History of Arts and Architecture

Professor Kirin Narayan of the School of Culture, History, and Language at Australian National University will give a public lecture on Vishwakarma, a Hindu deity traditionally associated with the creative processes of making the material world. Elaborated through very different iconographies, genealogies, and rituals in different regions of India, his worship was once confined to craftsmen who view him as a primordial ancestor, honor him through tools, and pray to him for inspiration and success.

Jeehee Hong, Associate Professor of East Asian Art History at McGill University and current Fellow at the Clark Art Institute, examines representations of grief in Chinese middle-period (9th-14th centuries) funerary contexts. Hong shows that fictional or localized mourners were “inserted” into monuments to transmit corporeal and raw emotions. Sponsored by the Department of History, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Middlebury College Museum of Art, and the Program in East Asian Studies.  Free

Daniel Hackbarth, visiting assistant professor of art and art history at Colgate University, gives an illustrated lecture on the woodblock prints of the German Expressionist artist group Die Brücke (1905–1913), focusing on the direct encounter between metal tools, viscous ink, and fibrous wood these images recorded, and highlighting an ongoing construction of the self through an intentionally laborious artistic process. Sponsored by the Middlebury College Museum of Art. Free

Lecture by Elizabeth Childs, Etta and Mark Steinberg Professor of Art History, Washington University in St. Louis. French avant-garde artist Paul Gauguin is perhaps best known for the art he produced in Tahiti during his first trip there in 1891. This lecture examines a later period of Gauguin’s life and art, including his increasing engagement with modern Polynesian culture, his fascination with global religions, his artistic texts, and his relocation to the Marquesas Islands in 1901. Sponsored by the Art History Program and the Johnson Enrichment Fund. Free

Lecture by Ara Merjian, associate professor of Italian and art history, NYU. By using humble materials, Arte Povera artists tacitly protested the corporate, technological design which had come to distinguish Italy by the late 1960s—the most conspicuous upshot of the so-called “economic miracle” of 1958–63, which had transformed the nation from a chiefly agrarian backwater into a major industrial power. Sponsored by the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Johnson Enrichment Fund. Free

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.