Into Painting, Into Performance: Sources and References

Visual artist Jonathan Vandyke will discuss the commingling of painting and performance in his art practice of the past decade, with a special emphasis on the art historical and cultural references that inform the creation of his works.

Lecturer
Department of History of Art, Bryn Mawr College

The Drug of Reminding: Tracing the Limits of Memory in the Archival Practice of Ellie Ga

This talk will focus on the artistic practice of Ellie Ga, a contemporary artist working across a variety of media that includes installation, photography, performance, sculpture and video. From her residency at the Explorer’s Club in New York where she developed a lecture that detailed the things that had disappeared from the club’s archive to her tenure as an artist in residence on an arctic naval expedition, Ga has developed a research and travel-intensive approach that integrates a wide range of narrative genres and visual strategies, from travelogue to documentary, photographs to video and slide installations. Focusing primarily on her most recent body of work, a sustained engagement with the archaeological ruins and archival sites of the Pharos of Alexandria, this talk will address the ways in which Ga’s practice interrogates the aesthetic, discursive, geographical and scientific systems of knowledge that sustain our constructions of personal and shared history.

John and Jill Freidenrich Director
Cantor Arts Center
Stanford University

Firing Dürer’s Cannon

My talk will address Albrecht Dürer’s 1518 etching Landscape with Cannon as an exploration of religious reform, Ottoman aggression, and etching. In the year following the publication of Martin Luther’s 1517 Ninety-Five Theses, Dürer deployed the caustic print technique in one of his most enigmatic compositions to critique canon law in support of Luther.

Visual Artist

Las Mujeres de Abril and the April 1965 U.S. Invasion of the Dominican Republic

This project began with a profound curiosity about my parents’ experience while living under Trujillo’s dictatorship and a desire to understand how Trujillo’s assassination, and the revolution that followed, became catalysts for our migration to NYC. Creating these images was a way to reclaim this history , and the collection of  65 images are formatted as a “family” album that embraces and documents the events that led to April 1965. The full size portraits depict Las Mujeres de Abril, a group of women who took up arms to fight for freedom becoming a significant part of the resistance during the American invasion of Santo Domingo.

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor of Islamic Art History
Department Chair, Harvard University

Art and Literature in Timurid Herat: Baysunghur’s Manuscripts

Baysunghur (d. 1433), son of ruler Shahrukh and grandson of Timur, has long been regarded as one of the most important princely bibliophiles of the Timurid dynasty, and yet his personal library of books has long deserved critical reevaluation. The lecture reexamines concepts of creative agency—the balance between patron and artists—, the physical and aesthetic reformation of the imperial book, and the effects of the total coordination of the elements of the book comprising binding, calligraphy, illumination, and painting. Why did near contemporaries and subsequent generations regard Baysunghur, and his books, as the benchmark of cultural achievement?

Assistant Professor, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania
“Artist Lecture: Some Recent Work”

Biography

NEH Post-Doctoral Fellow, The Library Company of Philadelphia
“Painter-Architects and the Making of the American Landscape”

A striking number of nineteenth-century American landscape painters also aspired to the practice of architecture and constructed intriguing buildings that have received little scholarly attention. This talk explores the sources of that preoccupation with domestic architecture in particular. The houses that Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Jasper Francis Cropsey, among others, designed and constructed were integral to the practice of a transdisciplinary art of landscape that transmitted principles from oil on canvas to the built environment, and put them in dialogue with a transatlantic tradition of “painter-architects” that can be traced to Rubens, Raphael and beyond.

This research draws from Will’s book project “Painting Houses: The Domestic Landscape of the Hudson River School,” on which he is at work full-time for 2016-17 with the support of fellowships from the New York Public Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. After graduating from Haverford as a member of the 2007 Bryn Mawr History of Art major class, he earned master’s degrees from the Courtauld Institute and Oxford and a PhD from Berkeley.

Founder and Artistic Director, Advanced Beginner Group
“Plays and Performance: Multi-disciplinary Approaches to Theatre Making”

David Neumann’s Advanced Beginner Group’s original work has been presented in New York at PS 122, New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, Abrons Arts Center, Central Park Summerstage (where he collaborated with John Giorno), Celebrate Brooklyn, Symphony Space (where he collaborated with Laurie Anderson), The Chocolate Factory and The Whitney. ABG has also performed at the Walker Art Center, Alverno College, MASS MoCA, The Ringling Festival and the American Dance Institute, among others. Neumann was a performer for many years working with, among others, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Big Dance Theater, Doug Elkins, Doug Varone and Sally Silvers. Recent projects include: choreographer on Futurity (Ars Nova and Soho Rep), An Octoroon at Soho Rep/Theater for a New Audience, directing Geoff Sobelle in The Object Lesson at BAM, and choreographing Hagoromo at BAM Harvey with Wendy Whelan and Jock Soto. Recent projects include: Hadestown at NYTW, The Total Bent at the Public Theater and War at LCT III. He is currently professor of theater at Sarah Lawrence College. Most recently, Neumann’s work, I Understand Everything Better received two 2016 NY Dance and Performance Bessie Awards, one for Outstanding Production and one for Outstanding Sound Design/Music Composition. This year he has been named a 2016 Artist in Residence at the SETI Institute and was awarded a Robert Rauschenberg Residency. Over the years Neumann has received three “Bessie” Awards, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award, an Asian Cultural Council Fellowship (Noh immersive), and support from the Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Capital, NYFA and National Dance Projects among others.

Assistant Professor of Visual Studies, Haverford College
“A Family Affair: Jacolby Satterwhite’s Queer Utopics”

Jacolby Satterwhite is an artist known for creating virtual worlds that feature avatars of himself voguing within densely rendered neon landscapes. Imagery for those landscapes derives from thousands of drawings of utilitarian objects that the artist’s mother made during his childhood in the hopes of striking it rich on the Home Shopping Network. Satterwhite’s virtual performances are as utopic as they are queer: his animated avatars makes manifest his desire to occupy a world as multiple and far-reaching as his sense of self.  However, in this paper I argue that this queer utopics begins with Satterwhite’s mother: operating within the dual restraints of mental illness and a capitalist imaginary, her drawings center possibility on the notion of utilitarian design. By reading Satterwhite’s virtual worlds through his mother’s drawings, I investigate a similar strategy of “making do to make new,” or reworking the mundane in the service of the marvelous.