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.

James Elkins – January 29           “Unresolved Issues in the Worldwide Spread of Art History” 

Abstract: In the last decade the question of art history’s global reach—or lack of it—has appeared as an inescapable topic for art history. As the discipline of art history wakens to the possibility of worldwide art historical writing, it also becomes more seriously engaged with postcolonial theory, critical theory, anthropology, visual studies, cultural studies, and subaltern studies, all of which have been intermittently or continuously interested in art practices outside of Europe and North America. Often there’s a hope that definitively different traditions of writing about art might coexist in an increasingly globalized world. This lecture reports on the some recent attempts to understand how art’s history is written around the world, including the Clark Art Institute’s Mellon project to study world art histories; book Is Art History Global?; the book World Art Studies; the 2007 Stone Summer Theory Institute Art and Globalization; and conferences in Beijing from 2010 to 2012.

Gerardo Mosquera – February 26     “Infinite Islands: Art, Internationalization and Cultural Dynamics” 

Abstract: This talk will analyze problems of art and culture in the context of contemporary internationalized art circuits by delving into the tensions between cultural homogenization and the opposite action of new cultural subjects who are diversifying the international art practice. New epistemological grounds for contemporary artistic discourses and practices will be discussed as they pertain to the plural construction of an international art and its language by a plurality of new artistic subjects who move in and out of local and global spheres, and who operate from the differences more than in their differences.

Griselda Pollock Friday, March 15 in Humanities Rm. 150 at 6 pm

Title: TBA

CRITICAL POSITIONS: Perspectives on Art History, Curatorial Practice, and Art Criticism

The Third Annual Lecture of the CU Art Museum and the Art History Program

Jerome Silbergeld – March 19      “Chinese Photography: Documentation as Art”

Documentary photographs led the way to the artistic recognition and museum collecting of photography in the West. More than a half century later, Chinese “avant-garde photography” has become internationally popular and yet China’s documentary photography has only just now begun to gain recognition. Why this contrast? Do Chinese museums regard photography differently than Western museums do? Do Chinese photographers see China differently than their Western counterparts do? And what does politics have to do with it all? This talk is based on the first major exhibition by Chinese documentary photographers held in America, curated by Professor Silbergeld at the China Institute in New York City.

Tim Barringer – April 9               “Broken Pastoral and the English Folk” 

This paper examines the revived interest in folk culture in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, exploring the relationships between ethnography, musicology and the study of historical arts and crafts. It places within this matrix the work of photographers, painters and composers, who derived both motifs and models for avant-garde artistic identity from the study of the rural poor. I contend that the aesthetic potency of visual and musical compositions drawing on folk sources lay in the widespread acknowledgement of the imminent disappearance of folk culture in the face of modernity and mechanized warfare. Under consideration are the photographer P.H.Emerson, painters George Clausen, Henry Herbert La Thangue and Augustus John, the gardener and writer Gertrude Jekyll, ethnographer E.B. Tylor, and composers Sir Hubert Parry, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger.

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)
• Stephen Campbell – “Andrea Mantegna: Force and the Frame”
• 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)
• Erika Doss – “Cultural Vandalism and Public Memory: Anger, Citizenship, and Memorials in Contemporary America”
• James Elkins (Art Institute, Chicago)
• Ilene Forsyth (University of Michigan)
• Michael Fried (Johns Hopkins University)
• Elaine K. Gazda (University of Michigan)
• Heidi Gearhart – “Is there Virtue in Virtuosity? Art and Skill in the Medieval Monastery”
• Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby (UC, Berkeley)
• Jeffrey Hamburger (Harvard University)
• Sharon Hirsch (Dickinson College)
• Wu Hung – ” Engaging the Real: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art”
• Amelia Jones (McGill University)
• Joan Kee – “Ming Wong’s Cultural Studies”
• 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)