In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

Latest Episodes:

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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

Show notes

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.

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