Art History

Art History Senior Presentations Tuesday, 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!

The Annual Art History Senior Project Presentations

Tuesday, May 19, 2015 at 5:00 pm 
in Olin 102.

Come hear our graduating majors present their senior projects.

All art history majors are encouraged to attend.  Open to all.

Bard College and the Art History Program congratulate and welcome

Olga Touloumi
Assistant Professor of Art History ’15

Ph.D. Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, 2014
Dissertation title: “Architectures of Global Communication, 1913-­‐1970”

The Dean of the College hosted a celebration of Patricia Karetzky’s new book
Chinese Religious Art at Finberg House, Monday, April 6th at 6:00 pm.

Introduction by Susan Aberth.

The Dean of the College and the Art History Program present
a lecture

 Ana Maria León
Massachusetts institute of Technology

This lecture examines a series of texts, images, and architectural projects produced in 1930s and 1940s Argentina, and how they participated in the intellectual, poetic, and spatial construction of the city of Buenos Aires as both a real and imaginary site. Casa Amarilla, an unbuilt housing project designed by Antonio Bonet, brings together these various works in the context of the city’s population growth and the country’s unsteady politics. I argue Casa Amarilla countered the centralized power of the Argentinian state by shifting formal characteristics of monumentality and centrality from the elites to the disenfranchised masses, and inserting them into the city.

Monday, March 23, 2015
4:00 pm
Preston Theater

The Dean of the College and the Art History Program
present
Olga Touloumi
Harvard University

During four short months in the summer of 1945, the Office of Strategic Services, IBM, and landscape architect Dan Kiley prepared Courtroom 600 for the Nuremberg Trials. Planned as a “world spectacle,” the project required a wide mobilization of resources and technologies that crossed national and institutional boundaries. Scholars have extensively discussed the legal and diplomatic history of the International Military Tribunal, along with its implications for international law in the post-World War II period, but little attention has been paid to the position of the courtroom itself in this seminal event.

This lecture will unravel the role of design and architecture in the Nuremberg Trials, explaining that both served to produce international law as an integral component of the world organization that the United Nations announced. By looking into the series of projects that led to the final courtroom design, I will discuss the debates on representation, mediation, and participation that informed this interior. Ultimately, I argue, in the Nuremberg Courtroom designers and officials reconceived architecture as a mobile technology to transfer and implement models of legal space across expansive and contested networks of global communication.

Tuesday, March 31, 2015
4:30 pm
RKC 101

Congratulations to Art History Major Nic Viollet!
MEMORIA: CONSTRUCTIONS & INTERPRETATIONS
The History of Art Students’ Association (HASA) at University of Toronto invited undergraduates to participate in its second annual History of Art conference March 6th-7th 2015. Through the conference,  the University aspired 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 focused on the constructions and interpretations of memory.  The University “invited 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 re-appropriations of a past. Nic Violett ’15 submitted and was accepted to present in the Third Session, chaired by Theresa Wang, his paper “Hon-En Katerdral: Audience and the Body.”

Mira Rai Waits
University of California, Santa Barbara

“Producing the Prison: A Spatial History of Prisoners in Colonial India”

Nineteenth- and twentieth- century histories of prisons in British India have followed three narratives. British imperial history presented prisons as exceptional infrastructural improvements essential to governance. In Indian nationalist history, prisons became synonymous with British rule and incarceration was determined to be a necessary stage of Indian resistance. Recent scholarship has emphasized the legal and ideological origin of the prison as well as the significance of medical practice. When examined as a whole, this body of material can provide valuable insights into the colonial Indian prison. However these histories fail to investigate the prison in terms of design, representation, physical space, and material experience, reducing the prison to a static concept—a site of pure ideology. This talk demonstrates that the prison was not a historical given, but rather a space continually altered, re-imagined, and even challenged by the people and objects experiencing, recording, and narrating its production. This paper advocates the recognition of space as an active and dynamic component of the history of Indian prisons.

Thursday, March 12, 2015
12:00 noon
Olin 102

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.