History of Arts and Architecture

Robert Echols ’69, curator of landmark retrospective shows in Venice and Washington, honors the 500th anniversary of the birth of Jacopo Tintoretto with a new assessment of the painter and his contribution, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the organization of a major international art exhibition. Free

Cameron Visiting Architect Lecture, Elizabeth Herrmann, AIA (President, Elizabeth Herrmann Architecture + Design):
Thinking Big, Designing Small: Turning Constraints into Architectural Opportunities
Architect Elizabeth Herrmann is founder of the award-winning, Bristol, Vermont firm, Elizabeth Herrmann Architecture + Design. In this lecture, she will discuss recent work, her approach to design and practice.

Sponsored by the Cameron Visiting Architect Program and organized by the Architectural Studies Program

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Students enrolled in ART 700 exhibit works in various media in this culminating exhibition, showcasing the work of advanced students completing semester long independent studio art.  

Pamela Jordan of the Netherlands’ HEAD-Genuit-Foundation analyzes the Berlin Wall as a sonic infrastructural space. Propaganda broadcasts, guard dogs, gunfire, and sirens were violent, auditory markers along the barrier. The patent differences in the two sides’ soundscapes coerced silence on the East, actively demarcating a territory of surveillance and hostile control. Free

International and Global Studies Colloquium lecture “Pageantry and Power: Gold in the Realm of Women during China’s Six Dynasties and Tang Periods” by Sarah Laursen, assistant professor of history of art and architecture, Middlebury College. Lunch is free for current Middlebury College students/faculty/staff; $5 for others; RSVP by 4/29 to rcga@middlebury.edu.

An illustrated lecture by Dr. Elizabeth Otto, executive director of the Humanities Institute and associate professor of modern and contemporary art history and visual studies at the University at Buffalo. She shares her research on the roles queer identities and gender fluidity played in the development of Modernism’s legendary art school. Free

   

Prints are a unique medium in that, through the repeated printing of a plate or block, prints index their own histories. Most of the prints that we have today from plates made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were likely pulled by hands not belonging to the artists who engraved, etched, and cut the plates themselves. Many, in fact, were printed posthumously, sometimes with interventions being made to the plates before reprintings by later artists and printers.

Shimenawa, or “enclosing ropes”, are used to construct sacred space in the worship of kami (Shinto gods). Shan Zeng ’19 will discuss the history of shimenawa in a short talk based on her thesis work. The talk will be followed by light refreshments and a visit to the Reiff Gallery of Asian Art to view the newly installed shimenawa there.

In this performance and artist talk, the renowned artistic duo better known as Las Nietas de Nonó will share the visceral motivations of their creative work and artistic practices in recent struggles for equity, visibility, and political change in Puerto Rico and beyond. 

Ilustraciones de la Mecánica takes up the history of medical experimentation and the pharmaceutical industry in Puerto Rico. It considers in particular the violence inflicted on Black women’s bodies in the name of medical research.