Summer 2013

Sum mer 2013
Department News
Department of the History
of Art and Architecture
Message from Department Head
Student News
Faculty News
arthistory.uoregon.edu
Experience, Experimentation—UO juried student art exhibition held
Last spring, the Art History Association organized a student-facilitated
exhibition entitled Experience, Experimentation, shown in the LaVerne
Krause Gallery. Held in conjunction with the AHA’s ninth annual student
symposium “Experience and Experimentation: An Investigation of
Alternative Artistic Practices,” the exhibition was created to promote
dialogue with and between student artists. The show was open to
undergraduate and graduate students across campus and across all
disciplines. Artists were asked to define how their art reflected current
concepts of alternative and experimental art practices.
For this exhibition, artists engaged with a wide range of mediums as a
platform for experimentation. Many works represented a hybrid concept,
experimenting with both traditional and innovative mediums, creating a
fusion of past and present materials and techniques while also exploring
experimental concepts. The show was student juried by members of the
AHA who chose thirteen outstanding works of art by their undergraduate
and graduate peers.
This show also provided an opportunity for both undergraduate and
graduate AHA members to gain hands-on experience with exhibit
production. Students were responsible for writing the call for art, jurying
the work and installing the show, providing them with insights into the ins
and outs of producing a gallery exhibition.
The show opening also served as the opening reception of the AHA’s
student symposium. Thus, the opening not only exhibited student artists,
but also student art historians from the University of Oregon and other
schools across the country. The event was a great success and brought
together artists and art historians, united under the shared interest of
alternative artistic practices
Pictured above are images of UO student work exhibited during the special juried show Experience, Experimentation in the LaVerne Krause Gallery this April.
Photos by Cody Rappaport.
From the Department Head
The Measure of Success
Until relatively recently, I never gave a
thought to such things as “benchmarking” or
“resource allocation metrics,” and if I tossed
and turned in the night my preoccupations
tended to concern Big Ideas (methodology,
semiotics, representation) or issues of
pedagogy. But as the Department of the
History of Art and Architecture has been
increasingly forced to compete for dwindling resources not only with
units within A&AA, but with others across campus as well, my head has
become filled with graphs and statistics detailing numbers of majors and
minors and faculty and student ratios and the like, and when I wake in
a cold sweat at 3:00 a.m. the cause of my vexation is more likely to be
student credit hour production than conundrums of Buddhist iconography.
Numbers and statistics, of course, can be notoriously slippery
(especially for someone who took “Math for Poets” to satisfy a
college graduation requirement). For example: On the one hand, the
department generates a large amount of student credit hours, and has
done so for years, which seems to suggest that art history courses
are as popular as ever. On the other hand, we have a somewhat small
number of majors for the size of our faculty in comparison with some
other disciplines, and since every graduating major produces a financial
premium for the department this situation is viewed in some quarters as
a deficiency on our part.
Pie charts aside, however, and as the stories and notes in this
newsletter regularly demonstrate, many of our undergraduate students
continue to gain admission to prestigious graduate programs, many of
our master of arts students continue on to prestigious PhD programs
and to finding work teaching and curating, and the members of
the faculty continue to produce important and innovative research
and to garner highly competitive awards and honors. In short, when
measured by the yardstick that I would prefer to use, the success of our
department is unambiguous.
Charles Lachman
Associate Professor and Department Head
[email protected], 541-346-3601
Faculty News
Comings and Goings...
Department welcomes Keith Eggener
Keith Eggener joins the department this fall as the Marion Dean
Ross Distinguished Chair in Architectural History. A native of Portland,
Eggener received his PhD
in art history from Stanford
University. Before joining the
University of Oregon in 2013,
he taught modern architecture
and American art at Carleton
College, the University of
Nevada-Las Vegas, and the
University of Missouri. He
is the author of two books,
Luis Barragán’s Gardens of
El Pedregal and Cemeteries
(part of a series from the
Library of Congress) and
numerous articles and book
chapters on Mexican and U.S.
art, architecture, landscape
architecture, and urban design.
He has served as an editor to various publications relating to the field.
Eggener will also serve as the director of undergraduate studies and will
begin teaching courses in the winter term.
Visiting Professors
We also welcome Rebekah Perry and Younjung Oh who will be joining
the department for the 2013–14 school year. Perry is joining us as a visiting
assistant professor of Medieval art and architecture. Perry holds a PhD from
the University of Pittsburgh and her research focuses on early Christian and
medieval architecture and architectural decoration, as well as on devotional
images and ritual performance. Oh is a visiting assistant professor of East
Asian art. Oh received her PhD from the University of Southern California in
Japanese art history. Her research interests include the history and theory of
modernity in Japan, display and collecting, and contemporary Korean art and
architecture.
Farewell
All best wishes for continuing success to Assistant Professor Nick
Camerlenghi, who has taken a position in Medieval art history at
Dartmouth College, and to former department head Andy Schulz who
was appointed associate dean of research in the College of Arts and
Architecture at Pennsylvania State University.
Keith Eggener
Faculty Notes
Jeffrey Hurwit, Philip H. Knight Professor of Architecture and Allied Arts,
spent five weeks this summer as a visiting fellow at the American School
of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece, where he continued his research
on the nature and significance of artists’ signatures in ancient Greece. He
gave a public lecture on the subject at the Athens Centre on July 23.
Kate Mondloch, associate professor, was coconvener of a research
colloquium on “Art History and Materiality” at the Clark Art Institute.
She published an article in Art Journal and contributed two chapters
to The Johns Hopkins Guidebook to Digital Humanities. She is the
winner of the Oregon Humanities Center’s Coleman-Guitteau Teaching
Professorship in the Humanities for her proposal to teach a new course
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on Global Currents in Contemporary Art and the Venice Biennale in fall
2013. Most recently, she was awarded a University of Oregon Faculty
Research Award for her project, “Aural Sensation: Jane Cardiff’s Audio
Walks” in 2013 and a Fund for Faculty Excellence Award, 2013–14.
Assistant Professor Albert Narath received a UO Summer Stipend for
Humanities and Creative Arts faculty members.
Akiko Walley, Maude I. Kerns Assistant Professor of Japanese
Art, was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in Japanese studies for
2013–14 by the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at
Harvard University.
Student News
Student-curated exhibit takes place in Coos Bay
Lisa Calevi, a PhD student, is working with Steven Brookes, director of
the Coos Art Museum in Coos Bay, Oregon, to curate A Distinguished
Line: Tracing Dürer’s Printmaking Legacy from Rembrandt to Picasso, an
exhibit that will be at the Coos Art Museum from October 18 through
December 7, 2013.
The exhibition, comprising more than seventy prints, explores a new kind
of graphic language that emerged at the end of the fifteenth century. Its
premise is that the technical and artistic vision of Albrecht Dürer (1471–
1528), one of the most significant printmakers of the Renaissance, not only
catalyzed artistic self-expression—effectively establishing the art of the print
in the West—but also, in freeing the line from its purely representational
responsibilities, inspired centuries of subsequent printmakers to recognize,
even revel, in its expressive potential.
This expressive impulse, wrought through line, characterizes the work
of many outstanding printmakers represented in the exhibition, which
begins with Dürer and proceeds apace, including exhibited works by the
seventeenth–century Dutch master, Rembrandt; British social satirist
William Hogarth; French etcher Charles Meryon; Spanish Romantic Goya;
German expressionist Max Beckman; American regionalist Thomas
Hart Benton and his more worldly compatriot, James Whistler; and many
others. The prints, in some cases created a world away and hundreds of
years ago, remain vibrant and beguiling—perhaps even more so when
one learns that they reside permanently in Oregon, held in private and
public collections throughout the state. With prints on generous loan
from their owners, the exhibition invites museum visitors to acquaint
themselves with the superb artistry and visionary makers of these works.
The exhibition’s companion catalog offers an important opportunity
to highlight the University of Oregon Department of the History of Art
and Architecture through the direct involvement of seven of its current
graduate students on the publication. As exhibition curator, Calevi was
responsible for the majority of catalog content. She also engaged six
master’s degree students—Rachel Barth, Kate Beaver, Jordan Koel, Janet
Northey, Maddeline Phillips, and Lauren Szumita—to assist in writing
approximately thirty of the show’s seventy wall labels. A select number
of these texts will be expanded and included in the catalog. Graduate
student Kate Beaver is also creating an educational component for area
school teachers to engage their students in the show.
Dürer, Sol Iustitiae
Rembrandt,
Study of Two Nudes
Picasso, Pour Roby
Student Spotlight
Travel awards help students with research
Last spring, several students were awarded travel funding to conduct
research regarding their individual thesis projects. These travel awards were
funded through scholarships from several donors including Gloria Tover
Lee, Connie West Arts Discovery, Raymond Bates, the Clarke Scholarship,
Foreign Language and Area Studies, and the Ina McClung Scholarship.
attracts more than 3,000 scholars from around the world and offers
papers, workshops and performances on a wide range of topics relevant
to Medieval studies.
Undergraduate student Christine Banawa received the Alice Wingwall
Travel Scholarship to visit museums in New York City.
Rachel Barth visited the Getty Research Institute and Photography
Department in the fall of 2012. In the spring of 2013, she traveled to Italy
to conduct research in photography and Futurist archives in Florence and
Rovereto. She is working on her master’s degree.
Kate Beaver, a master’s student, traveled to Los Angeles, California,
during spring break (March 2013) to conduct research for her thesis at
the Getty Research Institute, which explores the history of Surrealism’s
relationship to politics in Latin America between 1935 and 1942.
Daniel Borengasser traveled to Boston in March 2013 to present a
paper entitled “Ryu- honji’s Jeweled Pagoda Mandala: Visualizing the
Lotus Sutra in 13th Century Japan” at the twenty-ninth annual Boston
University Graduate Symposium on the History of Art and Architecture.
He also spent the summer studying Japanese at Senshu University in
Tokyo, Japan, where he also conducted on-site research in Kyoto for his
thesis, which examines the replication of Buddhist icons of the Seiryoji
Shaka tradition. Borengasser is in the master’s degree program.
Prickly Mountain, Vermont
Kelsie Greer, a master’s student, traveled to San Francisco to Vermont,
and to New Haven, Connecticut, during spring break 2013 to conduct
research regarding Prickly Mountain, a housing project in rural Vermont.
Her thesis explores the work at Prickly Mountain in relation to the
development of architectural education in the United States.
Alumni News
Jordan Koel, a master’s student, attended the fourty-eighth International
Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The congress
Fang Hui, MA ’12, was accepted into the doctoral program in Chinese
art history at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
Send news of your activities and any address updates to
[email protected].
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Department of the History
of Art and Architecture
arthistory.uoregon.edu
Summer 2013
The University of Oregon is an equal-opportunity, affirmative-action institution
committed to cultural diversity and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities
Act. This publication will be made available in accessible formats upon request.
©2013 University of Oregon DES0913-001np-D18157
Department News
Message from Department Head
Student News
Faculty News
Department News
Fashioning Apollo is 2013 Haseltine lecture
This May, Nicholas de Monchaux delivered “Fashioning Apollo,” the 2013
Sally Claire Haseltine Lecture, based on his recent book, Spacesuit:
Fashioning Apollo, which tells the story of the twenty-one-layer spacesuit
in twenty-one chapters addressing twenty-one topics relevant to the suit,
the body, and the technology of the twentieth century. In twenty-one slides,
the lecture guided attendees through the book that touches, among other
things, on eighteenth-century androids, Christian Dior¹s New Look, Atlas
missiles, cybernetics and cyborgs, latex, JFK¹s carefully cultivated image,
the CBS lunar broadcast soundstage, NASA¹s Mission Control, and the
applications of Apollo-style engineering to city planning. As the architect
of an urban and technologically mediated design practice, de Monchaux
presented these stories less as history and more as urgent criticism. In this
context, the suit is less an object than an object lesson; it tells us about
redundancy and interdependence and about the distinctions between
natural and man-made complexity. It teaches us to know the virtues of
adaptation and to see the future as a set of possibilities rather than a
scripted scenario. Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect, urban designer,
and theorist. He is an associate professor of architecture and urban design
at the University of California at Berkeley. Assistant Professor Albert
Narath organized his visit.
Astronauts perform tests on space suits at NASA. Photo courtesy NASA-Johnson
Space Center.