Art & Art History
Notables
Spring 2013
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Art notables
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Kim Smith, professor of art history, gave an invited lecture on May 18, 2013 at a German Expressionism Symposium held by the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon, in conjunction with an exhibition of Expressionist prints. Her talk was entitled “Primitivism and Perception in the Work of Franz Marc.” The event was organized by distinguished scholar Sherwin Simmons, and honored his retirement from the profession after forty years of important contributions to the field of German art history. -
Allison Miller, assistant professor of art history, gave an invited lecture at the San Antonio Museum of Art on April 16th entitled, “From Splendor to Revolt: Royal Intrigue and the Terracotta Works of Early Han China.” The talk focused on Han ceramic warrior figurines and was held in conjunction with the special exhibition, “Entombed Treasures: Funerary Art of Han Dynasty China.” -
Thomas Howe, professor of art and art history, presented a new interpretation of the site of the ancient Roman villas he has been studying in Stabiae, Italy, at an international conference titled “Public and Private in the Roman House” held in Helsinki, Finland, April 18-20, 2013. Read more here. -
Kate Nelson, studio arts technician, has had work accepted into America’s Clayfest at BlueLine Arts Gallery in Roseville, Calif., and an exhibit titled Less is More: Small Works in a Great Space at the Mitchell Gallery at St. Johns College in Annapolis, Md. She also has a solo exhibition and lecture planned for next year at Pittsburg State University.
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Patrick Hajovsky, Assistant Professor of Art History, gave a talk for the Pan American Round Table of Austin on February 25th. He discussed his research on painting in Cusco and devotional imagery following its disastrous earthquake of 1650.
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Patrick Veerkamp, Professor of Art, was invited to exhibit “Cordial Bottle with Cups” in “From Yellow Clay to Black Gumbo: Earth Movers in the Lone Star State,” which opened at Southern Methodist University, Pollock Gallery (through February 16) and will travel to Houston for the National Council on Education for the Ceramics Arts annual conference in March. Veerkamp’s work is essentially functional, informed by concepts pertaining to domesticity, intimacy, ritual and celebration, which reinterprets traditional forms in a personal and contemporary visual language. -
Victoria Star Varner, Professor of Art and Chair of Studio Art, was selected to exhibit a print in the 34th Bradley International Print and Drawing Exhibition at the Heuser Art Gallery, Bradley University, Illinois. Their website states, “The Bradley International Print and Drawing Exhibition is the second-longest running juried print and drawing competition in the country. Every two years it features the best contemporary graphic artwork from around the globe. All accepted artwork is featured in a full-color exhibition catalogue and on the exhibition website.” The exhibit was juried by Stephen Goddard, Senior Curator and Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. -
Victoria Star Varner, Professor of Art and Chair of Studio Art, was invited to present a body of eight recent works in an exhibition “PROOF” at De Pree Art Gallery, Hope College, Michigan, from January 11 – February 8. She exhibited paintings, drawings and prints from her ongoing “Crossed Paths” and “Centripetal Forces” series, which are comprised of indexical images that function as both art and document, i.e., ‘proof’. Though these works appear to be abstract, they are in fact direct recordings of centripetal force (nature’s force which seeks a center from a curved path) made by means of rope spinning. Varner’s recent work makes reference to the way that cultural identity is constructed, particularly in relation to American identity. Through this work, she investigates the potential of the marks left by rope spinning to inspire layered social and political metaphors.
Fall 2012
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Victoria Star Varner, Professor of Art and Chair of Studio Art, exhibited Crossed Paths: Arrangement #3 in Pressing Matters: A National Print Competition and Exhibition at the Pacific Art League, Palo Alto, California in November. The selected print is part of an ongoing series of Varner’s paintings, drawings and prints that function as indexical documents and respond to topics of American identity. The engraving is part of her series of engravings printed on translucent silk tissue from ten copper plates and presented in two superimposed layers. The layered presentations from ten matrices would, if carried to their numerical conclusion, number 6,400. The juror for the exhibition was Valerie Wade, Director of Crown Point Press, San Francisco, California. -
Thomas Howe, Professor of Art and Art History and Chair of Art History, and Coordinatore Generale of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation, has the general article on all Vesuvian archaeology (“Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Vesuvian Area,”) to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology and the Bible, ed. Daniel Master (Wheaton Coll.). The article is a general introduction to the major Vesuvian sites based on recent scholarly work and includes sections on the controversies over history of urban development, political system, status of women and slaves, and developments in religion in the first centuries B.C. and A.D. -
Thomas Howe, Professor of Art and Art History and Chair of Art History, and Coordinatore Generale of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation, contributed a chapter A Companion to Greek Architecture, ed. Margaret M. Miles, U.C. Irvine, for Wiley-Blackwell publishers. The article, “Hellenistic Architecture in Italy: Consuetudo Italica,” is general summary of architectural development in the last two centuries of the Roman Republic (c. 201-30 B.C.), when Romans entered the cosmopolitan, pan-Mediterranean culture of the Hellenistic world, and rapidly acquired and assimilated numerous features of Greek architecture. -
Thomas Howe, Professor of Art and Art History and Chair of Art History, and Coordinatore Generale of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation, delivered a book chapter: “The Architectural Evolution of the Villas of Stabiae, c. 80 B.C.-A.D. 79.” The paper was originally presented at the conference: Paradigm and Progeny: Roman Imperial Architecture and Its Legacy, Conference in Honor of William L. MacDonald, at The American Academy in Rome, Dec. 6-7, 2011 and is in press with the publication of the acts of the conference, eds. F.Yegül, D.Favro. -
Professor Thomas Howe, Professor of Art and Art History and Chair of Art History, and Coordinatore Generale of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation, was invited to serve on the editorial board of FORMA CIVITATIS: International journal of urban and territorial morphological studies http://www.formacivitatis.com, Alessandro Camiz Ph.D., Universita di Roma, La Sapienza, editor. He was also invited to serve on the Advisory Board of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Arts, 2013-15. Conference Paper: “The Excavations in the Garden of the Villa Arianna at Stabiae,” Invitational conference: Approaches to Ancient Roman Luxury Villas: Oplontis and Beyond,” (Organizer John Clarke), University of Texas, April 1-2, 2011. -
Allison Miller, assistant professor of art history, presented the paper, “Architecture in Archaeology: the Logic of Spatial Design in Elite Tombs of the Early Chinese Empire,” at the Society for East Asian Archaeology Fifth Worldwide Conference in Fukuoka, Japan in June 2012. The thumbnail is an image of the Yoshinogari site (吉野ヶ里), a Yayoi period settlement site that Dr. Miller visited with an international group of archaeologists. -
Patrick Hajovsky, assistant professor of art history, presented a paper on October 12th at the Université de Toulouse - Le Mirail for a group of scholars of Spanish America about local memory and competing miraculous images in Cusco, Peru that were responsible for intervening in earthquakes. One was Our Lady of the Remedies, which was favored among Spanish magistrates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The other was Our Lord of the Earthquakes, which has since and to this day been preferred.
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Victoria Star Varner, Professor of Art and Chair of Studio Art, was invited to present a 96” x 48” megalographic figure drawing in charcoal in the National Drawing Invitational Exhibition at Abercrombie Gallery, McNeese State University, Lake Charles, Louisiana. The drawing is a study for her painting “American Ancestor,” which questions matters of taste by borrowing the elegant forms of iconic Chinese ancestor portraits and their ornate, decorative designs and applies them to American design. She combines decorative forms (tattoos, decorative stockings from amazon.com, a Pottery-Barn-inspired rug) to seek an integrated beauty from the eclectic design combinations that characterize American popular culture. The exhibition was curated by Gerry Wubben, Professor of Art, McNeese State University. -
Kimberly Smith, professor of art history, gave an invited lecture at the San Diego Museum of Art on September 15, at a symposium held in conjunction with the SDMA’s “Human Beast” exhibition of Expressionist art. In her talk, “Franz Marc’s Abstractions: How To See Like An Animal”, Smith took a small piece in the exhibition by Marc entitled “Colored Flowers” as a starting point for considering the shift in style that occurs in the artist’s later work. Marc is best known for his lyrical paintings of animals, yet the little picture in the SDMA exhibition not only does not appear to represent animals, it is noticeably more abstract than much of his earlier and better known paintings. Prof. Smith proposed that Marc’s more abstract style represents a re-thinking of the possibilities of animal painting based on cognitive theories of divided perception.
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Patrick Hajovsky, Assistant Professor of Art History, has published a chapter entitled “Without a Face: Voicing Moctezuma II’s Image at Chapultepec Park, Mexico City” in the book Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World, Ashgate Press, June 2012.
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Mary Hale Visser, professor of art and holder of the Herman Brown Chair, presented a paper on “Cybersculpture: materials, processes and the history of sculpture in the digital age” at the European Forum on Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing symposium held in Paris in June.
