Paris in the 1920s and ’30s, highbrow and lowbrow met on the terrain of pulp publishing. Crime tabloids, skin magazines, and the flimsy pamphlets called ‘train-station novels’ were eye-catching and breathlessly modern. Employing photographs, photomontages, and an adventurous sense of page design, these very unrespectable publications echoed Soviet constructivism in creating an advanced visual culture for a public that was unschooled and not entirely literate.

Exilliteratur

Curated by Keziah Goudsmit ’12
April 30-May 10, 2012

Illustration by P. L. Urban, 1935, from Geschichten Aus Sieben Ghettos

After Hitler’s book burning in 1933, many authors fled the country to continue their writing. Most writers found refuge in other European cities like Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Prague and Moscow. After war broke out all over Europe, writers had to continue their journey. They found safety in countries abroad like the United States and Mexico. The books written in between 1933 and 1945 are placed in a specific category called Exilliteratur (exile literature).  Some famous exile authors are Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Klaus Mann and Thomas Mann.

Two Dutch publication houses, Querido Verlag and Verlag Allert De Lange, played an important role for the exiled writers. They published many books and strongly supported the authors during this period. In this exhibition, famous writers like Joseph Roth, Max Brod, Stefan Zweig and Lion Feuchtwanger plus several lesser-known authors are represented by volumes published in Holland.  All the books are first editions from the Nazi era. Querido and Allert De Lange made it possible for these authors to keep writing and it is important for our generation to keep their work alive. For this reason, I decided to find first edition books and exhibit them to Bard students and the community. This show is dedicated to the exiled writers and their struggle.

I thought I’d share with you some of the cool interpretation devices my historic preservation studio group has been working on.  All semester we’ve been studying the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront along the East River.  Here are, in full, the podcasts to listen to when taking the East River Ferry upriver from the Wall Street stop to the East 34th Street stop. They cover the general and specific history of the Brooklyn-Queens waterfront from Brooklyn Heights up to Hunters Point in Queens. Anyone with a smart phone can access these tours from the web while on the boat. The podcasts were put together by myself and my classmate Mayank Patel, and the voiceover was done by none other than yours truly.  In addition to the podcasts, we’re making brochures that elaborate on each neighborhood along the river, and which include self-guided walking tours.  I have attached one of them.

Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF5DE50E0C09D492D&feature=plcp

Our Fulbright Award-Winning Art History graduate from 2011, Rachel Heidenry, is completing her project in El Salvador with an exhibition of her photographs of the many murals created throughout this country. “Los Murales de El Salvador: una exposicion de fotografia por Rachel Heidenry” will be on view in San Salvador at the

Arcatao:por un ambiente sano, sin quemas ni basura, si a la vida, Areatao. Chatalatenango, sin fecha

Centro Arte para la Paz, Suchitoto
28 abril – 18 junio 2012

Congratulations to Rachel for this important project and exhibition!

Prof. Julia Rosenbaum has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Fellowship to study the visual culture of the American Civil War. The NEH Institute takes place this summer in New York City and involves work with a team of scholars, study of materials at significant museum and archival collections, and new media lab workshops.

Melons, 1998

Patty Chang, noted filmmaker, photographer and performance artist, will present her work in RKC 103 this Thursday, April 26, at 5:00.  Using herself as the protagonist, Chang has created a bracing body of work, sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, sometimes both, that comments on women’s roles in American and Chinese cultures.  New York Times critic, Roberta Smith, has praised Chang’s “post feminist toughness in which different aspects of the feminine are flaunted, exaggerated, or rendered almost humiliatingly vulnerable.”  All are invited to hear this challenging and entertaining artist.