CLARK ART INSTITUTE’S RESEARCH AND ACADEMIC PROGRAM ANNOUNCES FALL LECTURE SERIES

For Immediate Release
September 11, 2015

Williamstown, Massachusetts—The Clark Art Institute’s Research and Academic Program announces its annual series of fall lectures. All lectures are free and open to the public; they are held in Hunter Studio at the Lunder Center at Stone Hill on the Clark’s campus.

Thursday, September 24, 5:30 pm: Cultural theorist, critic, and video artist Mieke Bal leads a Clark Conversation. Bal, a former Clark Fellow, is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam, and was a professor at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) from 2005-2011. Her film, Madame B, airs at the Clark on Wednesday, September 23 at 5:30 pm in Hunter Studio at the Lunder Center at Stone Hill. The screening is free and open to the public.

Tuesday, September 29, 5:30 pm: Christopher P. Heuer, associate director of the Research and Academic Program, presents “Artic Aesthetics, 1578/1969.” Many European narratives of New World encounter tell stories of people and balmy things: strange flora, wondrous animals, inscrutable populations to mythologize or exploit. Yet around 1589, and again in the 1960s, one region upended all of these conventions in travel writing, science, and, most unexpectedly, art: the Arctic. In his lecture, Heuer explores how the Far North—neither a continent, an ocean, nor a meteorological circumstance—forced explorers and artists from England to grapple with questions of absence and dearth, with what we would now call a “non-site,” spurring dozens of previously unseen works, objects, and texts.

Tuesday, October 20, 5:30 pm: Clark Fellow Michael Brenson presents “The Place of Art in an Artist’s Biography: The Challenge of David Smith’s Medals for Dishonor.” Brenson is a member of the sculpture faculty of Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and a visiting senior critic in the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design’s MFA Program. He has been a Getty Scholar, Guggenheim Fellow and Bogliasco Fellow. His publications include Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Artist in America and Acts of Engagement: Writings on Art, Criticism, and Institutions, 1993–2002. As the Clark Holly Fellow, he is working on a biography of David Smith.

Tuesday, October 27, 5:30 pm: Mary Roberts, Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor, Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, presents “Transcultural Objects: Islamic Art and Artist-Collector Networks, 1860–1890.” Roberts is the John Schaeffer Associate Professor of British Art at the University of Sydney. A specialist in nineteenth-century British art, she focuses on gender and Orientalism, Ottoman art, and European cultural exchange. Her Clark/Oakley project focuses on the artistic exchanges between Ottoman and Orientalist artists in nineteenth-century Istanbul.

Tuesday, November 10, 5:30 pm: Clark Fellow Maureen Shanahan presents “The Orientalist and the Asylum: Gaëtan Gatain de Clérambault’s Veiled Photography.” Shanahan is a professor of art history at James Madison University. Her monograph, The Colorist Doctor: Fernand Léger, Memory, and the Nation, is now under advanced review at Pennsylvania State University Press. She and Ana María Reyes (Boston University) have co-edited Simón Bolívar: An Icon Unhinged, forthcoming from University Press of Florida. She has also published articles on Léger, early film, and French modernism in Cinema Journal, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift, International Journal of Art & Design Education, Michigan Feminist Studies, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, and various edited collections, encyclopedias, and exhibition catalogues. While at the Clark, she is researching the psychiatric and photographic works of Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934) as a lens into the visual epistemologies of French colonialism during and after World War I.

Tuesday, November 17, 5:30 pm: Clark Fellow Spyros Papapetros presents “The Prearchitectonic Condition: Architecture Before Architecture.” Papapetros is associate professor of theory and historiography at the School of Architecture, acting co-director of the Program in Media and Modernity, and member of the Executive Committee of the Program in European Cultural Studies at Princeton University. He studies the intersections between art, architecture, historiography, psychoanalysis, and the history of psychological aesthetics. He is the author of On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and the co-editor of Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture (MIT Press, 2014). At the Clark, he is working on a new book project titled The Prearchitectonic Condition examining the legacy of prehistory in architectural culture from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.

Tuesday, December 1, 5:30 pm: Clark Fellow Joanna Smith presents “Buried, Layered, Lasting, and Lost: Bronze Age Perspectives on the History of Art.” Smith is a consulting scholar in the Mediterranean section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She co-curated City of Gold: Tomb and Temple in Ancient Cyprus for the Princeton University Art Museum. Previously she curated exhibitions in New York and Cyprus. Currently she is curating the ancient art collection at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. Her books include Art and Society in Cyprus from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age. At the Clark, she is working on “Art History through Archaeology” about the perception of images in the Bronze Age.

ABOUT THE CLARK

The Clark Art Institute, located in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, is one of a small number of institutions globally that is both an art museum and a center for research, critical discussion, and higher education in the visual arts. Opened in 1955, the Clark houses exceptional European and American paintings and sculpture, extensive collections of master prints and drawings, English silver, and early photography. Acting as convener through its Research and Academic Program, the Clark gathers an international community of scholars to participate in a lively program of conferences, colloquia, and workshops on topics of vital importance to the visual arts. The Clark library, open to the public with more than 240,000 volumes, is one of the nation’s premier art history libraries. The Clark also houses and co-sponsors the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.

The Clark is located at 225 South Street in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Galleries are open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 am to 5 pm. Admission is $20; free year-round for Clark members, children 18 and younger, and students with valid ID. For more information, visit clarkart.edu or call 413 458 2303.

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