Art History

CALL FOR PAPERS – MEMORIA: CONSTRUCTIONS & INTERPRETATIONS
The History of Art Students’ Association (HASA) invites undergraduates to participate in
its second annual History of Art conference March 6th-7th 2015. Through the conference, we aspire to have undergraduate art historians engage and explore their fields of interest in a supportive and challenging environment, whilst developing both academic and professional skills. The year’s theme will focus on the constructions and interpretations of memory. We “invite students to submit papers that explore diverse dimensions of this overarching theme, including but not limited to:
–    The construction of real and imagined worlds
–    Collective and singular memories”
–    Physical and psychological conceptions of memory
–    Problems of subjectivity
–    Representations and reappropriations of a past
PAPERS
We invite papers of 15-20 mins (approx. 2500 words) on an issue related to the theme. Papers should be presentable and come accompanied with visual aids (i.e. slide projections, PowerPoint, etc). Papers can be excerpts from larger works or separate pieces, but must have a strong thesis and be well evidenced with primary and secondary material. We ask for papers that show a high degree of independent thinking and may”discuss any period in the art historical timeline. We welcome papers that take religious and/or historical approaches just as much as those that explore the theme in a literal and/or a postmodern framework.

SUBMITTING A PAPER
Students interested in presenting at this year’s conference need to submit a proposal or abstract (approx. 500 words) to the organizers by email: [email protected] by
Friday February 6th 2015 by 5 PM. Please include UGRAD_HASA_PROPOSAL as your subject line. Everything should be in a single attachment as either a .pdf or .docx file.
In you’re proposal, you should make sure to include:
– Your name, University, course and year of study as of January 2014
– Your paper’s title (or working title) and your abstract
ACCEPTANCE, CONFERENCE PROGRAM & ACCOMODATION
By February 10th you will receive an email that will let you know if your proposal has been accepted. Decisions will be made on a rolling basis.
A full program will be available and emailed to the speakers once decisions have been finalized. It will also be posted on our website: http://hasaannualconference.tumblr.com/
Links to accommodation recommendations will be posted on our website.

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The Thomas Cole National Historic Site is now accepting applications for its 2015 internship program. Interns are provided the opportunity to work closely with the education, collections, and interpretation staff on all aspects of the museum’s operation. In 2015, interns will also participate in the presentation of an unprecedented exhibition entitled “River Crossings”, organized in partnership with the nearby Olana State Historic Site, featuring contemporary art installed directly into the historic spaces and landscapes of the two historic sites. The exhibition is curated by the artist Stephen Hannock with Jason Rosenfeld, PhD. The artists in the exhibition include some of the most celebrated names over the last 40 years including Chuck Close, Angie Keefer, Stephen Hannock, Maya Lin, Elizabeth Murray, Martin Puryear, Cindy Sherman, Sienna Shields, Kiki Smith, and Elyn Zimmerman.

Description
Interns will work directly with museum staff and gain hands-on experience with exhibition installation, archive and collection inventory, daily office operations, research, and full engagement in the touring operation.  Interns also observe and participate in a variety of staff meetings to learn the structural, strategic, and operational decisions at play in an historic house museum. Internships are unpaid, though many interns arrange credit through their respective schools.  Interns are asked to commit to a minimum of 16 hours per week, preferably more, for the agreed-upon duration of the internship, which typically lasts three months but can be extended through six. The work week is Wednesday through Sunday.

Responsibilities
Through the combination of research, interpretation, and hands-on experience, selected candidates will have the opportunity to:

+ Lead tours of the historic buildings and monitor the galleries during the Open House

+ Conduct a research project

+ Take tickets, field customer phone calls, usher, and distribute programs at special events

+ Participate in day-to-day operations of a historic artist’s house museum

Qualifications
The TCNHS seeks self-motivated undergraduate students and recent graduates who have expressed a commitment to careers in a history or art museum, exhibition and collection management, and/ or museum education. A background, passion for, or study of history, art history, material culture, decorative arts, museum studies and/or museum education are ideal. Applicants should have strong organizational abilities, an affinity for public speaking, and computer skills.

How to Apply
Send a cover letter describing your interests and goals, as well as the days and times you would be available, along with a complete resume to: Melissa Gavilanes, Director of Education, [email protected] . For further information please email above or by phone call 518-943-7465 x 5.   For more information, please visit www.thomascole.org.

The Thomas Cole National Historic Site (TCNHS) preserves and interprets the home and studios of Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School of painting, the nation’s first art movement.  The TCNHS consists of Thomas Cole’s c. 1815 Federal-era brick home, his 1839 studio, and other historic structures on five landscaped acres with magnificent views of the Catskill Mountains.

Review of Richard Prince’s New Portraits

by Meghan Hogan

Richard Prince has made a career out of other people’s art. From his cowboy ‘rephotographs’ to his nurse paintings, almost all of his better-known work draws heavily from work created by others. Prince, in the past, has collected images from advertisements, book covers, and magazines to create his art, and now, at the Gagosian Gallery, he has added a new medium: instagram. In New Portraits, Prince finds portraits from instagram (with subjects ranging from celebrities to total strangers) and creates inkjet images of them on 65 ¾ by 48 ¾ inch canvasses after adding a comment from his own instagram account, RichardPrince4.

For the better part of the history of art, the female body has been the property of males. Painted by and for men, women themselves had little ownership in the representation of themselves. With the rise of media like instagram, anyone has the power to display their own body the way they chose. Subsequently, New Portraits features heavily semi-naked women. Prince and the female body have had somewhat of a problematic past.  In fact, his photograph Spiritual America, which is actually a rephotograph of a photo by Gary Gross, which pictures a naked, 10-year-old Brooke Shields, got him temporarily kicked off instagram. Many critics and artists have condemned him as a blatant misogynist, but it is never Prince who actually creates the problematic images; he only uses them. In the cases of pieces like Spiritual America, Prince comes off as critical of the original artists instead of exploitative of the subjects. In the case of New Portraits, however, it is different. Where does Prince stand in comparison to the people who created these salacious images when the creators are the subjects themselves?  Is he critiquing the artists even though they took photos of themselves or his he co-opting their portraits, forcing their bodies back into male dominance as he puts them on his canvas as his own creation, under his name?

To get an answer, the best place to look would be, you guessed it, instagram. In response to the show, many people who were featured in it, in a very Meta move, took pictures of themselves with their pictures. It would appear that most people in the show feel celebrated, rather than oppressed. Art has imitated life has imitated art, and it is still being documented! If you look at Richard Prince’s instagram today he is still posting other peoples pictures with his comments as his pictures. He even posted a picture with a comment from an angry viewer calling him “a thief and a con artist.” On his twitter, he tweeted pictures of topless women at his show, saying he had never had a crowd like this.

Though New Portraits may seem to poke fun at a vain, vapid, art form taking over the world, it also holds a certain reverence for the accessibility and honesty that instagram provides. New Portraits is an appropriate appropriation for modern times. Merging digital and physical, public and private, creation and theft, it might be a joke, but it’s one we can all feel in on.

********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************* by Connor Marley ’15

Richard Prince’s newest exhibition featuring thirty-eight inkjet-printed canvases of appropriated Instagrams  at the Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue in October 2014. The show, titled New Portraits, is not unlike Prince’s past work and yet it shows that at the age of 65, Prince is not afraid of incorporating digital media into his art. The series of prints are all images that Prince has appropriated from the popular social networking app, Instagram, and showcases a wide range of portraits. The people shown in the prints include well-known celebrities like Kate Moss, artists such as Laurie Simmons, as well as many Instagrammers who are relatively unknown. Although the show is quite casual and the works are priced much lower than most of Prince’s past work, New Portraits can provide older viewers with a blown up glimpse into the social media realm and younger audiences with an exaggerated reflection of their everyday practices.

Even though Prince’s New Portraits were clearly identifiable as images taken from Instagram, no one has actually seen images like these before because they have undergone an array of transformations since being selected by Prince. A phone screen only has a few inches of surface area while Prince’s appropriated images have been printed at a scale of roughly 4 by 6 feet. Our eyes are also accustomed to seeing these images on a backlit, glass surface on a seemingly endless scroll controlled by our fingers. Prince’s images on the other hand are lit by gallery lighting and are completely stationary. The fact that images are now on a wall hanging at about eye level with their audience gives them more authority and less manipulability than the hand-held originals. This loss of control is also reflected in the comments sections of the prints. While Instagram users are usually free to add any comment to an image, most of these Instagrams have had all but Prince’s comments removed giving @richardprince4 the final word on these Instagrams.

Whether it was by coincidence or not, by choosing to exhibit his New Portraits at the same time as the hugely popular Jeff Koon’s retrospective, Prince appears more relevant and in touch with the Millennial Generation using image appropriation in a more modern context than Koons has. As Peter Schjeldahl states in his New Yorker review of Prince’s show, the use of images curated from Instagram feels “fated”.[1] I completely agree that social media networks like Instagram make image appropriation easier than ever and it was only a matter of time before an artist used Instagram as material for art creation.  The screenshot function on the iPhone allows users to capture any image on their screen whether they have the right to download the image or not. In fact, some of the images that Prince selected had already been appropriated before he chose them, for example pictures posted by the users @katemossofficialpage and @katem0ss.

Copyright issues are surely expected when someone begins selling appropriated images under his own name and this is definitely not the first time Prince has been critiqued for using the work of others. It is too easy to write off the prints in the show as cheap screenshots however. Unlike the appropriated advertisements in the Koons retrospective that were just enlarged and printed advertisements, Prince has interacted with each of his selected images by incorporating his own small commentary in each print.

At first the images from Instagram may seem funny to younger visitors or confusing to Prince’s older fans, but they reveal characteristics of modern society that many people may choose to ignore or downplay.  The images that Prince selected for his New Portraits reflect a society obsessed with appearance and self-presentation in social media. These images also perfectly exemplify how the pictures we post online can be seen and possessed by anyone. Some of Prince’s comments may seem perverted[2], but in reality thousands of comments like his are posted on pictures everyday and yet people continue to tolerate it. I am sure all visitors, both old and young, are aware of these cultural trends before they enter the exhibition, but because vanity, narcissism, perversion and Internet obsession are not typically viewed as favorable traits, they are usually denied or not taken very seriously. Although I cannot rationalize the $40,000 price tag on printed screen shots, I appreciate that Prince’s New Portraits can expose these very real cultural phenomena in an artistic way that is also fun and casual.

Works Cited
Jerry Saltz, “Richard Prince’s Instagram Paintings Are Genius
Trolling,”Vulture.com, September 23, 2014
Peter Schjeldahl, “Richard Prince’s Instagrams,” New Yorker, September 30,
2014.
[1]Peter Schjeldahl, “Richard Prince’s Instagrams,” New Yorker, September 30,
2014.
[2]Jerry Saltz, “Richard Prince’s Instagram Paintings Are Genius Trolling,”Vulture.com, September 23, 2014

http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Schjeldahl-Prince-Instagram-1-690.jpg

Walter Wick: Games, Gizmos and Toys in the Attic

Shelburne Museum Education Department
Summer Program Assistants (Thursday, June 4-Friday, August 14, 2014; 4 positions available)
Lead Camp Assistant (Thursday, June 4-Friday, August 14, 2014; 1 position available)

Description: Summer Program Assistants
In these fast-paced, hands-on summer positions successful candidates will work in several education department programmatic areas, including summer camps, family programs and activities, special events, and adult programming.  Program assistants will work as camp counselors; lead daily art activities M-F in the Owl Cottage Activity Center and at Art on the Go carts on the museum grounds; and assist with planning, set up, and execution of special day and evening events. Program Assistants also may conduct research, fill in as exhibition guides, and perform other duties as assigned.  Expect on-going public interaction with audiences of all ages, some long days, including occasional weekend work and significant logistical work in preparation for events.

Lead Camp Assistant
n this position, the lead camp assistant will work closely with the academic programs coordinator to implement and manage the summer camp program at Shelburne Museum which includes six weeks of Museum-offered day camps, and a one week day camp offered jointly with the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts. This position will be responsible for the successful daily work of summer camp staff, management of camp logistics and regular communication with administrative staff. This position will also help support the work of family and adult programs during particularly busy times in the season.

Qualifications:
Academic experience in education, studio art, art history, museum studies or similar. Valid driver’s license to operate Museum vehicles, required. Ability to lift 35 lbs; ability to walk and stand for significant periods of time.

Experience and skills:
Experience working with children in academic or informal learning environments – school, camps, museums, etc. — required.  CPR/first aid certification a plus. Candidates must be comfortable working with diverse publics. Friendly, can-do attitude necessary with good time management skills to juggle multiple responsibilities. Ability to work independently as well as cooperatively within the education department and with staff from across the museum.

Camp assistant must have summer day or overnight camp experience.

Compensation:
Summer Program Assistants: Hourly wage of $9.40/hr
Lead Camp Assistant: Hourly wage of $10/hr.

To apply:
Application packages must be postmarked by Friday, January 30, 2015 and include:

·      Cover letter clearly stating the position/s of interest
·      CV/résumé
·      2 references
·      1 letter of recommendation
·      List of relevant courses, grades received, and overall GPA

has  several internships available for the upcoming 2015 winter/spring season. Below you will find links to the full descriptions and an application for this season.

Dates of internships: Monday, January 5, 2015 – Monday, May 25, 2015
Application deadline: Wednesday, November 5, 2014. Apply here!

Internship Descriptions

* (2) Stage Tech / Production
* (1) Museum Education
* (1) Archive/ Photography
* (2) Performing Arts Administration
* (1) Development and Special Event
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
1040 MASS MoCA Way | North Adams, Massachusetts 01247 | 413.MoCA.111
www.massmoca.org | [email protected]

Assistant Professor Fine Arts and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Robert Slifkin

will give a talk
“The Empty Room and the End of Man”

During the 1960s and early 1970s many artists in the United States created works that through their monumental scale, use of refracted light, and architectonic enclosures encouraged viewers to engage in an expansively spatial manner so that the gallery itself became an aesthetically-charged site. Many of the original viewers of these works experienced these unconventional, frequently austere, and affectless objects and installations as threatening and even aggressive. Drawing upon the original reception of some of the most significant public exhibitions of minimal and postminimal art (taking the work of William Anastasi, Dan Flavin, Dennis Oppenheim, and Bruce Nauman as key examples) this paper will argue that these works and ‘environments’ (to use a word often invoked around such art) produced experiential situations that served as imaginary figurations of what the world would look and feel like without human inhabitation or if the viewer was the last person on the Earth. By creating works that imagine uninhabitable or empty physical spaces or, through their massive size or spatial expansiveness, encourage a mode of spectatorship and photographic reproduction that occludes other people, these works channeled a larger cultural anxiety concerning the threat of nuclear annihilation that fundamentally inflected, however unconsciously, significant realms of postwar American culture well into the 1970s.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014
7:00 pm
Olin 102

Free and Open tot he Public

The Infernal Desire Machine of Angela Carter: Selections from the Bradford Morrow Collection

Angela Carter (1940-1992) was one of the most prolific and innovative writers of her time.  In his introduction to her collected stories, Burning Your Boats, Carter’s friend Salman Rushdie deemed her work “by turns formal and outrageous, exotic and demotic, exquisite and coarse, precious and raunchy, fabulist and socialist, purple and black.”  Born Angela Olive Stalker, she was raised in Yorkshire, England and attended high school in south London where she began writing at an early age, first as a journalist and soon thereafter as a fiction writer, essayist, translator, and dramatist.  Indeed, her first book, Unicorn, was published as a mimeographed pamphlet just after Carter’s sixteenth birthday in May, 1966.  Among her best-known works are Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (written while she lived in Japan), The Magic Toyshop, Love, Nights at the Circus, Wise Children, Black Venus (published in America as Saints and Strangers), the groundbreaking study The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, and her masterpiece, The Bloody Chamber.  A pioneering feminist writer and brilliant re-inventor of classic fables and fairy tales, Angela Carter, whose untimely death of lung cancer cut short a burgeoning career, is now widely considered one of the most influential British authors of the second half of the twentieth century.

Monday, October 20- Friday, December 5, 2014
Stevenson Library Atrium

Opening Reception: Monday, October 27th, 4:30-6:00 pm

Saturday, October 25, 2014
2pm – 3pm

Leonora Carrington: Invitation, Invocation and Manifestation
Prof. Susan Aberth (Bard College)

From her first widely exhibited work, Inn of the Dawn Horse (Self Portrait), executed while only twenty-one in 1938, the artist Leonora Carrington used the act of painting to invoke and harness unseen forces. Through the depiction of communion with and between animals, the presentation of altars containing ritual sacrifices, or the drawing of magic circles and other geometric patterns, Carrington’s work often serves as a perpetual summoning of the divine to manifest. Celtic goddesses, spirits of the departed, the Sidhe of the Tuatha Dé Danann, and other chthonic and ancient entities are called forth to serve unknown purposes or perhaps simply to demonstrate their continued existence and intervention in our supposedly secular times. This talk will focus on works in various media that best illustrate this aspect of Carrington’s oeuvre.

 is one of the most comprehensive and innovative international book series on contemporary art. Published biannually each volume focuses on three to four of the world’s most compelling artists, whose oeuvre is explored in three to four texts by renowned authors. At the same time each artist creates a limited edition work exclusively for the readers of Parkett. To date Parkett has published 94 volumes with a total of 240 artists collaborations.
This exhibit highlights a selection of some twenty of these collaborations from the last 30 years.

Curated by Kornelia Tamm
Courtesy of Dieter von Graffenried

September 4- October 10, 2014
Stevenson Library Atrium

Cindy Sherman

The Art History Program will hold its Majors’ Event on Wednesday, November 5th in the Faculty Dining Room.  Art History faculty will meet with majors and interested students to discuss the Spring 2015 course offerings.  Three alumni will speak of their lives after Bard, their failures and successes, giving tips and networking advise to current students.

Refreshments will be served.