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.
2012 - 2013 Schedule
Anna Brzyski, University of Kentucky
Thursday, October 18, 2012 from 5:00 - 6:00 p.m. in Woodburn Hall 101
Lecture title: “Modernism without Modernity: Internationalism and National Identity in Polish Symbolism at the Fin de Siecle.”
Anna Brzyski is Chellgren Endowed Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the School of Art & Visual Studies, University of Kentucky. She has published broadly on Central/Eastern European, in particular Polish, art and art discourse. Her research interests focus on the dynamics of cultural and economic value, especially on the role played by institutions, discourses, and art groups within those processes. She the editor of Partisan Canons (Duke UP, 2007), and of three special issues of the journal Centropa: Central European Art Groups, 1880-1914 (January 2011), Parallel Narratives. Construction of National Art Histories in Central Europe (September 2008), and Modernism and Nationalism, Postmodernism and Postnationalism? (September 2001). Her research has been supported by grants from the Whiting, Luce, and IREX foundations. She is also a recipient of the Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays Fellowships. Her work has appeared in Art Criticism, Centropa, 19th Century Art Worldwide, RES, n-Media, and a number of anthologies. She is currently completing work on a book project National Modernism: Polish art on the International Stage, 1870-1914 and is serving as the guest project editor for Central & Eastern Europe at Grove Art On-Line (Oxford UP).
Philip Sohm, University of Toronto
Thursday, November 8, 2012 from 5:00 - 6:00 p.m. in Woodburn Hall 101
Lecture title: “Performing Painters: Hands, Brushes and Palettes at work.”
Philip Sohm works on early-modern Italian art and architecture, criticism, theory, biography and economics. His books cover various topics: architectural patronage in Renaissance Venice (The Scuola Grande di San Marco: the Architecture of a Venetian Lay Confraternity, 1982); the history of a word in early modern art criticism (Pittoresco. Marco Boschini, His Critics and Their Critiques of Painterly Brushwork, 1991); the language and theories of artistic style (Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy, 2001); the old age of art and artists (The Artist Grows Old. The Aging of Art and Artists in Italy, 2007); and the economics of art production (co-authored: Painting for Profit. The Economic Lives of Seventeenth-century Italian Painters, 2010). He is currently working on art studios as psycho-social work spaces: the studio as sensorium and other mind/body issues; the material conditions of making art; and painting as performance.
David Doris, University of Michigan
Friday, February 8, 2013 - 5:30 - 6:30 p.m. in Radio/TV 251
Lecture Title: When Two is Three: The Presence of Absence in Yoruba Ogboni Society Staffs
David T. Doris (Ph.D Yale, 2002) is Associate Professor of African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Michigan, in the Department of the History of Art, the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, and the School of Art & Design. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Nigeria, an Ittleson Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts, a Smithsonian Post-Doctoral Fellow at the National Museum of African Art, and a Residential Fellow at the Getty Research Institute. His PhD dissertation, written under the mentorship of Robert Farris Thompson, received the 2004 Roy Sieber Memorial Award for Outstanding Dissertation in African Art History, from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association. The resulting book is Vigilant Things: On Thieves, Yoruba Anti-Aesthetics, and the Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects in Nigeria (University of Washington Press, 2011); it addresses the moral, ethical, and aesthetic roles of assemblages of useless and discarded objects in contemporary Yoruba culture. Vigilant Things won the 2012 Melville J. Herskovits Award, from the African Studies Association.
Art History Association Symposium
Saturday, March 30, 2013 - 5:00-6:00 p.m. Fine Arts 102
Keynote Speaker: Rebecca Green, Bowling Green State University
Lecture Title: Community Public Artistic Responses to HIV/AIDS in Trinidad and Tobago
Rebecca L. Skinner Green is associate professor of World Art and culture and has been teaching at Bowling Green State University since 1996, where she served as Division Chair for almost 10 years. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Indiana University in African, Oceanic, and Pre-Columbian Art History (1991 and 1996 respectively), and her B.A. in Art History from the University of California, Santa Barbara (Honors in African Art History, 1986). Her research focuses on traditional and contemporary art and culture in Africa, with particular specialization on Madagascar, where she studies the relationships between ancestors, funerary practices, divination, gender roles, and traditional and contemporary art. Her research is currently expanding into art and culture in the Caribbean, with primary focus on Trinidad and Tobago, contemporary art, and communal public artistic responses to HIV/AIDS. Her work, which has resulted in conference papers, articles, books, edited volumes, curated exhibitions, and television interviews, has been sponsored by a Social Science Research Council fellowship, a Foreign Language Area Studies grant, a Fulbright fellowship, two Fulbright-Hays fellowships, and an American Association of University Women fellowship. Green regularly presents papers at national and international conferences, including the African Studies Association, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (where she served on the Board of Directors), the Caribbean Studies Association, and others. Green's publications include: "From Cemetery to Runway: Dress and Identity in Highland Madagascar," in Contemporary African Fashion. Suzanne Gott and Tina Loughran (eds), Indiana University Press, 2010; and "Conceptions of Identity and Tradition in Highland Malagasy Clothing," in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture. Special Issue: African Fashion/African Style. Victoria Rovine (editor), June 2009. Green has also authored: "Kanga/Proverb Cloths‚" in Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion, Valerie Steele (ed.), Charles Scribner & Sons, 2005; "Betsileo Textiles: Negotiating Identity Between the Living and the Dead," in Unwrapping A Little-Known Textile Tradition: The Field Museum's Madagascar Textile Collection. Chapurukha M. Kusimba, Judy Odland, and Bennet Bronson (eds). UCLA's Fowler Museum, 2005; and "Ancestral Dreams: Re-Visiting the Past, Re-Living the Present, Re-Creating the Future," in Memory and Representation: Constructed Truths and Competing Realities. Eber, Dena E., and Arthur G. Neal (eds), Bowling Green: Popular Culture Press, 2001
Hannah Higgins, University of Illinois at Chicago
Thursday, April 4, 2013 5:00 - 6:00 p.m. in Fine Arts 102
Lecture Title: "The Ghost in the Machine: The Experimental Art of Manframes."
A Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Higgins is the author of Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002) and The Grid Book (MIT Press, 2009) and an edited anthology with Douglas Kahn, Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art, about the mainframe phase of experimental computer art from 1960-1970 (University of California Press, 2012. Higgins has lectured internationally on topics ranging from Fluxus to the art of Marcel Duchamp, a variety of grid structures across the arts and sciences, and artists’ games. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1994 and has been the recipient of DAAD, Getty and Philips Collection research support.
2011 - 2012 schedule
Spring Semester 2012:
The 2011-2012 Robert and Avis Burke Lecture Series is pleased to present:
Dr. Magee will give her talk “There is a There There: Place in Contemporary African Photography” on Friday, February 10, 2012 at 4:30 in room 102 of the Fine Arts Building.
Dr. Carol Magee is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Africa in the American Imagination: popular culture, racialized identities, and African visual culture (University Press of Mississippi, 2011) and co-editor with Joanna Grabski of a collection of essays African art, Interviews, Narratives: Bodies of Knowledge at Work (Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2012).
Dr. Jones will give her talk “Artist/System: Hans Haacke in the ‘60s” on Friday, February 17, 2012 at 5:00 in room 102 of the Fine Arts Building.
Dr. Caroline A. Jones studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on its
technological modes of production, distribution, and reception; she is professor of art history and
director of the History, Theory, Criticism program in the Department of Architecture at MIT.
Jones has published on subjects ranging from Francis Picabia to John Cage to Robert Smithson
to new media and visual culture, in journals such as Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Res, Science in
Context, Art Papers and Cahiers du Musée national d'art moderne. She also works as an essayist
and curator, most frequently with MIT’s List Visual Art Center on Sensorium (2006), Video
Trajectories (2007), and the planned Hans Haacke 1967 (2011). Jones completed her PhD at
Stanford University in 1992, before which she held positions at The Museum of Modern Art in
New York (1977-83) and the Harvard University Art Museums (1983-85). Her exhibitions
and/or films have been shown at MoMA as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, and the Hara Museum Tokyo,
among other venues; her publications include Sensorium (as editor, 2006), Eyesight Alone
(2005/08), Machine in the Studio (1996/98), the co-edited volume Picturing Science, Producing
Art (1998), and other works. Jones's current research into globalism informs her next book,
Desires for the World Picture: the global work of art, which looks into how art functions in
world’s fairs, national pavilions, and biennial culture.
Dr. Pinder will give her talk “Graffiti, Identity and Space: Culture Jamming Inside and Outside the Gallery” on Saturday, March 3, 2012 at 4:00 in room 102 of the Fine Arts Building. Dr. Pinder is the keynote speaker for the 22nd Annual AHA Graduate Student Symposium.
Dr. Kymberly N. Pinder is a professor in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She teaches, writes and lectures widely on representations of religion, history and race in American Art. Dr. Pinder was the editor of the collection Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History (Routledge, 2002). Her work has also appeared in The Art Bulletin, The Art Journal, Third Text, Outsider, and The AfricanAmerican Review. Dr. Pinder received her Ph.D from Yale University and has been a lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Terra Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon, Ford and Henry Luce Foundations, among others. In 2007 she was a scholar-in-residence at the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center to complete her book on art in Chicago’s African American churches entitled Black Public Art and Religion in Chicago. Her most recent articles appeared in November’s the Smithsonian’s American Art and Romare Bearden: American Modernist. She, the artist Bernard Williams and Art Institute students have also painted three murals in Chicago Public Schools.
Dr. Lodder will give her talk “Defying Gravity: Space and the Russian Avant-Garde” on Friday, March 23, 2012 at 4:30 in room 102 of the Fine Arts Building.
Professor Christina Lodder is an established scholar of Russian art. She is currently a fellow at the University of Edinburgh and an editor of Brill’s Russian History and Culture series. Among her publications are numerous articles and several books, including Russian Constructivism (1983), Constructing Modernity: The Art and Career of Naum Gabo (co-author, 2000), Gabo on Gabo (co-author, 2000), Constructive Strands in Russian Art (2005) and Rethinking Malevich (co-editor, 2007). She has been involved with various exhibitions such as Modernism (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2006) and From Russia (Royal Academy, London 2008).
Fall Semester 2011:
Friday, September 23, 2011 4:30 p.m. in Fine Arts 102
Dr. Worland will give his talk “The War, The West, and 9/11: Frontier Framings of Americans at War in ‘Cold Mountain’ (2003) and ‘The Last Samurai’ (2003)” on September 23, 2011 at 4:30 in room 102 of the Fine Arts Building.
Dr. Rick Worland received his Ph.D. in Motion Picture/Television Critical Studies from UCLA. He is a Professor in the Division of Film & Media Arts at Southern Methodist University where his teaching includes Film History, Documentary, popular genres including the Western and the horror film, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. His work has been published in Cinema Journal, The Journal of Film & Video, and The Journal of Popular Film and Television among others. His first book, The Horror Film: An Introduction appeared in 2007 from Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. He is currently working on a new book for Wiley-Blackwell, Ultimate Trips: Hollywood Films in the Vietnam Era, 1960-1979.
Friday, October 14, 2011 4:30 p.m. in Fine Arts 102
Dr. Brusati will give her talk "Seeing in Pictures: Looking at Dutch Art in Real Time" on October 14, 2011 at 4:30 in room 102 of the Fine Arts Building.
Dr. Celeste Brusati is Professor of the History of Art and Professor in the School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan. Her scholarship has focused on the imagery and ideologies of the pictorial arts in the Netherlands in the early modern period, and in particular on the role of self-imagery and self-representation in texts and images about art. She is the author of Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1995) and Johannes Vermeer (1993) as well as a number of essays and articles on still life, self-imagery, perspective, illusionism, and the relations between visual and literary discourses on art in the Netherlands. She is co-editor with Walter Melion and Karl Enenkel of The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400-1800 (2011). She is currently writing a book on fictions of seeing in Dutch art, and editing an English translation of Samuel van Hoogstraten's painting treatise, the Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst (1678), for the Getty Research Center.
2010 - 2011 schedule
Dr. Melion will give his talk “In sensus candentem imaginem: Varieties of the Spiritual Image in Cornelis Galle’s Life of Blessed Father Ignatius of Loyola (1610)” on Wednesday, October 20th at 4:30 pm. in Woodburn Hall 100
Walter Melion is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta., having previously taught at Duke University and The Johns Hopkins University. In addition to monographs on Jerónimo Nadal’s Adnotationes et meditations in Evangelia (Philadelphia: 2003-2007) and on scriptural illustration in the 16th-century Low Countries (New York and London: 2009), his books include Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s “Schilder-Boeck” (Chicago: 1991) and The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550-1625 (Philadelphia: 2009). He has co-edited numerous volumes, most recently Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout: 2008) and Early Modern Eyes (Leiden: 2009). Forthcoming this year are The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500-1700 (Turnhout: 2010) and Meditatio: Theory and Practice in Late Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual Culture (Leiden: 2010). He is currently writing a book entitled ‘Maria Pictura’: Marian Image-Theory and Praxis in the Low Countries, 1575-1625. He was recently elected Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Ousterhout will give his talk talk “Is Nothing Sacred? A Modernist Encounter at the Holy Sepulchre” on Friday, October 22nd at 5:30 pm. in Fine Arts 102
Robert Ousterhout teaches Byzantine Art and Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Center for Ancient Studies and chairs the graduate groups for the History of Art and the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World. The former President of the U.S. National Committee for Byzantine Studies, his research focuses on the documentation and interpretation of the vanishing architectural heritage of the eastern Mediterranean, in particular the Byzantine architecture, monumental art, and urbanism of Constantinople and Cappadocia. He has published 15 books, including The Art of the Kariye Camii (London-Istanbul, 2002), A Byzantine Settlement in Cappadocia, Dumbarton Oaks Studies 42 (Washington, DC, 2005), The Byzantine Monuments of the Evros/Meriç River Valley (Thessaloniki, 2007, with Ch. Bakirtzis), and Master Builders of Byzantium (2nd paperback edition, University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications, 2008).
Dr. Stiles will give her talk “Ever so Far at Close Shooting Range: Warhol’s Polaroid Photographs” on Friday, November 12th at 4:30 pm. in Fine Arts 102
Kristine Stiles is professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She is an internationally recognized specialist in contemporary global art and theory, performance art, and destruction, violence, and trauma in art. She has taught and lectured internationally on the subject of “cultures of trauma,” the term she coined in 1993 to theorize visual representations of trauma in art, literature, film, and society.
Stiles is the co-editor with Peter Selz of Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (1996), forthcoming from the University of California Press in November 2010 in a 2nd edition, revised and expanded by Stiles. Her book Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and her Circle is also forthcoming in November 2010 from Duke University Press.
She is currently completing Concerning Consequences of Trauma in Art and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2011), and Uncorrupted Joy: Art Actions, History, and Social Value (University of California Press, 2012). With Dr. Kathy O’Dell, she is also working on World Art Since 1945, a survey of global art.
Stiles has authored numerous artists’ monographs; published widely in international art journals, exhibition catalogues, and artist’s books, including most recently Marina Abramovic (Phaidon Press, 2008) and States of Mind: Dan & Lia Perjovschi (2007).
She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including an Honorary Doctorate from Dartington College of Arts & University of Plymouth, England; the J. William Fulbright; and the John Simon Guggenheim for her work on documentary photography of the nuclear age. Stiles is also an artist and equestrian.
