* * ART, ART HISTORY & VISUAL STUDIES * *

FACULTY EXHIBITION: PEDRO LASCH

Lasch

Pedro Lasch’s new exhibition, Latino/A America: The New York and North America Suites, opens at Branch Gallery on January 16, with an opening reception that evening 5-8 pm. Branch Gallery Is located at 401c Foster Street in Durham, NC.

LECTURE

Thursday, January 22, 12:00-1:30pm
East Duke Building Room 204B
Duke University East Campus

Odo

David Odo
Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University
and Visiting Curator, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University

“Souvenir Photographs and the Anthropological Gaze: New Understandings of 19th-century Photographs of Japan”

Fieldwork in the photographic archives can yield surprising results. This paper discusses the unexpected connections between anthropology and nineteenth-century tourist photography of Japan, connections that became evident as a result of research at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Japanese souvenir photographs produced at this time are well studied and are archived in collections across the globe. Unlike colonized regions of the world, however, Japan was not subject to the anthropological camera's gaze; instead, anthropologists relied on tourist photographs as a source of visual data, often many years after the images were initially produced. The paper will also discuss the anthropological co-opting of souvenir photographs within the larger context of photography and anthropology.

This is a public lecture. It is being co-sponsored by the Visual Studies Initiative, the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, the History Department, the Department of Cultural Anthropology, and the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.

NASHER EXHIBITION

A Room of Their Own:
The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections

December 18, 2008 – April 5, 2009
The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

Grant

Duncan Grant, ‘Seguidilla’ for the Queen Mary, 1937. Oil on canvas,
Image courtesy of private collection.

A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections, organized to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of Bloomsbury's beginnings, will examine the American reception of the art produced between 1910 and the 1970s by the Bloomsbury artists and their associates and collaborators. The exhibition will include paintings, works on paper, decorative arts, and book arts borrowed from public and private collections throughout the United States, and will focus on how this small group of artists made its imprint on the cultural thinking of their day.

The exhibition is organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in conjunction with the Nasher Museum. The exhibition premieres at the Nasher Museum, then travels to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell. It will also travel to the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill; the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; and the Palmer Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

Bell
Vanessa Bell, Study for the Portrait of Leonard Woolf, 1938. Oil on paper. Image courtesy of the Victoria University Library Collection, Toronto.

A Room of Their Own is made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. A full-color exhibition catalogue has been produced in conjunction with the show. At the Nasher Museum, the exhibition and related programs are sponsored in part by the Duke University Provost's Common Fund, Duke's Graduate Liberal Studies Program, the Wachovia Foundation and the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation, Inc.

FACULTY PUBLICATION

Stiles

Kristine Stiles wrote the monograph-length survey text for a new book on the internationally renowned Serbian performance artist, Marina Abramovic. The book, Marina Abramovic, is published by Phaidon in its artist book series. Abramovic was the winner of the Golden Lion at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 for her performance "Balkan Baroque," a multimedia installation and performance.

NEW FACULTY MEMBER IN VISUAL ARTS

Alt

The department welcomes Casey Alt this semester as Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice of New Media Art. He will be offering a new course in visual arts: “Interactive Graphics: Secret Code.” Alt completed his MFA in Design/Media Arts at UCLA in 2008. From 2004-2008, Alt was Program Director for Duke’s Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS) program, where he also developed and taught ISIS courses. He received his MA in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology in 2001 from Stanford.

NEH GRANT SUPPORT

NEH

A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections was featured in the November/December 2008 issue of Humanities, the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, on their Endowment-supported events page.

NASHER EXHIBITION IN TIME’S TOP TEN

Greco

The Nasher Museum of Art’s major exhibition, El Greco to Velazquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III, was named to Time magazine’s list of top ten museum exhibitions for 2008, coming in at No. 3. Time’s review stated:

“…during his [Philip III] reign Spanish painting arrived at that blend of realism and visual drama that would culminate in Velázquez. Philip took the throne when El Greco was still launching his thunderbolts, and a bunch of them opened this show with a bang. But some of the most interesting canvases were by lesser-known artists, like Juan Bautista Maino, who were giving a Spanish accent to the Italian Baroque — or Juan Sánchez Cotan, whose almost Surreal pictures of vegetables hanging from strings in bright light against black backgrounds are too strange for any art historical categories to account for them.”

RETHINKING TEACHING

Prof. Bruzelius teaching “Gothic Cathedrals” in one of the new Link classrooms.

Caroline Bruzelius, Anne M. Cogan Professor of Art History, is profiled on Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology’s website about teaching with flexible learning spaces in Perkins Library’s new “Link.” The Link is “an expansive and flexible campus facility offering innovative spatial and technological approaches to teaching and learning.” You can read about Prof. Bruzelius’ experience on two blog posts on CIT’s page at http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/11/21/link2009/

Senior Charles Sparkman teaching the AutoCad program portion of the “Gothic Cathedrals” class.

NEW VISUAL ARTS/VISUAL STUDIES COURSES FOR SPRING ’09

ARTSVIS 170
Interactive Graphics: Critical Code
Instructor: Alt
Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Smith Warehouse, W 11:40-2:30

Interactive Graphics: Critical Code is an introduction to interactive graphics programming for artists. Students will gain understanding of object-oriented programming via the Processing programming environment as well as historical and theoretical appreciation of interactivity and computer graphics as artistic mediums. Course meetings will combine discussions of key concepts from the readings with hands-on Processing projects and critiques. No previous programming experience or prerequisites required. 4 units. Enrollment limited to 15 students. Meets Wednesdays from 11:40-2:30 in Smith Warehouse, Bay 12, Room 101.

Please email Professor Casey Alt directly at caseyalt@duke.edu <mailto:caseyalt@duke.edu> to enroll.

VISUALST185.01
Digital Perspectives - Navigating the Digital Visual
Instructor: Seaman
Art, Art History & Visual Studies
East Duke, T-TH 1:15-2:30

This course will provide a broad approach to discussing digital visuals. Differing intellectual perspectives will provide the student with a broad background to a series of contemporary practices that employ digital media as a means of authorship. This course involves extensive readings and online viewing of digital media. Topics of discussion will include the social and cultural ramifications of particular forms of digital media, the authorship potential of these forms in terms of Art Content, and the potential to develop these forms as a vehicle of personal expression, empirical research, as well as social interaction. The interdisciplinary approach to digital media production will also explore how differing groups of art practitioners, scientists, and digital humanitarians might explore such systems though the definition of bridging languages.

VISUALST200S
Theories of Visual Studies
Instructor: Weisenfeld
Art, Art History & Visual Studies
East Duke, TH 2:50-5:20

Capstone seminar focusing on advanced visual studies theories, as well as individual senior projects undertaken as a written research paper or visual production. Consent of instructor required.

This course explores the theories and practices of Visual Studies. We will examine and discuss a wide range of approaches to the creation and interpretation of visual experience in everyday life, which is filled with a constant flow of images on billboards, TVs, subways, and buses; and in magazines, newspapers, emails, and airport terminals. This fast-paced production of images has revolutionized communication. The class will consider the many ways that art historians and cultural critics have examined and described visual art, photography and film, fashion and everyday objects, as well as how the visual is used in the social sciences and sciences. Students will learn how Visual Studies has contributed to shaping the concepts, values, and meanings that constitute cultural life in a diverse range of societies; how to extrapolate methods and theories of visual culture from applied research; and how to develop the skills necessary to think productively and write effectively about the meaning of images and the visual world.

VISUALST201SL
Wired! New Representational Technologies
Instructors: Brady, Bruzelius, Dillon, Olson, Salvatella de Prada
Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Smith Warehouse, MW 10:05-10:55, F 10:05-12:00

Historical disciplines that explore archaeological sites, buildings, and cities can benefit from new visual technologies to record and communicate complex sets of visual and physical information. This course will introduce techniques for the visual presentation and interpretation of such material through a series of reconstructive case studies. Course includes a multimedia lab component for hands-on experience in new media tools such as DHTML, Google Earth/Maps, Flash and Illustrator, Google SketchUp and other 3D rendering platforms.

VISUALST265S.01
Emergent Interface Design
Instructor: Seaman
Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Smith Warehouse, T 2:50-5:20

This class will explore a number of issues surrounding embodied approaches to interface design. The class will articulate a methodology for generating new forms of human/computer interface. The course will include workshops, discussions, student presentations, critiques and group brainstorming sessions. Content related to biomimetics; haptic body knowledge; multi-modal sensing; physical computing; physical | digital relationships; networked relations; the potentials of virtual space and different qualities of space, both visual and sonic; as well as datatbase potentials will be discussed and explored in the service of developing new approaches to interface.

Please refer all relevant departmental information for inclusion in our weekly announcement to John Taormina, Director, Visual Resources Center, at taormina@duke.edu.