News & Events Archives

Spring 2009

"The Value of Art: The Place of Art in the University Today"
Thursday, March 26, 2009 6:30pm -  Remis Sculpture Court

A wide ranging discussion of the values of art, including aesthetic, social, cultural, and economic perspectives. How has the controversy surrounding the threatened closing of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University and the selling of its collection heightened our awareness of these values? What is the place of art in the university and what is the role of the university in preserving our artistic and cultural legacy?

Panelists:
Jamshed Bharucha
Provost and Senior Vice President, Tufts University
Title: "Music as a Binding Force"

Andrew McClellan
Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Art History, Tufts University
Title: "The Role of Art Museums in Society"

Amy Ingrid Schlegel
Director of Galleries and Collections, Tufts University
Title: "Daily Interruptions in a Liberal Education: The Role of the Fine Arts Collection at Tufts (and beyond)"

Peter Probst
Associate Professor of Art History, Tufts University
Title: "The Value of Art: An African Perspective"

Moderated by Eva Hoffman
Associate Professor of Art History

Free and open to the public. Reception to follow sponsored by the Humanities Center. Co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History, The Tufts University Art Gallery, and the Humanities Center.

Organized in conjunction with the course "Arte Povera, Art in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s", this event juxtaposes the work of two prominent contemporary artists, Tacita Dean and Luisa Rabbia, who reflect on the reception of the Italian Arte Povera Movement (1967-1972).  This event combines a presentation by Italian artist Luisa Rabbia and a screening of British artist Tacita Dean's 16mm film 'Mario Merx" (2002).  The Arte Povera movement insisted on the opposition between natural and industrial materials, anthropological archetypes and mass culture, tautology and metaphor.  Dean and Rabbia each offer a portrait of tow of Arte Povera's protagonists, Mario Merz and Gilberto Zorio, as both homage and reconsideration.

Tacita Dean (b.1965, Canterbury, England)

Co-organized and sponsored with the Tufts University Art Gallery

The Cappella Palatina: The Twelfth-Century Norman Palatine Chapel in Palermo, Sicily
Tomasso Lecture with Dr. Gerhard Wolf
Tuesday, April 21, 5:30-7:00pm, Granoff Music Center, rm. 155, 20 Talbot Avenue

Dr. Gerhard Wolf, is the Director of the Kunsthisorisches Institut in Florence, Italy (Max-Planck Institut). Dr. Wolf's area of research included Italian art and visual culture in the Mediterranean and European framework from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period.  His research also addresses areas such as the pictorial world of Italian cities from the 12^th to 15^th century, theories of the "image," historical anthropology of image and media, artistic exchange between Mexico and Europe in the 16^th/17^th century and interrelations between artistic and scientific world views.

Fall 2008

Tomasso Lecture with Paul Kaplan
Tuesday, October 7, 5:30 – 7:00pm Granoff Music Center, room 155

'Jewish Artist and Black Africans in Renaissance Art'
Paul Kaplan is a Professor of Art History at SUNY, Purchase. His doctoral dissertation examined the image of black Africans in European art up to 1520. He published The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art, 1985 and many articles in this field. He served as Project Scholar for the artist Fred Wilson's Installation in the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, an exploration of the role of black Africans in Venetian art and society entitled "Speak of Me as I Am." He is also a specialist in the political iconography of Venetian Renaissance art, with particular emphasis on the works of Giorgione and Veronese. His current projects include a study of martial imagery in Giorgione, and a comprehensive treatment of the social position and representation of black Africans in Venetian culture. Professor Kaplan is currently a research fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. Co-sponsored by Africa and the New World.

André Raymond, Professor Emeritus, Université de Provence, France
Tuesday, November 18, 5:30 – 7:00pm Cabot Intercultural Center, 7^th fl.

'The Traditional Arab City and Urban Modernization in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries'
André Raymond has served as Director of the French Institute of Arab Studies of Damascus (IFEAD), Professor at the University of Provence, Visiting Professor at Harvard and Princeton Universities, Founding Director of IREMAM in Aix-en-Provence, Vice-President of the Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), Founding President of the French Association for the Study of the Arab and Muslim World (AFEMAM), and Founding President of EURAMES. His publications include: La Tunisie (1961), Artisans et commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siècle (l974), The Great Arab Cities: An Introduction (l984), Grandes villes arabes à l'époque ottomane (1985), Ibn Abî l-Diyâf: Chronique des Rois de Tunis (l994), Le Caire des janissaires (1995), Bâlis II (with J.-L. Paillet, l995), Egyptiens et Français au Caire. 1798-18O1 (1998), La ville arabe: Alep, à l'époque ottomane (1998), Le Caire (ed., 2OO1), Arab Cities in the Ottoman Period (2OO2), Le Dîwân du Caire. 1800-1801 (with M. Afifi, 2003), Le Mouradites, Tunis, Cérès (2006), and The City in the Islamic World (forthcoming). Co-Sponsored with The Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies.

Thomas Mathews, John Langeloth Loeb Professor Emeritus, New York Institute of Art
Wednesday, November 19, 5:30 – 7:00pm, Sophia Gordon Hall, 15 Talbot Avenue

'Icons in Early Armenia'
Thomas Mathews was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) from Weston College, Somerset, UK. After his ordination he returned to the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, studying under the Byzantinist Hugo Buchthal and writing his dissertation on early churches in Constantinople under Richard Krautheimer. He received a Samuel H. Kress Fellowship at the Biblioteca Hertziana, Rome. While a Guest Curator for the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, with a grant from the N.E.H., he organized the "Treasures in Heaven" exhibit of Armenian Illuminated Manuscripts. A fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, led to his appointment on the Visiting Committee of Medieval Art and the Cloisters. He was a senior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC., and in 2003 he received a J. Paul Getty Trust Collaborative Research Grant, to research his "From Pagan to Byzantine Icons in Late Antique Egypt. Co-Sponsored with the Department of Classics.

Spring 2008

Barkan Lecture with Howard Singerman
Monday, March 10, 6:00 – 7:00pm, Music Lecture room 155

Endgame: Sherrie Levine in 1987
Howard Singerman is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (1999) and Art History, After Sherrie Levine forthcoming from the University of California Press. He is also the author of numerous articles in the journals, October, Oxford Art Journal, articles and reviews for ArtForum, More and Less, Parkett, and Art in America as well as catalogue essays for exhibitions for artists such as Joe Havel, Sharon Lockhart, Mike Kelley, and Sherrie Levine.

Margaret Henderson Floyd Lecture with Annabel Wharton
Thursday, April 3, 6:00 – 7:00pm Sophia Gordon Hall

Buildings as Bodies: Incidents of Architectural Violence
Annabel Wharton is the William B. Hamilton Professor of Art History at Duke University. Her work has focused on Late Antique and Byzantine art and culture, but she has also investigated the effect of modernity on the medieval past and its landscapes, first in her study of the first generation of Hilton International Hotels Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture, University of Chicago Press, (2001) and most recently in a book titled Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replics, Themeparks, University of Chicago Press, (2006).

Tomasso Lecture with Sylvia Bottinelli
co-sponsor Museum Studies Program
Wednesday, April 16, 7:00 – 8:30pm Tisch 316

Artists and Institutions in Modern Italy: the Florino Award and Collection at the Pitti Palace, Florence (1950-1977)
Sylvia Bottinelli, PhD candidate, University of Pisa. In December 2007 Bottinelli's book on the Florentine Florino Award (1950-1978) was published by Edifer, in a series of museum studies directed by Cristina De Benedictis. This book is the result of research undertaken during a fellowship at the Pitti Palace; it takes advantage of the opening of the previously closed archive of the Unions Fiorentina. Bottinelli analyzes the role of this prize in the Italian art system after the second world war and through the Sixties and Seventies, raising questions about the dynamics of power between artists and institutions, and the reception of modern art in Italy, and in Florence in particular, at that time.

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