Bard College ART HISTORY and VISUAL CULTURE PROGRAM
The Art History Program
invites you to
THE ANNUAL ART HISTORY MAJORS EVENT!
Thursday, November 5, 2015
6:00-8:00 pm
Faculty Dining Room
Learn about Spring 2015 course offerings and hear presentations by three alumni art history majors on their experiences since graduating from Bard.
Majors are required to attend and all those interested in the program are encouraged to attend.
Food and beverages will be served.
rsvp to arthistory@bard.edu or call 845.758.7158
Alex Kitnick will give a talk:
“Use Your Illusion: Barbara Kasten’s ‘Architectural Sites'”
Thursday, October 22nd, 6:00 pm
International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago
Reception at the Graham Foundation
In conjunction with our new exhibition Barbara Kasten: Stages, art historian and critic Alex Kitnick will explore the critical stakes of Barbara Kasten’s photographic series from the 1980s that artfully staged important works of American architecture, including Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Richard Meier’s High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Created at the height of postmodern theory, Kasten’s Architectural Sites submits iconic buildings to distorting angles and colored lights, thus transforming already vertiginous structures into truly illusory spaces. Kitnick argues that these photographs offer a unique form of criticism that seek to heighten—rather than deconstruct—the effects of an emerging Postmodernism, and that these effects that are increasingly familiar today.
Alex Kitnick teaches at Bard College, where he was recently appointed the Brant Fellow in Contemporary Arts. In 2010 he received his PhD from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. From 2011 to 2012 he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Kitnick’s work frequently focuses on the intersection of art and architecture. He has edited numerous volumes including a collection of John McHale’s writings, The Expendable Reader: Articles on Art, Architecture, Design, and Media, 1951-1979, which was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation, and October 136 on New Brutalism. He is a frequent contributor to Artforum, October, and Texte zur Kunst, among other publications.
Related Grant: 2011 Individual Grant to Alex Kitnick for the publication “The Expendable Reader: John McHale on Art, Architecture, Design, and Media, 1951-1979″ (Sourcebook Series, GSAPP Books, 2011).
Robert Wiesenberger is the 2014–16 Stefan Engelhorn Curatorial Fellow at the Harvard Art Museums, where he is responsible for their Bauhaus collections, and a Critic at the Yale School of Art, where he teaches a first-year seminar in the MFA program in graphic design. He is completing his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, where he specializes in modern and contemporary art, architecture and design. His dissertation treats the work of the late American designer Muriel Cooper.
Graphic designer Muriel Cooper’s career at MIT spanned the transition from print to software, from the MIT Press in the 1960s to the Media Lab in the 1980s. Perhaps her best-known achievement in print was the monumental and still authoritative tome The Bauhaus, released by the MIT Press in 1969. But less known are Cooper’s restagings of that book in multiple media, including posters, a film, and an exhibition. This research coincided with her first exposure to computer programming, and can be understood as a way of prototyping in analog the effects she would spend her career seeking from software. The Bauhaus is thus both a landmark and an inflection point for Cooper: at once her masterpiece in print and evidence of a growing anxiety about the medium; a gesture toward reading’s possible futures, and a source of durable metaphors for them. Choosing this book for her research was also no coincidence: In both scale and subject, The Bauhaus was an ideal test case for Cooper.
Thursday, October 15, 2015
3:10-4:30 pm
RKC 103 – Lazlo Z. Bito ’60 Auditorium
A Presentation by
Dr. Margo Machida
Professor of Art History & Asian American Studies
University of Connecticut
Trans-Pacific Visions in Asian American Art
This talk focuses on the Asia Pacific region and selected works by contemporary U.S.-based Asian American artists that engage themes of trans-Pacific circulation and global systems of cross-cultural exchange. Based on Dr. Machida’s current research in Hawai’i, this presentation draws attention to islands as a generative framework to analyze and to compare art in the Asia Pacific region and the Americas. The Pacific, with more islands than the world’s other oceans combined, is above all an island realm. Accordingly Islands and associated oceanic imaginaries exert a powerful hold on works by artists who trace their ancestral origins to coastal East and Southeast Asia and Oceania. All are invited to this talk about these exciting contemporary artists.
Wednesday, October 28th
6:30 pm
RKC 103 – Lazlo Z. Bito ’60 Auditorium
Sponsored by American Studies, Art History, Asian Studies, Religion, and Africana Studies
Three cultural organizations whose antecedents established the Woodstock Art Colony in the early twentieth century – Maverick Concerts, the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum (WAAM) – join in this historic exhibition. Marking the importance of music in Woodstock’s early history, the exhibition particularly celebrates Maverick Concerts, the oldest continuous summer chamber music festival in the United States.Music in the Woods: One Hundred Years of Maverick Concerts opened in a joint reception on July 25, 2015 from 5:00 to 7:00 pm, and will run in WAAM’s Towbin Wing through September 26 and at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts of the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild through August 30.
The exhibition features three seldom seen sculptures by John Flannagan, as well as a bronze maquette for a recently commissioned sculptural portrait of Hervey White by contemporary Chinese artist Wan Jida. Works also include a kaleidoscope of painted and photographic portraits of Hervey White by Bolton Brown, Harry Gottlieb, Konrad Cramer, Peggy Bacon and others; portraits of early musicians by Robert Chanler, Antonio Borone, and George Bellows; quick sketches of musicians in performance by artists John Fenton, Andrée Ruellan, Julia Santos Solomon and others; drawings and prints by Woodstock artists; and vintage photographic portraits of musicians, some as early as 1919, who played at Maverick Concerts from the early years to the present.
Tom Wolf is author of “John Flannagan’s Maverick Horse” in the catalog.
The exhibition also highlights images of the unique concert hall, whose eccentric architecture has attracted photographers since its earliest days, including Konrad Cramer, Alfred Cohn, Howard Greenberg, Leon Liss, Dion Ogust, and Noritaka Minami.
Olga Touloumi is author of “The Economy of Design: Architecture and High Finance in the Maverick House Concert Hall” in the catalog.
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