Art History | Events

Past Events

Beyond the Binary" Race-ing Art

6:00 pm – 7:00 pm, Monday, November 9, Abramson Family Recital Hall

A native of Los Angeles, California, and current New York resident, Sanford Biggers uses the study of ethnological objects, popular icons, and the Dadaist tradition to explore cultural and creative syncretism, art history, and politics. An accomplished musician, Biggers often incorporates performative elements into his sculptures and installations, resulting in multilayered works that act as anecdotal vignettes, at once full of wit and clear formal intent. In 2009, he will realize several new commissioned works for the New York Percent for the Arts, Creative Capital, New York; the Kitchen, New York; and Harvard University's Office of Fine Arts. Biggers is presently a full-time faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University's Sculpture and Expanded Media program and a visiting scholar at Harvard University's Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and Office of the Arts for 2009.

Panel Discussion

6:00 pm – 8:00 pm, Tuesday, November 10, Abramson Family Recital Hall

Join the Department of Art for a panel discussion on this semester's theme. Panelists will include Howardina Pindell, Sanford Biggers, Jiha Moon, Galo Moncayo, and Isabel Manalo. 

Film Screening: The Heretics

October 30, Abramson Family Recital Hall

The Heretics uncovers the inside story of the Second Wave of the Women's Movement for the first time in a feature film. Joan Braderman, director and narrator, follows her dream of becoming a filmmaker to New York City in 1971. By lucky chance, she joins a feminist art collective at the epicenter of the 1970's art world in lower Manhattan. In this first person account, The Heretics charts the history of a feminist collective from the inside out. Braderman will introduce the film and lead a question and answer session afterward.

This event is cosponsored by the National Museum of Women in the Arts and American University's Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program.

The 'New Woman' in Impressionist Painting and Visual Culture

4th Annual Distinguished Scholar Lecture in Art History
featuring Dr. Ruth E. Iskin

Wednesday, September 30, 8:00 pm, in the Abramson Family Recital Hall, Katzen Arts Center

Ruth E. Iskin (PhD, University of California, Los Angeles) will explore whether Impressionist painting represented the "New Woman" and how the latter's images functioned in diverse genres of visual culture, from caricatures to posters and photographs. By looking at a broad range of visual representations that circulated in the late nineteenth-century, the talk probes images as intervening in discourses, arguing that the latter were shaped across a dynamic field of art and print culture.

Professor Iskin is a Paul Mellon and Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, The National Gallery of Art. Her areas of research include Impressionist painting and consumer culture; nineteenth century art, graphic arts and culture; gender and modernity. She teaches nineteenth-century art and visual culture; women's art; and museum and curatorial studies at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She has held an Andrew W. Melon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Penn Humanities Forum, the University of Pennsylvania; The Ahmanson-Getty Research Fellowship at the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies, and The Killam Memorial Fellowship at the University of British Columbia. Her book, Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture, has been published by Cambridge University Press (2007), and her essays have appeared in journals, anthologies and museum exhibition catalogues.