Please note that some sessions run simultaneously, and any sessions denoted as seminars have limited seating. To attend a seminar, you must pre-register for that seminar.
PUBLIC PANEL
Auditorium
Manton Research Center
Clark Art Institute
9:00 AM–12:00 PM CASE HISTORIES
In 1980, Carlo Ginzburg analyzed a modern medical-semiotic paradigm predicated upon clues that emerged simultaneously among the detective, the psychoanalyst, the forensic scientist, and the art connoisseur. Expanding from this line, this session aims to think broadly about the largely unacknowledged medical models underpinning the writing of art history and perpetuating harm within it. By incorporating perspectives of disability studies, the history or sociology of medicine, and critical medical humanities, among others, we hope to propose new ways of writing that either account for these origins or seek how, in practice, to repudiate them.
Suzanne Hudson, co-convener, professor of Art History and Fine Arts, University of Southern California
Victoria Papa, co-convener, associate professor of English and Visual Culture, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
Amanda Cachia, assistant professor of Arts Leadership, Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts, University of Houston, Texas, on “Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism”
Fiona Johnstone, assistant professor of Visual Medical Humanities, Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University, UK, on “Art History and Critical Medical Humanities”
Raphael Koenig, assistant professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Connecticut on “Hans Prinzhorn: Between Medical Case Studies and Art Historical Style”
Hannah Zeavin, assistant professor of History, University of California, Berkeley, on “Composite Cases”
SEMINAR
Scholars’ Seminar Room
Library, Upper Level
Manton Research Center
Clark Art Institute
You must pre-register in advance to attend this seminar.
9:00 AM–1:00 PM A CALL TO TRANSFORM: ART HISTORY & BLACK STUDIES
This colloquium gathers scholars invested in the productive challenges that black studies, and its engagement with gender studies and performance theory, bring to bear on the discipline of art history. We will be devoted to sharing both the broad methodological approaches and the specific tools with which we bring black studies and art history into conversation, both in our scholarship and in the classroom.
Ellen Tani, convener, assistant professor of Art History, Rochester Institute of Technology
Sampada Aranke, associate professor of History of Art and Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University
Tiffany E. Barber, assistant professor of African American Art, University of California, Los Angeles
Emilie Boone, assistant professor of Art History, New York University
Megan Driscoll, assistant professor of Art History, University of Richmond
Donette Francis, associate professor of English and director of the Center for Global Black Studies, University of Miami
Faye Gleisser, associate professor of Art History and Critical Theory, Indiana University
Christina Knight, assistant professor of Art History, Rutgers University
Keisha Oliver, assistant professor of Art and Design, University of The Bahamas, and PhD candidate in Art Education and African American and Diaspora Studies, The Pennsylvania State University
Abbe Schriber, assistant professor of Art History and African American Studies, University of South Carolina
TOUR
Meet by water feature on Fernandez Terrace
Outside Manton Research Center
Clark Art Institute
10:00–11:30 AM HIKE & TOUR OF GROUND/WORK OUTDOOR SCULPTURE EXHIBITION AT THE CLARK
OBJECT POP-UP
Study Center for Print and Drawings
Manton Research Center
Clark Art Institute
11:00 AM–1:00 PM PRINT ROOM POP UP: RECENT ACQUISITIONS AT THE CLARK
Drop in to the Manton Study Center for Prints and Drawings to see a display of recent acquisitions.
PUBLIC PANEL
Auditorium
Manton Research Center
Clark Art Institute
1:30–4:30 PM WRITING THE I: THE SELF IN ART HISTORY
How has art historical writing shifted in recent years to account for the author’s lived, embodied experience? How have scholars borrowed from autobiography, creative nonfiction, life-writing, and auto-theory to open the discipline to new ways of writing art history that emphasize an author’s positionality––their groundedness in history, class, sexuality, gender, race, time, space, and place? This session seeks to uncover the wide-ranging possibilities, risks, and potential shifts to our thinking about the art object when art historical writing asserts a self.
Sarah Hamill, convener, professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Sarah Lawrence College
J. Vanessa Lyon, professor of Art History, Bennington College, on “Blackness Thirteen Ways: On Finding Myself in Art History”
Iris Moon, associate curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department, Metropolitan Museum of Art, on “The Bluest I: Writing Melancholy Wedgwood”
Ren Ellis Neyra, associate professor of English, Wesleyan University, on “A Disturbance that Does Not Yield”
Jordan Reznick, assistant professor of American Studies, Grinnell College, on “Looking with the Ancestors”
Jennifer Stager, assistant professor of Art History, Johns Hopkins University, on “Casting Knucklebones, Conducting Clouds”
SEMINAR
Carswell Room
Clark Center, Lower Level
Clark Art Institute
You must pre-register in advance to attend this seminar.
1:30–4:30 PM FORM: SELF AND EXPERIENCE
This seminar asks: What would it mean for form to “tell us enough, or even, at times, what we most need to know” (as Eve Meltzer has written)? In other words, what ways have questions of form (be they visual, narrative, conceptual, etc.) modeled ways of being and living? “Form”—as both a noun and a verb—is our provocation to the representational politics through which art history tracks identity. Form is neither separable from content nor signification, but it is also surplus to them. We contend that only through an account of experiences—not identities—can the terms of enduring and surviving be characterized. Thus, we attempt to supplant the mapping of intersectionality with narratives of the behaviors through which intersectionality is experienced.
David Getsy, co-convener, professor of Art History, University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Rachel Haidu, co-convener, professor of Art History, University of Rochester
Jennifer Doyle, professor of English, University of California, Riverside
Joan Kee, Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director, Institute of Fine Arts (IFA), New York University
TOUR
Meet in Reading Room
Manton Research Center
Clark Art Institute
2:00–3:00 PM HIGHLIGHTS TOUR: RECENT ACQUSITIONS AT THE CLARK
FILM SCREENING
Images Cinema
50 Spring Street
Williamstown, MA
6:00–7:30 PM ART HISTORY x CINEMA
A screening of short films at Images
The Desert and the Lagoon: A Film Essay on Giovanni Bellini (2020), dirs. David Young Kim and Amelia Saul, 21 minutes
You Hide Me (1970), dir. Nii-Kwate Owoo, 16 minutes
Art Isn’t Fair (2012), dir. Allen Sekula, 5:16 minutes
Hubert Damisch: Thinking Aloud (2011), dir. Mieke Bal, 20 minutes
RAP 25 is free and open to the public, but please register to attend.