Visiting Scholar Program

The Visiting Scholar Program is organized to explore the discipline of art history—its cultural connections, its methodological pursuits, and its changing nature—by focusing extensively on the research and insights of individual academic experts. Three to five highly regarded art historians and/or art critics speak at a public lecture presenting current research and published papers. During their week long visit they work closely with graduate students enrolled in the visiting scholar seminar class.

Erika Doss – January 31
Cultural Vandalism and Public Memory: Anger, Citizenship, and Memorials in Contemporary America
Historical memory of 16 c. Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate is extraordinarily contentious in the American Southwest.  Oñate is remembered by New Mexican Hispanics as a heroic founding father, the New Mexico’s Native Americans,  remember him as a brutal conqueror.  Conflicts over memorials are representative of the increasingly factionalized and affective conditions of contemporary  historical memory.  Focusing on the rights-claims of multiple publics, and on contemporary understandings of citizenship and regional/national identities, this talk considers the conflicted crossroads of commemoration throughout the nation today. Ms. Doss is Professor and chair in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

Joan Kee – February 14
Ming Wong’s Cultural Studies
Intended more as a exploratory discussion than a formal lecture, this talk looks at the works of Ming Wong, a performance artist based in Singapore and Berlin who has recently attracted significant attention for his investigations of beauty, translation, and the place of appropriation. Ms. Kee is an Assistant professor in the History of Art department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. An authority in the field of contemporary art in East and Southeast Asia, she has published extensively on the subject, including articles for the Oxford Art Journal, Artforum, Art Journal, as well as forthcoming essays in Art History and Art Bulletin.

Heidi Gearhart – February 28
Is there Virtue in Virtuosity? Art and Skill in the Medieval Monastery
Precious few texts on art survive from the High Middle Ages; most are excerpts, taken from sources like letters, chronicles, or exegetical tracts. As a result, the practice of art-making in the Middle Ages remains mysterious, its guiding principles often ascribed to religious imperative. One of the only complete treatises on art to survive from the period is On Diverse Arts, or, in Latin, de diversis artibus. Written by a monk under the pseudonym Theophilus.  In this paper I look at Theophilus’ descriptions of technique and explore his concept of artistic skill. When read within the context of twelfth century thought, a distinct theory of artistic practice begins to emerge, and a relationship between virtue and skill becomes evident. Ms. Gearhart is a post-doctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute.

Wu Hung – March 20
Engaging the Real: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art
The Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric project in history, has garnered widespread attention from the scale of its economical and political ambition. This lecture introduces and analyzes some excellent art works, which four contemporary Chinese artists have developed as their individual responses to the project. I hope to offer a more complex, microscopic view of contemporary Chinese art, and encourage discussions about the general relationship between contemporary art and contemporary social, political, and environmental issues.  Wu Hung is Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History, Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia, and the Consulting Curator of the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago.

Stephen Campbell – April 10
Andrea Mantegna: Force and the Frame
ABSTRACT: “While generally considered as in terms of its typicality – as group portraiture, prinly propaganda, courtly wall decoration, demonstration of perspective illusion – Mantegna’s “painted chamber” in the Gonzaga palace is considered here as a visual discourse on the pictorial technologies of portraiture and of perspective. The painting embeds princely portraiture in a poetical dialectic, confronting it with remarkable figurations of the pathos such portraiture had normally excluded, and supplements perspective virtuosity with embodied personifications of spiriti visivi in the form of winged erotes. Mantegna will be shown to have resisted a particular Albertian dispensation of pictura defined entirely by the geometric character of vision.”

Amelia Jones – April 17
Queer Feminist Durationality: The Trace of the Subject in Contemporary Art

This paper draws on my research on the history of beliefs about identity in relation to the visual arts, expanded upon in my forthcoming book Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts.  “Queer Feminist Durationality” focusses on recent art practices that offer or suggest a new theory of identification in relation to visuality, one that draws on feminist strategies critical of gender/sexual formations, maintaining a politics relating to specific coalitional concerns, but keeps in play a range of potential meanings. Ms. Jones is Professor and Grierson Chair in Visual Culture at McGill University in Montréal.

Past VISITING SCHOLARS Include:

• Nina M. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer (University of Delaware)
• Bettina Bergmann (Mount Holyoke)
• Irene Bierman (UCLA)
• Suzanne Preston Blier (Harvard University)
• Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt (NYU)
• Norman Bryson (Harvard University)
• Sarah Burns
• Michael Camille (University of Chicago)
• Annemarie Weyl-Carr (Southern Methodist University)
• Anna Chave (CUNY)
• John R. Clark (University of Texas)
• Michael Cole (Columbia University)
• Brad Collins (University of South Carolina)
• Paul Crenshaw (Washington University, St. Louis)
• Joanne Cubbs (Indianapolis Museum of Art)
• Neil Cummings (Chelsea School of Art, U. of London)
• Anthony Cutler (Penn State University)
• Thomas E.A. Dale (University of Wisconsin)
• James Elkins (Art Institute, Chicago)
• Ilene Forsyth (University of Michigan)
• Michael Fried (Johns Hopkins University)
• Elaine K. Gazda (University of Michigan)
• Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby (UC, Berkeley)
• Jeffrey Hamburger (Harvard University)
• Sharon Hirsch (Dickinson College)
• Amelia Jones (McGill University)
• Martin Kemp (Oxford University)
• Donald Kuspit
• Ann Kuttner (University of Pennsylvania)
• Dana Leibsohn (Smith College)
• Amy Lyford (Occidental College)
• Lyle Massey (University of California, Irvine)
• Eugene Metcalf
• David Morgan (Duke University)
• Keith Moxey (Barnard College, Columbia University)
• Lawrence Nees (University of Delaware)
• Carol Ockman (Williams College)
• Mary Pardo (UNC, Chapel Hill)
• Donna Pierce (Denver Art Museum)
• Martin Powers (University of Michigan)
• Donald Preziosi (UCLA)
• Sally Promey (Yale University)
• Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (independent, artist)
• Pamela Smith (Columbia University)
• Catherine B. Soussloff (UBC, Vancouver)
• Barbara Stafford (University of Chicago)
• David Summers (University of Virginia)
• Joyce Szabo (University of New Mexico)
• Ellen Wiley Todd (George Mason University)
• Richard Vinograd (Stanford University)
• Anne Wagner (University of California, Berkeley)
• William E. Wallace (Washington University, St. Louis)
• Thomas Ybarro-Frausto
• Robert Zwijnenberg (University of Leiden)