* * ART, ART HISTORY & VISUAL STUDIES * *

FACULTY BOOK SIGNING AT THE NASHER
Thursday, February 12, 2009, 5:30 PM

Powell

Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, presents his new book, Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture. Free, and followed by a reception.

GRADUATE STUDENT SYMPOSIUM
Friday, February 13, 2009

Living in a Material World:
Consumerism, Commercialization, and Spectacle

Graduate Student Presentations
10:30 – 11:30 AM

Alexis Clark
“Painting on the Walls: The Myth of Paul Gauguin in the Early Twentieth Century”

Kency Cornejo
“Eres lo que Lees: Habacuc’s Exposition No. 1”

Graduate Student Presentations
11:45 AM – 1:00 PM

Fredo Rivera
“Liberating the Havana Hilton, Revolutionizing Modern Form”

Hilary Coe Smith and Sandra van Ginhoven
“Accounting for Preferences for Paintings in Paris: 1764-1780”

East Duke Building 204B
East Campus, Duke University

Free and open to the public.

Keynote Address
4:30 - 5:30 PM

Monopoly
Oyvind Fahlstrom, Shooting of Du Gamla du Fria (Provocation), 1969

“New Games”

Pamela Lee
Professor of Art and Art History, Stanford University

Haemisegger Family Lecture Hall
Nasher Museum of Art
Duke University

Free and open to the public.

In her lecture, Professor Lee traces a genealogy for interactivity in contemporary art in terms of the principles of game theory, the insidious branch of economics that emerged with American postwar military strategizing. What are the historical implications of speaking about contemporary artworks through the rhetoric of games? What extra-aesthetic models might complicate our understanding of such practices, troubling the utopian and democratizing premises underlying much participatory art? Far from treating artworks as merely playful, or taking recourse to the long tradition of gaming associated with the historical avant-garde, Professor Lee will contend that such relational modes rest as much with a theory of conflict as they do with the playful.

Professor Lee specializes in modern and contemporary art, globalization theory, and criticism. Her books include Chronopobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s and Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark.

Support for these events is generously provided by The Duke University Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies; The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; and The Program in Literature at Duke University

GUGGENHEIM EXHIBITION

Kristine Stiles, Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, served on a team of advisors to Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator for Asian Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim, for Munroe's current exhibition, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, which opened January 30 and runs through April 19, 2009 in New York. Stiles also contributed an essay, "Irregular Ways of Being: Performance Art and the Experiential Present," to the accompanying exhibition catalogue/book. In Stiles' essay, she writes: "Among the myriad ways that artists nurtured by Asian thought have harnessed its energies are: emphasizing the immediacy of the moment; remaining aware in the present; coping with war and Diaspora; accepting death as a dimension of life; embracing nothing as productive of the very constitution of the world; understanding anomalies and invisible forces as part of matter and mind; reckoning and partnering with the omnipotence of nature to sustain the planet; and uncoupling art from the ego to modify Western epistemological dualisms."

SOLO EXHIBITION IN FRANCE

Lasch

Pedro Lasch, A Sculptural Proposal for the Zocalo, 1999/2004

Pedro Lasch, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Visual Arts, will be having a solo exhibition at Galerie of Marseille in Marseille, France. Opening Reception: March 7. Closing April 18.
http://www.galerieofmarseille.com/comingnext/comingnext.html
Among the works shown in the exhibition will be selections from A Sculptural Proposal for the Zocalo (1999/2004).

BOOK WINS DESIGN AWARD

Powell2

Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture, by Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, has won the best design award in the "Scholarly Illustrated" category from the American Association of University Press. The AAUP's 2009 Book, Jacket and Journal Show is a competition that recognizes meritorious achievement in the design, production, and manufacture of books, jackets, and journals by members of the university press community. The designer for the book was Matt Avery; Cutting a Figure is published by the University of Chicago Press, 2008.

BLOOMSBURY AT THE NASHER
Duke in Depth Weekend

February 27-28, 2009

Bell
Vanessa Bell, Flowers in a Vase, 1917. Watercolor, 18-1/2 x 12-1/2 inches. Image courtesy of private collection.

This year's Duke in Depth weekend, February 27-28, 2009, celebrates a culmination of the yearlong programs at Duke designed to illuminate the Bloomsbury Group and showcase the Bloomsbury exhibition of works at the Nasher Museum of Art.

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.
For the full schedule, please go to: http://www.dukealumnicenter.com/ed_travel/Bloomsbury_Final_Schedule.pdf

PUBLIC LECTURE
Thursday, March 5, 2009, 4:30 PM

"Inclusions and Exclusions: Folklore and Ethnographic Museums in 19th-century France"

Nelia Dias
Department of Anthropology, University of Lisbon

East Duke Building, East Campus
Duke University

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