In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

“Fragmentary Ruins and the Enduring Image”: Cammy Brothers on Drawing as a Way of Thinking Mar 26, 2024

In this final episode of the season focused on the craft of writing, Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator in the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Cammy Brothers, a scholar of art and architecture at Northeastern University. In this episode, Brothers examines Michaelangelo’s drawing practice and that of his contemporary, Giuliano da Sangallo, and the ways in which da Sangallo’s architectural drawings aim to assemble fragmentary images of Rome on the page. Brothers also reflects on her career and writing practice: on publishing a first book that was not an adaptation of her doctoral dissertation; on the ways in which recitation is integral to clear and compelling scholarship; and on composing endings that open new lines of thought rather than summarizing or foreclosing meaning. She also discusses her role as a critic for the Wall Street Journal and the craft of writing for a public readership.

"A Critique of What Art Can Do”: Jennifer Nelson on Undoing Mastery Mar 19, 2024

In this episode, Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator in the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Jennifer Nelson, a poet and scholar of early modern art at the University of Delaware. Through the lens of their first book on Holbein, and a second, forthcoming, on Cranach, Nelson describes how comparative studies of elite cultural production can allow us to the see the category of art as capacious, and capable of dismantling our concept of mastery. They offer concrete advice on writing—from tone, to endings, clarity, and decisive punctuation—and speak about their own writerly process, in which ideas often manifest first in poetry and later in prose.

“To Give Shape to a Way of Seeing the Past”: Shira Brisman on the Intimacy of Writing the History of Social Art Mar 12, 2024

In this continuation of a season focused on the craft of writing in art history, Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator in the Research and Academic Program) speaks to Shira Brisman, a historian of early modern art and assistant professor of the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania. Through the lens of her two books, the first on Albrecht Dürer, and the second, forthcoming, on the goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer (1563–1618), Brisman explores how art can shape communities, and can either draw people together or divide them. She discusses the idea of a “craft” of writing, the impact of poetry on her own prose, and how an “off stage bibliography” can provide a generative set of thematic, linguistic, and structural alternatives that amplify one’s understanding of their own scholarly writing projects.

“The Magic Art of Framing”: Alexander Nemerov on Writing History and Making a World Mar 05, 2024

This is the first episode of a new season focused on the craft of writing in art history. Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator for the Research and Academic Program and a fiction writer) speaks with Alexander Nemerov, professor of art history at Stanford University, about his most recent book, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s. He discusses his writing process, how his craft has changed over time, and this current book’s varied sources of inspiration—from painting and poetry to time spent in nature and pilgrimages to historical sites.

"On Living Archives": Tsedaye Makonnen on Collaboration and Black Performance Practices Apr 18, 2023

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with artist and curator Tsedaye Makonnen about her multidisciplinary studio, curatorial, and research-based practice. They discuss how Tsedaye’s sculptural installations and performances thread together her identity as a daughter of Ethiopian immigrants and a Black American woman to explore the transhistorical forced migration of Black communities across the globe.

"Attention Becomes a Kind of Politics": Sarah Hamill on Sculpture and Interpretation Apr 11, 2023

In this week episode Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Sarah Hamill, a scholar of modern and contemporary art and professor at Sarah Lawrence College, about the role of description in art history, and how description is always a form of interpretation. Sarah describes how the embodied experience of sculpture captured her imagination and how she came to understand the role of photography in mediating our encounters with art objects. She also discusses her current research into feminist politics, media, and sculpture in the 1970s, focused on the artist Mary Miss, and reflects on how art historical practices like slow looking may help us grapple with urgent issues like the climate crisis.

“Shifting Focal Points”: Sergei Tcherepnin on Sonic Attention Apr 04, 2023

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Sergei Tcherepnin, an artist who works in the intersections of sound, music, sculpture, theater, and photography. We discuss how his work is made to be interacted with, creating new intimacies—listening by hearing, but also listening by touching, by walking, by pressing, by feeling. Sergei describes how he seeks to create multiple focal points within each work, activating a kind of queer sound or queer listening.

“What ‘Minor' Histories Allow Us to See”: Donette Francis on Writing African Diaspora Mar 28, 2023

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Donette Francis, an Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami, Coral Gables. A founding member of the Hemispheric Caribbean Studies Collective, her research and writing investigate place, aesthetics, and cultural politics in the African Diaspora. They discuss the politics of making visible what Donette calls “minor histories.” Across her work on the novel as well as in the realm of contemporary art, Donette invites us to ask: what does attending to these histories allow us to see?

"I Never Start with Nothing": Mary Lum on Collage and Constructed Geographies Mar 21, 2023

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark) speaks with Mary Lum, a visual artist based in North Adams, Massachusetts, about how her intricate collages, paintings, and photographs explore the margins of city life, constructed geographies, and her use of text as image. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship for Advanced Study, and several MacDowell Fellowships, Lum taught at Bennington College from 2005 to 2022. Her work has been exhibited in and commissioned by MASS MoCA, The Drawing Center, and Oxford University, among numerous other venues.

“An Outward-Looking Model”: The Future(s) of the University and Higher Education in a Digital Age with Koenraad Brosens and Blake Stimson Apr 12, 2022

In this episode, guest interviewer Anne Helmreich (The Getty Foundation) speaks with Koenraad Brosens, professor of art history at the University of Leuven in Belgium, and Blake Stimson, professor of art history at the University of Illinois Chicago, about the future of universities in a digital age. They discuss the benefits and challenges of teaching at public institutions, the concept of “the third generation university,” and potential pitfalls to the vogue for interdisciplinarity. Reflecting particularly on the past two years of the pandemic, Koenraad and Blake share how they are navigating the newly digital and remote world of teaching and mentoring, and muse about the possibilities of the new trend towards building virtual education infrastructure rather than investing principally in physical campuses.
This fourth season of In the Foreground is a special series of five roundtable conversations dedicated to “the Grand Challenges” – a phrase frequently adopted in the sciences to refer to the great unanswered questions that represent promising frontiers – of bringing together digital and computational methods and the social history of art. This series grows out of a colloquium on this topic convened by Anne Helmreich (Associate Director of the Getty Foundation) and Paul B. Jaskot (Professor of Art History at Duke University) at the Clark’s Research and Academic Program in April 2019. Anne and Paul serve as the guest interviewers for this podcast series, for which they have invited back colloquium participants to reflect further on how digital art history might help us explore social history of art’s future, and which digital methods might be effective at analyzing large scale structural issues and modes of visual expression.

“What are Our Important Questions?”: Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity in a Digital Age with Jacqueline Francis and Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi Apr 05, 2022

In this episode, guest interviewer Paul B. Jaskot (Duke University) speaks with Jacqueline Francis, a scholar of contemporary art and chair of the Graduate Visual and Critical Studies Program at the California College of the Arts, and Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, a specialist of the arts of Africa and associate professor of art history at Emory University, on the topic of collaboration and interdisciplinary in art history and digital humanities. They articulate a shared experience of “falling into” collaborative, digital practices out of necessity, led by the kinds of questions they wanted to answer. Throughout the discussion, all three speakers return to the idea of shifting away from paradigms of hierarchy and authority, whether through partnering with students and colleagues outside the academy, rethinking what is recognized as “scholarly” within the humanities and academic publishing, making visible the intellectual exchanges and collaborative labor that makes research projects, artworks, and museum exhibitions possible, and how these attitudes might fundamentally change how we approach the canon of art history.

This fourth season of In the Foreground is a special series of five roundtable conversations dedicated to “the Grand Challenges” – a phrase frequently adopted in the sciences to refer to the great unanswered questions that represent promising frontiers – of bringing together digital and computational methods and the social history of art. This series grows out of a colloquium on this topic convened by Anne Helmreich (Associate Director of the Getty Foundation) and Paul B. Jaskot (Professor of Art History at Duke University) at the Clark’s Research and Academic Program in April 2019. Anne and Paul serve as the guest interviewers for this podcast series, for which they have invited back colloquium participants to reflect further on how digital art history might help us explore social history of art’s future, and which digital methods might be effective at analyzing large scale structural issues and modes of visual expression.

“To Make Visible the Structures”: Challenging the Canon, Digital and Beyond, with Niall Atkinson and Min Kyung Lee Mar 29, 2022

In this episode, guest interviewer Anne Helmreich (Getty Foundation) speaks with Niall Atkinson, associate professor of art history at the University of Chicago, and Min Kyung Lee, assistant professor of Growth and Structure of Cities at Bryn Mawr College, to reflect on the canon of art history. They discuss how the canon as a narrative offers a shared framework for discussion, analysis, and exchange, but problems arise when the canon becomes fixed or an imposition. Niall and Min describe how they approach using archives in more varied ways, to capture “different voices,” and they revel in the collaborative nature of computational practices, the scale of which – both zooming out and zooming in – demands that scholars work across disciplines and as a team. Finally, both emphasize the importance of being aware of how we define the data we use, and how we in fact produce the data we use – a reflexive approach that may allow us to confront and correct implicit biases, building a more inclusive and heterogeneous approach to data and "the canon.”
This fourth season of In the Foreground is a special series of five roundtable conversations dedicated to “the Grand Challenges” – a phrase frequently adopted in the sciences to refer to the great unanswered questions that represent promising frontiers – of bringing together digital and computational methods and the social history of art. This series grows out of a colloquium on this topic convened by Anne Helmreich (Associate Director of the Getty Foundation) and Paul B. Jaskot (Professor of Art History at Duke University) at the Clark’s Research and Academic Program in April 2019. Anne and Paul serve as the guest interviewers for this podcast series, for which they have invited back colloquium participants to reflect further on how digital art history might help us explore social history of art’s future, and which digital methods might be effective at analyzing large scale structural issues and modes of visual expression.

“Distance and Criticality”: The Digital Humanities and the Potential for Art History Scholarship with Hubertus Kohle and Emily Pugh Mar 22, 2022

Paul B. Jaskot (Duke University) speaks with Hubertus Kohle (professor of art history at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany) and Emily Pugh (an art historian and the Digital Humanities Specialist for The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles) on the relation between the digital humanities and the potential for art history. They reflect on how we work as scholars in terms of accessing and documenting archives and data, and the difference in scale between transferable computational methods as opposed to project-specific solutions. Both guests discuss how engagement with the digital might grant us distance to see our discipline anew, or reveal biases within the history of art, while also expressing some concern about a plateau in innovation, or a resistance in art history to collaborating with practitioners from adjacent fields who might open new directions within the digital. Throughout, the conversation circles around the question of how computational approaches may equip us to become more critical art historians.
This fourth season of In the Foreground is a special series of five roundtable conversations dedicated to “the Grand Challenges” – a phrase frequently adopted in the sciences to refer to the great unanswered questions that represent promising frontiers – of bringing together digital and computational methods and the social history of art. This series grows out of a colloquium on this topic convened by Anne Helmreich (Associate Director of the Getty Foundation) and Paul B. Jaskot (Professor of Art History at Duke University) at the Clark’s Research and Academic Program in April 2019. Anne and Paul serve as the guest interviewers for this podcast series, for which they have invited back colloquium participants to reflect further on how digital art history might help us explore social history of art’s future, and which digital methods might be effective at analyzing large scale structural issues and modes of visual expression.

“Directed Towards How We See Ourselves”: Social Art History in a Digital World with Paul B. Jaskot and Barbara McCloskey Mar 15, 2022

This fourth season of In the Foreground is a special series of five roundtable conversations dedicated to “the Grand Challenges” – a phrase frequently adopted in the sciences to refer to the great unanswered questions that represent promising frontiers – of bringing together digital and computational methods and the social history of art. This series grows out of a colloquium on this topic convened by Anne Helmreich (Associate Director of the Getty Foundation) and Paul B. Jaskot (Professor of Art History at Duke University) at the Clark’s Research and Academic Program in April 2019. Anne and Paul serve as the guest interviewers for this podcast series, for which they have invited back colloquium participants to reflect further on how digital art history might help us explore social history of art’s future, and which digital methods might be effective at analyzing large scale structural issues and modes of visual expression.
In this episode, Anne Helmreich speaks with Paul B. Jaskot and Barbara McCloskey, professor of art history at the University of Pittsburgh and a specialist of twentieth-century German art, on the role of social art history in a digital world. Paul and Barbara consider the simultaneous emergence of both computational methods and social art history in the 1970s and reflect on what drew them personally to both approaches. They discuss the centrality of collaboration and the role played by institutional and disciplinary expectations for how scholarship is produced. Throughout, the conversation turns to questions of scale and sociality, and the speakers ponder the blind spots, limitations, or dangers of the digital as well as the ways in which both social art history and the digital have – and have not – fulfilled their promises.

“A Mechanism for Survival”: McClain Groff on nibia pastrana santiago’s NO MORE EFFORTS Feb 01, 2022

Puerto Rican multidisciplinary artist nibia pastrana santiago’s video NO MORE EFFORTS (2020) uses humor, dance, and site-specificity to critique contemporary labor conditions and challenge histories of colonialism, dispossession, and marginalization.

“A Picture of Resilience”: Ashley Lazevnick on Charles Demuth’s "Red Poppies" Feb 01, 2022

A still life, like a poem, may be charged with private meaning, and yet it is offered like a gift that the viewer may open for themselves, not unlike the delicate unfurling of a flower. Charles Demuth’s watercolor Red Poppies of 1929 exemplifies this exchange in the way it pictures how vulnerability may still be resilient, as expressed in a contemporaneous poem by Williams Carlos Williams that meditates on loss.

“An Expression of the Poetic Self”: Yuefeng Wu on the Stele Inscription of the Jiu-Cheng Palace Feb 01, 2022

The Jiu-Cheng Palace Stele inscription, created in China in 632, during the early Tang dynasty, is an influential work of Chinese calligraphy that embodies a skillful balance between liminality and tranquil harmony.

“From Imitation to Evolution”: Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen on Georges Seurat’s "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte–1884" Feb 01, 2022

Georges Seurat’s masterpiece A Sunday on La Grande Jatte–1884, is the kind of painting that has become so ubiquitous it almost disappears into itself, but within this busy scene of curiously automata-like human interaction lie many clues to the transformations of the period. For one, this picture manifests a shift in thinking from imitation to civilization, mimesis to evolution, insofar as it encapsulates Darwin’s theories of natural selection and their ramifications for the understanding of human psychology at the time.

“An Allegory of Representation”: Byron Otis on Gabriel Metsu’s "View into a Hall with a Jester, a Boy, and his Dog" Feb 01, 2022

Gabriel Metsu's painting View into a Hall with a Jester, a Boy, and his Dog from c. 1667 subtly upends expectations of Dutch genre painting from this period. Rather than depicting a placid scene of everyday life, Metsu reflexively calls attention to the constructed nature of this illusionistic scene and implicates the viewer within the cast of characters.

"Touching at a Distance”: Ellen Tani on Nadine Robinson’s "Coronation Theme: Organon" Feb 01, 2022

Nadine Robinson’s installation Coronation Theme: Organon of 2008 uses its monumental sculptural presence and an immersive soundscape to weave complex layers referencing aspects of Black life in America over the past century, from dance halls to sacred and secular oration, to the Civil Rights movement and police brutality.

“Between the Personal and the Historical”: Asma Naeem on Listening to Art and Visual Culture Dec 14, 2021

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Asma Naeem, the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Asma shares her circuitous path into the discipline, from her sensitivity to the visual landscape of her childhood within an Indo-Pakistani immigrant family, to the formative challenges of practicing law in a district attorney’s office in Manhattan, and how her tenacious passion for art history led her to explore the intersections between sound technologies and nineteenth-century American painting and into her current curatorial work.

“The Ethics of Seeing”: Kaira M. Cabañas on Creative Care and Art’s Histories Dec 07, 2021

In this episode, which continues the miniseries focused on sound, media, and visual art, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Kaira M. Cabañas, professor of art history at the University of Florida, where she is also affiliate faculty in the Center for Latin American Studies and Center for Gender, Sexualities and Women’s Studies Research. Kaira describes how her early studies helped her think about the relations and discontinuities between cultural contexts, and reflects on artists who practice film “otherwise.” She shares her most recent project focused on transatlantic exchanges in art and psychiatry, and critiques what is often perceived as the current “crisis” in the discipline, asking: a crisis for whom?

“Grounded by a Set of Relations”: Nancy Um on "Horizontal" Cultures within Art History Nov 30, 2021

In this episode Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Nancy Um, professor of art history at Binghamton University in New York State, whose research explores the Islamic world from the perspective of the coast, with a focus on material, visual, and built culture on the Arabian Peninsula and around the rims of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Nancy describes her experience of conducting fieldwork in Yemen, particularly as a young female scholar, and reflects on the constraints of focusing on an area marked by geopolitical instability. She recounts her decision to focus on bodies of water instead of territories, and how this approach destabilizes some of the traditional organizing principles of the discipline, but allows her to pursue global art history on a local scale. Finally, she considers digital art history as a site of access, and as part of a dynamic approach to her own work changing over time.

“To Approach the Object from Outside”: Joseph Koerner on History, Trauma, and Wonder Nov 16, 2021

In this episode Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Joseph Leo Koerner, professor of art history at Harvard University, who teaches and writes about the history of art from the late Middle Ages to the present day, with an emphasis on Northern Renaissance art. Joseph discusses his early focus on literary studies, psychoanalysis, and romanticism, and how his curiosity about the traumatic core of history has informed his work. More specifically, he describes how themes of fragility and besieging shaped his childhood by way of the physical presence of his father’s paintings in their family home, as well as the role played by visiting Vienna and the Kunsthistoriches Museum there. Finally, he delves into his 2019 documentary The Burning Child, and describes his current book project that explores concepts of siege. What does art do in a state of siege, he asks; how does it flare up?

“To See the Effects of Sound”: Niall Atkinson on Acoustic Topographies of the Early Modern Nov 09, 2021

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) continues the miniseries on sound and visual art in conversation with Niall Atkinson, an associate professor of art history at the University of Chicago. Niall's research concerns the relationship between sound, space, and architecture and their role in the construction of pre-modern urban societies. They discuss his research methods for working on historical soundscapes, and ways of reconstructing sonic relationships in the past even if the sounds and sonic experiences themselves are now lost to us.

“What a Picture Can’t Offer”: Michael Gaudio on the Imaginative Work of Sound in Art History Nov 02, 2021

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) continues the miniseries on sound and visual art in conversation with Michael Gaudio, professor of art history at the University of Minnesota, who specializes in visual arts in the early modern Atlantic world. Michael describes his early studies in literature and the influence of deconstruction as a theory that taught him to inhabit the contingencies and ambiguities of a work. They discuss the gap between pictures and sound and how audiences in earlier eras navigated that gap. Finally, Michael reflects on the “melancholy work of being an art historian,” part of which he characterizes as the descriptive challenge of thinking, writing, and teaching about sound in visual art.

“How Do We Know What We Know?”: Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi on Fieldwork and Evidence Oct 26, 2021

In this episode, Alice Matthews ('21 graduate of the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art) speaks with Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, associate professor of the historical and present-day arts of West Africa at Emory University. They discuss the trajectory that ultimately brought Susan to her field, including undergraduate internships with the Baltimore Museum of Art. Susan reflects on her research methodology and the process of establishing relationships and conducting interviews in Burkina Faso. She discusses her current, born-digital project, Mapping Senufo: Art, Evidence, and the Production of Knowledge, and reflects on the significance of the digital humanities to art history. Susan also shares her thoughts on the importance of collaboration among scholars as well as with other professionals, and the need to challenge what we think we know.

“Becoming Belonged”: Roberto Tejada on the Political Project of Photography and Poetry Oct 19, 2021

In this episode Caro Fowler (Starr Director, Research and Academic Program) speaks with Roberto Tejada, a poet and art historian who in a professor in the creative writing program and the department of art history at the University of Houston, Texas. They discuss the decade he spent immersed in the literary culture of Mexico City, including working with Octavio Paz and the historical layers of the colonial project with the built environment there. He describes the political project of poetry and photography and shares his perspective on the changing landscape of Latin American and Latinx art within the discipline of art history. Finally, Roberto describes the possibilities and limits of what he calls “border-thinking” and “becoming belonged,” as part of his enduring commitment to the idea of encounter as an ethical position, and as a way of moving beyond the predicaments of extraction.

“What Sort of Problems Does an Artwork Pose?”: Joan Kee on Art History as an Infinite Game Oct 12, 2021

In this episode, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Joan Kee, professor of art history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Joan describes the influence of growing up in Seoul, Korea, but shares her uneasiness with centering a sense of self within art historical writing. She reflects on modes of description and their political resonances, and muses about the specific strengths and limitations of art history, particularly when it comes to categories like “global contemporary” or an assumption of a unified “we” within the discipline. Finally, she shares current projects, including one on Black and Asian artistic intersections from the early 1960s to the present.

“Always About to Take Place”: Glenn Peers on the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Jun 08, 2021

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies: short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian.
Originally adorning a small Greek Orthodox chapel in Cyprus, from 1997 to 2012 these Byzantine frescoes were installed in a specially built space, an “infinity box” that feels akin to being inside an architectural reliquary, at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. Glenn Peers (Syracuse University) reflects on how the history of the Byzantine Fresco Chapel tells a story of nation-states in conflict, restitution and mediation, and the capacity of images to transform across time and environments.

“The Status of the Human”: Amy Freund on the First French Hunting Portrait Jun 08, 2021

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies: short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian.
Amy Freund (Southern Methodist University) reveals the newly discovered Portrait of a Seated Hunter with His Dogs (1661), which dates to nearly forty years before the genre was previously believed to have emerged in France. This painting testifies to the creative as well as the destructive power of humans, challenging certain seventeenth-century conceptions of “man” by subverting assumed hierarchies of human and animal.

“The Erosion of History”: Samantha Page on Hung Liu’s “Migrant Mother” Jun 08, 2021

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies: short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian.
Samantha Page (Clark Art Institute) explores how Hung Liu’s painting Migrant Mother (2015) reimagines Dorothea Lange’s iconic Depression-era photograph; here the materiality of paint draws attention to layers of mediation and imbues the image’s subjects with renewed agency.

“A Rebuke to Polite Masculinity”: Charles Keiffer on Thomas Patch’s “British Gentlemen at Sir Horace Mann’s Home in Florence” Jun 08, 2021

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies: short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian.
Charles Keiffer (Williams College) recounts the heightened atmosphere of intoxicated conviviality on display in Thomas Patch’s oil painting British Gentlemen at Sir Horace Mann’s Home in Florence (1763–1765), in which caricature is deployed to subversive ends, challenging norms of masculinity and using formal idiosyncrasies to invoke the ephemeral nature of sociability.

“The Color of Emergency”: Joan Kee on Chao-Chen Yang’s “Apprehension” Jun 08, 2021

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies: short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian.
Joan Kee (University of Michigan) delves into how Chao-Chen Yang’s color photograph Apprehension (c. 1942) captures the feeling of surveillance, silencing, and precarity, particularly as experienced by those who are Asian in the United States, whether during World War II or today.

“It Looks like How Jazz Sounds”: Jordan Horton on Romare Bearden's “The Dove” Jun 08, 2021

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies: short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian.
Jordan Horton (Williams College) explores how Romare Bearden’s collage The Dove (1964) plays with fragmented forms to visually evoke the “broken time” of jazz while also embodying how Black people living in Harlem in the 1960s might have experienced the urban spaces they knew as home.

“‘Others’ of Various Kinds”: J. Vanessa Lyon on Intersectionality as an Early Modern Scholar May 04, 2021

In this episode Caroline Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with J. Vanessa Lyon, who is on the faculty at Bennington College, where she teaches the histories of art with an emphasis on gender, race, and post/colonial relationships in Spanish, Flemish, and Transatlantic visual representation. Vanessa speaks about the influence of her graduate studies in theology and how she views teaching as a politics of care. She also describes her experiences as a queer woman of color working on “Old Masters” like Rubens, and contemplates reverberations between early modern and contemporary art, particularly for artists of color.

“Where the Impossible is Possible”: Saundra Weddle and Lisa Pon on Collaboration and Renaissance Studies Apr 27, 2021

In this episode Caroline Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with two scholars of Renaissance art and architecture: Saundra Weddle, professor of architecture at Drury University and a Clark Fellow in fall 2020, and Lisa Pon, professor of art history at the University of Southern California. They discuss how they met one another by chance in a hostel while studying in Italy as graduate students, and how their thirty-year-friendship has shaped their professional work. Saundra and Lisa reflect on their experiences conducting archival research and share their perspectives on where the field of early modern art history is headed.

"One's Own Bifurcations": Lorraine O'Grady on Both/And Thinking in Art Apr 20, 2021

In this episode, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Lorraine O’Grady, an artist and cultural critic whose work on Black female subjectivity and modernism has made significant contributions to numerous disciplines. Lorraine discusses her early research on the relationship between Charles Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval and grapples with her relationship to Black abstract art. She critiques the elision of scholars of color within art history and reflects on the move among Black feminist scholars to acknowledge the specificities of difference. Throughout the conversation, Lorraine offers a perspective that integrates personal histories with broader, cultural ones

“Moving Across the Threshold“: Alisa LaGamma on Curating the Arts of Africa Apr 13, 2021

In this episode Caroline Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Alisa LaGamma, a specialist of African art and Ceil and Michael E. Pulitzer Curator in Charge for the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she has been a curator for twenty-five years. Alisa discusses the formative influence of her childhood spent in the Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria, Togo, Senegal, South Africa, and Italy, her abiding interest in Renaissance art, and how she landed in curatorial work. She reflects on several of her exhibition projects that have sought to anchor African art historically and conceptually and shares her thinking behind the Rockefeller Wing reinstallation that is currently underway at the Met.

“Sound is a Dimension of Reality”: Robin James on Theorizing Sound, Race, and Gender Mar 30, 2021

In this episode in the mini-series focused on sound, art, and media, Caitlin Woolsey (Manton Postdoctoral Fellow in the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Robin James, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. Robin explores the intersections of pop music, sound studies, feminism, race, and contemporary continental philosophy, and discusses how her work often sits uneasily within institutional disciplines. She shares how she sees popular music as a kind of archive and critiques theoretical approaches that idealize sound as neutral or reparative.

“Perception is a Form of Sampling": Christoph Cox on Materialities of Sound Mar 23, 2021

In this episode from the mini-series focused on sound and art, Caitlin Woolsey (Manton Postdoctoral Fellow in the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Christoph Cox, professor of philosophy and dean of the faculty at Hampshire College. Christoph writes on aesthetics, theories of sound, and cultural theory. In this conversation he describes his transdisciplinary academic path, how he views music writing as a kind of fieldwork, and a current collaborative project on sampling. Finally, Christoph reflects on the ethical implications of how we think about the nature of sound as object, as materiality, and as a perennial flow.

“The Sound Can Touch You Directly”: Christina Kubisch on Electronic Sound Art Mar 16, 2021

In this episode from the mini-series focused on sound, media, and art, Caitlin Woolsey (Manton Postdoctoral Fellow in the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Christina Kubisch, a pioneer of sound art. Trained as a composer and flautist, since the 1970s Christina has worked with techniques like electromagnetic induction to realize her experiential installations. In this conversation, Christina describes growing up in postwar Germany, her formative training in music and painting, and her re-invention of technology within her artistic practice. She also reflects on how her experiences in the world of experimental music (among the likes of John Cage and Pauline Oliveros) have informed the sound works and “Electrical Walks” in cities around the world for which she is known today.

“When is This?”: Brian Michael Murphy on Media Archaeology and Preservation Mar 09, 2021

This is the first of a series of four episodes focused on sound, media, and art, in which Caitlin Woolsey (Manton Postdoctoral Fellow in the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Brian Michael Murphy, a writer and media archaeologist who is a faculty member in media studies at Bennington College. Brian explores intersections between race and the materiality of media, and examines how media technologies—from taxidermy to photography archives and the preservation of big data infrastructure—represent and reshape human experience.

“A Database is an Argument”: Anne Helmreich on Digital Humanities and Art History Mar 02, 2021

In this episode Caroline Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Anne Helmreich, an art historian and digital humanist. Formerly the Associate Director of Digital Initiatives at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, since April 2020 Anne has been the Associate Director of the Getty Foundation. A specialist of nineteenth-century art, Anne recounts how she veered away from law school to pursue art history. She reflects on how she first encountered digital humanities, and why for nearly fifteen years she has explored the possibilities of what this burgeoning field might open up for art history, and how art history in turn might productively challenge the digital humanities.

“A Gesture of Reciprocity”: Souleymane Bachir Diagne on Translation and Restitution Feb 23, 2021

In this episode Caroline Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Souleymane Bachir Diagne, professor in the departments of French and philosophy and director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. Bachir reflects on his early studies in Senegal as well as formative experiences studying with Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida in Paris. He revisits his role in creating the Dakar Biennale and shares his thoughts on restitution and the arts of Africa. Finally, he describes how he understands translation as an ethical act of hospitality.

“Unpacking My Identity”: Genevieve Gaignard on Race in America and the Impossibility of Home Feb 16, 2021

In this episode Caroline Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Genevieve Gaignard, a Los Angeles-based artist whose mixed-media practice explores the intersections of race, class, and femininity within the United States. While thinking through the notion of home as an impossible or privileged construct, Genevieve reflects on her experience moving back to rural Massachusetts for a residency at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and how her practice fits within the predominately white demographic of the Berkshires compared to her diverse creative community in LA. Genevieve discusses her 2020 exhibition A Long Way From Home and contemplates the ways in which her collages and photographic self-portraits grapple with racial and class stereotypes, particularly in the polarized contemporary political landscape.

“How to Look with Soft Eyes”: Darby English on Description as Method Feb 09, 2021

In this first episode of Season 2 of In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing, Caroline Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Darby English, the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. In this conversation they discuss Darby’s early affinity with Dutch seventeenth-century painting, his belief in the vital role description plays in art historical writing, and the necessity of developing slow looking in opposition to the velocity that characterizes culture production and our lived experiences more broadly.

“Philosophical Grounding”: Michael Ann Holly on Creating Visual Studies  Nov 17, 2020

In this episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Michael Ann Holly, the founding director of the Research and Academic Program. Michael describes what initially drew her art history, what interested her in historiography, and the importance of critical theory to her work. Caro and Michael discuss her contributions to the founding of RAP as well as the department of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, the first department of its kind in the United States. Additionally, Michael speaks to the influence and solace of the landscape of the Berkshires on her thinking and writing.

"Can You Show Thinking?”: Mieke Bal on Film & Writing Nov 10, 2020

In this episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist, critic, and video artist. Mieke's work focuses on gender, migratory culture, psychoanalysis, and the critique of capitalism. In this conversation, Mieke discusses her early influences and reflects on what drew her to filmmaking. She describes the intersections between art history and the cinematic, and delves into several of her video projects, including a “film about thinking” on Hubert Damisch. Additionally, she reflects on how for her writing, filmmaking, and curating represent distinct modes of thinking and making.

"Refusal of Personality": Brigid Doherty on Rosemarie Trockel and Rorschach Oct 27, 2020

In this episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Brigid Doherty, Associate Professor in the Departments of Art and Archaeology and German at Princeton University. Brigid’s research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of twentieth-century art and literature, especially relationships among artistic practices and aesthetic and psychoanalytic theories. In this conversation, she describes her intellectual path towards modernism and delves into the project she worked on as a fellow at the Clark in spring 2020, a book on the “Rorschach Pictures” of the German artist Rosemarie Trockel.

“Looking as Knowing”: Svetlana Alpers on Critical Thinking and Photography Oct 20, 2020

In this episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Svetlana Alpers, a specialist of Dutch Golden Age painting and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. In this conversation, Svetlana shares how literary criticism influenced her early encounters with art and reflects on her intellectual formation at Harvard in the 1960s, and her role forming the art history department at Berkeley. She reflects on the altered state of the discipline today, and levels a critique of the turn towards global art history. Finally, they discuss the relation between painting and photography in light of her new book on Walker Evans, and Svetlana draws out parallels between this new project and her seminal book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century.

“An Art History Yet to Come”: Kirsten Scheid on Palestinian Art  Oct 13, 2020

In this episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Kirsten Scheid, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the American University in Beirut. In 2019–2020, while the Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow at the Clark Art Institute, Kirsten worked on an ethnography of aesthetic encounters in contemporary Palestine, building on her career-long research into and archival documentation of art-making in Palestine and Lebanon. In their conversation, Kirsten and Caro discuss issues of access and ethics around archives, and Kirsten shares her belief in the power of archives to “hail an art history yet to come.” They also talk about curatorial projects and consider imagination as an ethical practice.

“A Set of Ways of Engaging”: Lisa Lee on Thomas Hirschhorn & Materiality Oct 06, 2020

In this episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler speaks with Lisa Lee, Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University and Florence Gould Foundation Fellow at the Clark in spring 2020. While a fellow, Lisa worked on a project tentatively titled “Thomas Hirschhorn’s Real Abstraction, 1984–94,” which focuses on a critical period in the life of the Swiss artist, who is known for his work in collage and monument-making, primarily with found materials. Through working with these materials, often in public spaces, his art grapples with the political, economic, and social conditions of contemporary life. Lisa also discusses her work on the German artist Isa Genzken. This conversation explores Lisa’s interest in the tension of what she describes as work that highlights the possibility of art and its everyday political power.

“An Embodiment of Experience”: Steven Nelson on African Art and Writing History Sep 29, 2020

In this episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler speaks with Steven Nelson, who in March 2020 was named Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA). Prior to that appointment, Steven served as Professor of African and African American Art History at UCLA. Steven’s broad interests in design, travel, and histories of the African diaspora are reflected in his path toward a career in academia. Steven and Caro discuss how graduate education shaped Steven’s specialization in African and African American art, his writing practices, and his latest book project, which focuses on the Underground Railroad and American myth-making. Steven also shares his hopes for his new position at CASVA and the future of the field of art history.

“To Speak Across Time”: Gabriele Finaldi on Museums Sep 15, 2020

In this episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with art historian Gabriele Finaldi, who since 2015 has been Director of the National Gallery in London. A specialist of Renaissance and Baroque art, Gabriele previously served as Deputy Director of the Prado for over a decade. In this conversation he describes his early interest in the discipline and his graduate studies at the Courtauld, why he was moved to work on Jusepe de Ribera, and the particular power of drawing as a medium. More broadly, Gabriele and Caro discuss the evolving roles of education and the science of conservation within modern museums, and reflect on new directions for historical and collections-based museums today.

“An Archive of Exchange”: C. Ondine Chavoya on Chicanx and Latinx Art History Sep 08, 2020

In this episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with C. Ondine Chavoya, Professor of Art History and Latina/o Studies at Williams College. They discuss what shaped Ondine’s interest in Chicanx art and his role in establishing the program in Latina/Latino Studies, the first of its kind at a liberal arts college in the United States. Ondine describes his work as a curator and advocates for the vital role of exhibitions and catalogues in the production of knowledge. He and Caro reflect on the immersive experience of researching from non-traditional archives, and the ways those processes shape the writing of history. Set against the backdrop of experiences of institutionalized racism within the discipline, Ondine shares some the ways in which he hopes to move the field forward.

“Surfaces of Projection”: Dell M. Hamilton on Performance Art and Black Embodiment Sep 01, 2020

In this episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Dell M. Hamilton, an artist, scholar, writer, and independent curator. They discuss how Dell’s long affiliation with the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University shaped her perspective as an artist, and the impact of literature and architectural spaces on Dell’s performances, including Blues\Blank\Black, a piece she presented in the galleries of the Clark Art Institute in November 2019. Dell reflects on the possibilities of art to foment political change, and describes the potential for performance art to produce images of the experiences of Black women that otherwise go unseen.

“The Nature of All Our Forms”: María Magdalena Campos-Pons on Performance Art Aug 18, 2020

In the inaugural episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with María Magdalena Campos-Pons, a multidisciplinary artist and the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University. Magda recounts her early progressive education and the importance of the exchange of ideas with her mentors and other women artists and describes how she carries that generosity forward in her own teaching. They discuss how performance art addresses transformations of the human body, whether through processes of aging or technological prosthetics, and Magda reflects on her decision to document her performances (or not). Throughout the interview, Magda returns to the long and elemental force of performance on the formation of human knowledge, including in our everyday experiences navigating Covid-19.

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