Letter from the Chair / Highlights / Programs in Review / Programs to Come / Our Faculty / Our Staff / Contact Letter from the Chair
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home Letter from the Chair → Highlights → Programs in Review → Programs to Come → Our Faculty → Our Staff → Contact → 2020-2021 Stanford University Department of Art & Art History Newsletter Letter from the Chair / Highlights / Programs in Review / Programs to Come / Our Faculty / Our Staff / Contact Letter From the Chair Letter from the Chair → Highlights → Programs in Review → Programs to Come → Our Faculty → Our Staff → Letter from the Chair Contact → s the Covid crisis hit in March, the Department adapted on A the fly, like everyone else at Stanford and around the world. Courses went online; professors learned about Zoom; students were anxious yet heroic in the way they stayed focused, even as so much around the university, and the globe, changed on a daily basis. Toward the end of spring quarter, George Floyd was murdered. The call for justice resounded at Stanford and elsewhere. A new era of self-reflection and institutional revision was suddenly upon those of us who are not Black. Students in the department petitioned the professors, listing the way the study of Art and Art History at Stanford could be better than before. The faculty responded, first in a series of town halls convened by professors Jonathan Calm and Terry Berlier in the first week of June, then in a series of meetings over the summer at which the department’s curricula and culture were reconsidered and changed. It is all only a beginning. In the midst of that spring quarter, a member of the senior class, studio art major Langston Wesley, passed away—another young Black person taken too soon. Langston Wesley was a protean artist. His work speaks of a creative force one rarely encounters. As I have learned, he was a courageous person in so many ways—he had the courage of his art, and the courage to confront life. One of his paintings, entitled 200020, seems a fit emblem of the year—its pain and possibilities. If we do not ultimately deal in emblems—if the work we make, like Langston Wesley’s, is bigger than “meanings” or “symbols”—this is a sign that we are more than any year of our lives, more even than this one. All that we have ever been, and all that we will be, is the place where we start. Langston Wesley. 200020 (2017). Acrylic on canvas, 72 × 36 in. Alexander Nemerov Chair Highlights Letter from the Chair → Highlights → Programs in Review → Programs to Come → Our Faculty → Our Staff → Highlights Contact → Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative Over the summer, the Department of Art and Art History outlined a series of initia- tives to reaffirm its commitment to anti-racism and the fundamental truth that Black Lives Matter. Changes to the department’s curriculum and general culture were the result of intensive discussions among faculty, students, and alums, with the understanding that these important conversations will continue and inspire ongoing action. Each change represents just one small act to make the department a more inclu- sive place, both now and over time, and addresses the specific fields of art practice, documentary film and video, and art history, as well as the overall culture of the de- partment. Among these changes are the elimination of course fees for undergradu- ate art practice and film production courses; a mandatory new team-taught art his- tory course called Art and Power, which will demonstrate to students how art and its history are shaped by structures of power and inequality and, conversely, how power relations are represented, reinforced, or subverted by art; a commitment to top- ics concerning Black art, delivered by Black professors, curators, critics, and artists, across all the department’s lecture series; student representa- tives from each area at faculty meetings; the implementation of a confidential feedback form; departmental town halls, and more. Read the entire statement. Professor Bissera Pentcheva wins prestigious award for her book on Hagia Sophia Distinguished scholar of Byzantine art Bissera Pentcheva, a professor in the department, received the award for Excellence in Historical Studies from the American Academy of Religion in 2018 for her book Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space and Spirit in Byzantium, published by Penn State University Press in 2017. More than ten years in the making, the book grew out of Pentcheva’s discovery that scientists were conducting ex- periments to measure the acoustics of Hagia Sophia. Her book combines digital acoustic models and video with a close exami- nation of liturgical texts and melodic structures, immersing the reader in the space’s original sacred atmosphere. With imagi- native and scientific precision, she shows how the liturgy sung at Hagia Sophia reverberated to form an aural experience that led to mystical transcendence for worshippers. With the recent decision of Turkish president Recep Tayyid Erdogan to turn Hagia Sophia from a museum back to a mosque, Pentcheva’s book acquires still greater significance. On October 9 and 16, 2020, she convened two panels of distinguished scholars over Zoom to discuss Hagia Sophia in light of Erdogan’s decision. PUBLICATIONS Amber Harper “Aby Warburg: Montage Into History” in Links Amber Harper contributed to a special issue on the German art historian Aby Warburg in the Italian journal Links: Rivista di letteratura e cultura tedes- ca (Journal for German Literature and Cultural Studies, Pisa and Rome). Harper’s essay, “Aby Warburg: Montage Into History” examines the affinity between Warburg’s photographic history, which he called Mnemosyne Atlas, and the advent of cinema. The essay probes Warburg’s fascination with the persistence of the past in the present, a topic that was embodied in Warburg’s concept of Nachleben and one that was likewise of interest to philosophers and writers addressing the new media of cinema in the early-twentieth century. Cyle Metzger Journal of Visual Culture (Volume 19, Issue 2) Cyle Metzger, PhD candidate in art history, and Kirstin Ringelberg, professor of art history at Elon University, together organized, edited, and composed the introduc- tion to the first issue of the Journal of Visual Culture dedicated to transgender art and visual culture. In their introduction, “Prismatic views: a look at the growing field of transgender art and visual culture studies,” Metzger and Ringelberg provide con- text for the collection of essays to follow, including studies on “Marie Høeg’s world- making photography,” David Antonio Cruz’s portrait of the florida girls, Potassa de Lafayette, and more: Transgender art and visual culture studies is a quickly growing field, and we pres- ent it to readers of this themed issue less as a linear discourse or a set of parameters than as a prism, with no clear temporal progression or geopolitical center. In this introduction, we not only announce the articles in this issue and discuss their con- vergences and divergences, but also survey works in transgender studies that have proven critical to discussions of the visual and material within transgender cultures. Reading what follows, we hope any shared notion of transgender art and visual cul- ture is expanded rather than contracted—that we find new ideas rather than merely those that reconfirm our existing sense of things or serve a monolithic construct that limits our future imaginary. This project started as a panel discussion at the College Art Association annual conference in 2018. We then worked long and hard to create an issue that would support the continued growth of transgender art history and visual culture studies. From composing our roster of contributors, to drafting my assessment of the importance of transgender art history in our co-authored introduction, this experience gave me an invaluable opportunity to deepen my own awareness and understanding of how this burgeoning subfield of art history can address some of the most pressing questions about gendered embodiment in art. — Cyle Metzger, PhD candidate, Art History Untitled (S.089, Hanging Asymmetrical Twelve Interlocking Bubbles), ca. 1957. Galvanized steel, brass and iron wire, 26x22x17 in. The Asawa Family Collection. Artwork © 2020 Estate of Ruth Asawa/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Courtesy The Estate of Ruth Asawa and David Zwirner. Photo: Dan Bradica. Jason Vartikar “Ruth Asawa’s Early Wire Sculpture and a Biology of Equality” in American Art PhD candidate Jason Vartikar’s first peer-reviewed article, “Ruth Asawa’s Early Wire Sculpture and a Biology of Equality,” was published in the spring 2020 issue of American Art (Volume 34, Number 1), in which he argues that the artist’s biomor- phic sculptures engage midcentury biological science and its expanding rhetoric against racial hierarchies. The article’s opening epigraph is a quote by Asawa: “The web of an insect . looked more modern than the modern things of that time. And we were forced to go back to natural things.” Following a wide-ranging explora- tion of the historical and cultural context that informed Asawa’s woven-wire forms, Vartikar concludes: . Asawa’s early wire sculptures seem like vivid reminders of primordial beings, evolutionary processes, and the universal biological materials common to the story of humankind. In such a way, their biomorphic contours suggest the repeated forms in nature from which all humans emerge as equal kin. Shane Denson Discorrelated Images (Duke University Press, 2020) In Discorrelated Images, Shane Denson examines how com- puter-generated digital images displace and transform the traditional spatial and temporal relationships that viewers had with conventional analog forms of cinema. Denson analyzes works ranging from the Transformers series and Blade Runner 2049 to videogames and multimedia installations to show how what he calls discorrelated images—images that do not corre- late with the abilities and limits of human perception—produce new subjectivities, affects, and potentials for perception and action.