History of Arts and Architecture

Sponsored by the Department of History of Art and Architecture.

Elizabeth Searcy, PhD candidate at UCLA, gives an illustrated lecture on family and gender in the art of MacArthur Award-winning photographer and visual artist Carrie Mae Weems. She explores the consequences of race and gender stereotypes as presented by Weems’ works on domesticity, in particular the photographic series Family Pictures and Stories and Kitchen Table Series. Sponsored by the Art History program and the Johnson Enrichment Fund. Free

Till-Holger Borchert, director of the Groeningemuseum in Bruges, Belgium, examines the veneration of images imported from Byzantium into the Low Countries, tracing the Byzantine roots of popular images in Early Netherlandish painting and manuscript illumination, and the adaptation of Eastern icons by Northern Renaissance painters such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. Enjoy further conversation over a light lunch in the lobby. Presented as part of the series Off the Wall: Informal Discussions About Art.

During WWII, artwork was displaced on an unprecedented scale, both destroyed during conflict and looted by soldiers and civilians alike. This lecture by Victoria Reed, Monica S. Sadler Curator for Provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, provides a behind-the-scenes look at the process of research and documentation of seizures, thefts, and losses in Europe between 1933 and 1945. Sponsored by the Middlebury College Museum of Art, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Johnson Enrichment Fund, Museum Studies Gift Fund, and the Department of History. Free

This talk by Fabian Goppelsroder asks, what influence does the calendar exert on the short stories published in it? To what extent is the newspaper responsible for the peculiar poetics of the so-called fait divers, the three-line memo of little scandals from across the street? And what exactly turns a tweet into twitterature? Goppelsroder studied philosophy and history in Berlin and Paris and got his PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University. Currently he is a Feodor-Lynen-Fellow at the Department of Germanic Languages at University of Chicago.

Sanchita Balachandran, curator/conservator of the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, discusses recent projects where undergraduate students worked hands-on with ancient art from the museum’s collection. Recent courses such as Recreating Ancient Greek Ceramics and Technical Examination of Roman Egyptian Mummy Portraits have given students the opportunity to interact closely with the objects of the ancient world, and to consider the ancient people who made and used them.

Lecture by Eric Anderson, assistant professor of art history, Rhode Island School of Design. Sigmund Freud’s Vienna office has long been recognized as a site of intellectual revolution and an emblem of modernism. This talk considers the iconic space somewhat differently, linking materiality and color to scientific theories of vision and the mind. Sponsored by the Middlebury College Museum of Art, Department of History of Art and Architecture, and the Johnson Enrichment Fund. Free

In this illustrated lecture via Skype, cartoonist Gene Luen Yang describes how he created his critically-acclaimed graphic novel American Born Chinese, shares the book’s connections to both modern American pop culture and the Ming dynasty novel Journey to the West, and discusses the comics medium’s place in Asian American culture. Sponsored by the Middlebury College Museum of Art, the Chinese Department, the Program in East Asian Studies, the Department of History of Art and Architecture, and the Christian A. Johnson Enrichment Fund. Free

Lecture by Ellen Prokop. Many specialists have claimed that the early modern artist El Greco served as an important source of inspiration for several seminal masters of French 19th-century painting. Yet there is little evidence that these avant-garde artists had the opportunity to study El Greco’s work in person. This lecture outlines this scholarly debate and demonstrates how geospatial technologies and analytical techniques offer a compelling means to explore El Greco’s contested legacy and discover new perspectives on the enduring issue of his influence.

Susan Ackerman, professor of religion, women’s and gender studies, and Jewish studies at Dartmouth and president of the American Schools of Oriental Research; and Shalom Goldman, professor of religion at Middlebury, discuss the legacy of Near Eastern Art in American museums and the ongoing destruction of the ancient cultural patrimony in Iraq and Syria. Sponsored by the Middlebury College Museum of Art, Department of Religion, Department of History of Art and Architecture, and the Director of the Arts. Free