Friday, September 20th, 2024
Dr. Emilie Boone - A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography
Fine Arts Room 102 | 4:00 p.m. 

This lecture dovetails with the recent publication of A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography, the first book on the celebrated twentieth century African American photographer in decades. Through a reconsideration of Van Der Zee's expansive oeuvre, Boone challenges distinctions between art photography and the kind of output common to commercial photography studios. Such an approach recasts our understanding not only of this canonical figure but of photography's central role within the arc of quotidian Black life of the Harlem Renaissance era and beyond. 

Thursday, October 3rd, 2024
Dr. Heather Hyde-Minor - Magnificence Without Meaning: Piranesi's Carceri
Eskenazi Museum of Art - Martin Commons in the 3rd floor Center for Education | 4:00 p.m.

G.B. Piranesi's Carceri (Prisons) have long been considered among the most enthralling and enigmatic works of art in the eighteenth century. For nearly three centuries, a wide array of viewers have tried to decipher the meaning of these paper penitentiaries. This talk will focus on the artistic and intellectual practices that Piranesi used to craft his sheets.

Friday, November 1st, 2024
Dr. Stephanie Su - Redefining Femininity in Imperial Japan: The Chinese Female Body in Uemura Shōen's Yōkihi (1922)
Eskenazi Museum of Art - Martin Commons in the 3rd floor Center for Education | 4:00 p.m.

Painted in 1922, Uemura Shōen’s (上村松園, 1875-1949) Yōkihi is an alluring, sensual, and ambiguous work. Shōen reinterpreted the eighth-century Chinese beauty Yōkihi as semi-nude.  A pioneering female artist in modern Japan, Shōen’s work explores the relationship between women artists and genres such as bijinga (美人画, Picture of beautiful people, especially beautiful women) and nude painting. Through visual and textual analysis, I argue that Yōkihi encapsulates the multiple and ambivalent readings of gender, sexuality, and art institutions. Shōen’s female nudes differ from contemporary male painters by subverting the male gaze and in doing so renewing the pictorial convention of bijinga. Shōen’s work expanded the visual vocabulary of femininity beyond expressions of physical beauty. The central position of the breast in Yōkihi, for example, suggests the nurturing nature of womanhood, and the reference to Buddhist female deities, including Kisshōten and Kannon, emphasizes the spirituality and inner power of women. By doing so, Shōen engages with female viewers in startling and contemporary ways.