Burke Lecture Series
Robert and Avis Burke Lecture Series
Robert Elisha Burke (1884-1957) was an artist and professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University from 1907 to 1949. He was Professor Emeritus of Fine Arts from 1949 until his death in 1957, when his wife, Avis Adalaide Tarrant Burke (1886-1984), endowed the department of the History of Art to present distinguished scholars to Bloomington. Mrs. Burke was widely known for her philanthropic interests including her donation to Indiana University of nineteenth century women’s clothing and fans.
The purpose of the Robert and Avis Burke Lecture Series is to share the current research of outstanding scholars with Indiana University students and faculty as well as the larger Bloomington community. We attempt to coordinate the key speakers to the interests of faculty and topics in current courses.
2009-2010 Burke Lecture Series
September 18, 2009
Charles Colbert (Assistant Professor, Portland State University)
"Whistler's Haunted Nocturnes: Spiritualism and Art in the Nineteenth Century."
FA 102, Time 4:30 pm
After graduating with a Ph. D. from Harvard University in 1978, Charles Colbert taught at Middlebury College. He has also taught at Boston College and Brandeis University. Since 2000 he has resided in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches at Portland State University. He is the author of A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America and many articles on American art. His current project, a book on Spiritualism and American Art, is awaiting publication.
September 25, 2009Renata Holod (Professor, University of Pennsylvania) rholod@sas.upenn.edu
"Event and Memory: The Portrayal of a (Minor) Victory in 13th-Century Iran."
FA 102, Time 5 pm
Renata Holod is Professor of the History of Art, and Curator, Near East Section, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her BA in Islamic Studies from the University of Toronto, MA in the History of Art from University of Michigan and Ph.D. in Fine Arts from Harvard University. She has carried out archaeological and architectural fieldwork in Syria, Iran, Morocco, Central Asia, Turkey, Tunisia, and Ukraine. She has co-authored and edited works such as: City in the Desert: an account of the archaeological expedition to Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi, Syria; Architecture and Community: Building in the Islamic World Today; Modern Turkish Architecture; The Mosque and the Modern World; The City in the Islamic World; and An Island Through Time: Jerba Studies.
Professor Holod has served as Convenor, Steering Committee Member, and Master Jury Chair of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. She also served as consultant to Skidmore, Owing and Merrill (SOM), Arthur Ericson Architects, and Venturi Scott-Brown Architects. In 2004, the Islamic Environmental Research Centre honored her with an Award for outstanding work in Islamic Architectural Studies.
November 5, 2009
Dr. Gloria Groom, Art Institute of Chicago
“Eva Gonzalès and Berthe Morisot: Manet's Muses and Models”
FA 015, 5:05 pm
Gloria Groom is the David and Mary Winton Green Curator of Nineteenth Century European Painting and Sculpture at The Art Institute of Chicago. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin (1989) with a specialty in late l9th century French painting. During her three years in Paris she studied at the Université de la Sorbonne, UNESCO and Ecole du Louvre, in addition to interning at the Musée Picasso. She came to the Art Institute in November 1984 as a research assistant for the popular exhibition A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape (1984-1985). Two years later, she worked on and wrote for the exhibition and catalogue The Art of Paul Gauguin (1986-1987).
Her book, Edouard Vuillard: Painter-Decorator was published by Yale University Press in 1993. Since then she has been involved as both curator and catalogue author for exhibitions on important French artists including: Redon (1994), Caillebotte (1995) Renoir (1998), Bonnard and Vuillard (2001) Manet (2003) Seurat (2004), Toulouse-Lautrec (2005) and the major loan exhibition held in New York, Chicago and Paris , entitled Cézanne to Picasso (2007). Most recently she played a major role in the reinstallation of the 19th century European Art galleries, which reopened in January 2009.
An internationally acclaimed author, curator, and lecturer, she was bestowed the title Chevalier des arts et lettres by the French government in 2005. Her current projects include the organization of a major loan exhibition, Fashion Impressionism and Modernity, which will open in Paris in fall of 2012 and preparations towards an on-line scholarly and technical catalogue of the 19th century collection.
Dr. Groom lives in Oak Park with her art teacher husband and two teenage sons.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Dr. Henry Drewal, University of Wisconsin, Madison
"Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art of Ancient Nigeria"
FA 102, 5 pm
Born and raised in New York City and Hempstead, NY, Henry Drewal received his BA from Hamilton College majoring in French and minoring in Fine Arts. After graduation he joined the Peace Corps, taught French and English and organized vacation arts camps in Nigeria. It was during his two years in Nigeria that he apprenticed himself to a Yoruba sculptor. That experience was transformative. He returned home, entered graduate school at Columbia University in African Studies with an interdisciplinary specialization in African art history and culture studying under Professors Margaret Mead, Douglas Fraser, Paul Wingert, and Hans Himmelheber. He received two Masters' degrees (1968/69) and a PhD from Columbia in 1973. He began teaching at The Cleveland State University (where he was chair of the Art Department), and was a Visiting Professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara and SUNY-Purchase. He also served as Curator of African Art at The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Neuberger Museum. Since 1991 He has been the Evjue-Bascom Professor of Art History and Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Adjunct Curator of African Art at the Chazen Museum of Art, UW-Madison.
Over the years he has published several books and edited volumes and many articles on various aspects of African art, primarily on the arts of Yoruba-speaking peoples of West Africa and the Yoruba diaspora in the Americas, primarily Brazil. He has curated many exhibitions of African art: Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (toured seven cities) and Beads, Body and Soul: Art and Light in the Yoruba Universe (with John Mason), which toured five US cities (Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami, Madison, and New York) between 1998-2000. The book/catalogue for the exhibition was a finalist for the Arts Council of the ASA award in 2001. He has received numerous academic awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, several NEH and Fulbright awards, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency.
In 2001, he began research (funded with a Senior Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies) on the arts, identities, cultures, and histories of African descendants (Siddis) in India. Most recently, he completed work on an edited volume (Sacred Waters – 46 contributors plus DVD published by Indiana University Press, 681 pp.), curated and wrote the catalogue for the major traveling exhibition entitled Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas organized by the Fowler Museum-UCLA.
Spring 2009
Friday, January 16th @ 4:30 PM, Fine Arts 102Dr. Patricia Mainardi, Professor of Art History, City University of New York
Title: “Paths Forgotten, Calls Unheard: Illustration in the 19th Century”
Dr. Patricia Mainardi is the author of numerous books and articles on 19th century art, including Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (Yale, 1988), which received the Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association as the outstanding art history book of its year; The End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third Republic (Cambridge, 1993), and Husbands Wives and Lovers: Marriage and Its Discontents in 19th Century France (Yale, 2003). She is currently completing a book entitled “Another World: Illustrated Print Culture in 19th-Century France.” She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts At the National Gallery of Art, the Institute for Advanced Study, among others.
Friday, January 23rd @ 4:30 PM, Woodburn Hall 120
Dr. Elisabeth Cameron, Associate Professor of Art History, University of California, Santa Cruz
Title: “Art that Dies: Iconoclasm and the Perduring Object in African Art”
Dr. Elisabeth Cameron’s research focuses on Central African art, particularly in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She is the author of several books, her most recent being The Art of the Lega (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 2001). Others include Isn't S/He a Doll? Play and Ritual in African Sculpture (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1996) and Reclusive Rebels: An Approach to the Sala Mpasu and their Neighbors (San Diego: San Diego Mesa College, 1992).Reception to be held at the SoFA Gallery 6:00 P.M.
Friday, February 20 @ 4:00 PM, Fine Arts 102Dr. Mark Meadow, Associate Professor of Art History, University of California, Santa Barbara Title: "The Aztecs at Ambras: Social Networks and the Dissemination of Knowledge about the New World"
Professor Meadow is the author of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Netherlandish Proverbs and the Practice of Rhetoric, 2002 and the editor of several volumes, including translations and critical editions of Symon Andriessoon's 1550 Duytsche adagia ofte spreeckwoorden, Hilversum, 2003 and Samuel Quiccheberg's 1565 Inscriptiones vel tituli theatri amplissimi, Los Angeles, forthcoming. A specialist in Northern European art of the early-modern period, Professor Meadow has particular interests in the histories of rhetoric and collecting and in early-modern ritual and spectacle. As Co-Director of The Microcosms Project, Prof. Meadow is investigating the history, functions and future of the material collections in the contemporary university. He recently founded Proteus: Studies in Identity Formation in Early-Modern Image-Text-Ritual-Habitat, a new book series with Brepols Publishers in Belgium.
Friday, February 20 @ 5:30 PM, Radio & TV 251
Dr. Ellen Johnston Laing, CCS Center Associate & Retired Maude I. Kerns Distinguished Professor of Oriental Art, University of Michigan
Title: “Art and Politics on the Eve of the Chinese Revolution.”
Dr. Lang presents a Horizons of Knowledge Lecture on the topic of “Art and Politics on the Eve of the Chinese Revolution.” This program is made possible with generous support from the Horizons of Knowledge, Thomas T. Solley Endowment for the Pamela Buell Curator of Asian Art, East Asian Studies Center, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Department of History, Friends of Art, The Robert and Avis Burke lecture series, and the Department of the History of Art. The lecture will be followed by a reception in the Thomas T. Solley Atrium at the IU Art Museum from 6:30-8:00 at which time the second floor gallery, Art of Asia and the Ancient Western World, will be open so that visitors might enjoy an installation of Chinese Socialist Realist prints on loan to the Museum in Memory of John and Alice Colling.
Reception in the Thomas T. Solley Atrium from 6:30 - 8:00 p.m. at which time the second floor gallery, Art of Asia and the Ancient Western World, will be open so that visitors might enjoy an installation of Chinese Socialist Realist prints on loan to the museum in Memory of John and Alice Colling.
Friday, March 6 @ 3:30 PM, Woodburn Hall 101
Dr. David Peters Corbett, Professor of Art, University of York
Title: "The Moral Result: Martin Johnson Heade, Frederic Edwin Church, Theodore Winthrop and the Painter's Responsibility"
Professor Corbett has written extensively on English painting after 1850 and is now at work on a project which looks at the relationship between landscape painting and depictions of the city in the United States between the mid-nineteenth century and the Armory Show in 1913. The project looks at the subject from two new perspectives. Firstly, the US is placed within an expanded field, drawing in comparisons from Mexico and Canada . Secondly, it identifies and examines a set of themes, revolving around the idea of creation as the work both of the painter and of nature, which are thematised in the works and which structure their aesthetics. He also continues to have an interest in British art and is now at an early stage of research on painting and culture in England between 1930 and the mid-1960s.
Thursday, April 2 @ 4:30 PM, Library 033
Dr. Davor Dzalto, Assistant Professor of the History and Theory of Art, Niš University in Serbia
Title: "Vanishing Acts: Corporeal Absence in Twentieth Century Art."
Dr. Davor Dzalto is an Assistant Professor of the History and Theory of Art at Niš University in Serbia. He received his Ph.D. from Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg, Germany with a dissertation entitled "The Role of the Artist in Self-Referent Art." He has received fellowships from the governments of Germany, Norway, Serbia, and the United States, and lectured from Bonn to Belgrade. A practicing artist as well, Dr. Dzalto has had exhibitions and performances in Austria, Germany, Greece, Russia, and Serbia. He is spending the spring semester 2009 at Indiana University on a prestigious fellowship from the U.S. Department of State.
Thursday, April 2 – Sunday, April 5, Indiana University Memorial Union Shifting Cultural Frontiers in Late Antiquity
The Department of History at Indiana University will host the eighth biennial Society of Late Antiquity's Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity Conference. This conference seeks to understand how cultural transformation occurred amidst the political and religious disruption that can seem characteristic of late antiquity.Friday, April 10 @ 4:30 PM, Fine Arts 102
Dr. Anna Brzyski, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Kentucky
Title: “Who is Contemporary and Who is Not: Historiography and Modernism in East Central Europe”
Anna Brzyski's research interests focus on Central/Eastern Europe, in particular, Poland. Her work examines the critical discourse and institutional framework within which modern art developed in this region. She is also interested in systemic analysis of art worlds, relationship between modernism and nationalism, dynamics of self-promotion within artists' groups, emergence of art canons, impact of specific languages on development of art historical paradigms, and discursive shifts in the meaning of the term "modernism."