Art History

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.

Sanctified Sandals—Polemics and Prophetic Relics in an Era of Technological Reproducibility
Barry Flood, Professor of Humanities, Institute of Fine Arts and College of Arts and Sciences, NYU

Monday, November 10, 2014
Olin, Room 102
5 pm
Although recent controversies about the historical representation of the Prophet Muhammad have focused on figural paintings, these were relatively rare and circulated in a limited milieu. More commonly, the Prophet was represented metonymically, by depictions of his footprint or sandal, for example. The most famous relic of the Prophet’s sandal was kept in Damascus; from the twelfth century onwards, images of this sandal relic were generated by tracing its outline. Such tracings were believed to circulate the blessings (baraka) conferred by this cherished vestige through contact with the body of the Prophet. The copying of the sandal relic continued into modernity, when new print technologies and photography were applied to the reproduction of its image. The deployment of modern technologies of mass (re)production to the circulation of the relic as an image may be related to debates within Islam about the acceptability of relics, shrine veneration and mediation, debates that continue until the present day. However, the ability of mass-produced images to transport and transmit the charisma of the original relic also raises interesting questions about the nature of images, copies and mediation.

Sponsored by: Art History Program; Middle Eastern Studies Program; Religion Program.

The art history program will make its bi-annual program trip to the Metropolitan
Museum on Sunday, October 5th.  Faculty will meet students at the Museum
to discuss exhibitions and answer questions.  Tickets for the bus are available
at the Art History office, Fisher Annex 112.