History of Art winter course preview. Not sure what classes to take? Come listen to the History of Art professors talk about their winter 2010 courses. Pizza and soda provided by Helicon, the UM History of Art undergraduate student organization.

Professor Martin Powers delivers the inaugural lecture celebrating the opening of the Confucius Institute at U-M, "De-familiarizing the Exotic: Appreciating the Arts of China in the 21st Century."

The Kelsey reopens its doors after over a year of renovations and expansion, including the new William E. Upjohn Exhibit Wing. Provost Teresa Sullivan, LS&A Dean Terrence J. McDonald, and Kelsey Museum Director Sharon Herbert will host the celebration.

Stephen Bann, author of Paul Delaroch: History Painted and Parallel Lines:Printmakers, Painters, and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France, among numerous other books and articles, writes about the relationship between painting and photography and the role of mass media in the evolution of imagery in the museum. His lecture is given in conjunction with the exhibit The Lens of Impressionism: Photography and Painting Along the Normandy Coast, 1850-1874 which runs October 10, 2009 to January 3, 2010 at UMMA.

Celebrate the publication of Susan Siegfried's book Ingres: Painting Reimagined and Dena Goodman's Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters.

"Beneath the Black: Richmond Barthe's Nudes," a lecture by Margaret Vendryes, professor of art history at City University of New York.

U-M History of Art graduate students give 30-minute talks followed by Q & A. Today: Katie Brion on "From Opticality to Psychophysics: Neo-Impressionism and the Problem of the Sensual" and Katharine Raff on "Standardization in the Painted Decoration of the Apartments of Roman Ostia."

"The Absent Witness of Everything: Picturing Omnipresence in Yoruba Visual Culture," a lecture by U-M History of Art Associate Professor David Doris.

"Michelangelo Deutsch! Michelangelomania in Germany between 1860 and 1945," a lecture by Joseph Imorde, Professor of History of Art at the University of Siegen. The lecture concentrates on the tremendous success that was enjoyed by Michelangelo in Germany between 1860 and 1945. What it tries to show is the speed with which interest in Michelangelo developed and the surprising fever pitch that “Michelangelomania” reached finally in Germany until the point in 1941 when one spoke of Michelangelo being viewed as "spirit of German spirit, and flesh of German flesh." Viewed in a larger context, this story is about Germany’s intellectual encroachment on Italy, or, as Wilhelm Bode – the first director of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin – once put it, "the framing of the German cultural self in the mirror of foreign art," a framing that, in other words, might have been described as nothing other than German cultural imperialism.

UM History of Art graduate students give 30-minute talks followed by Q & A. Today: Anna Wieck on "Looking at Floating Figures: An Exploration of Alienation and Growth in Wols’ Early Watercolors," and Kathy Zarur on "Masculinity Represented, Nationalism Abandoned In Photographs by Tarek Al-Ghoussein."

The Journal des dames et des modes shaped the representation of gender roles, social values, and vogue for contemporary women and men during the early nineteenth century. This interdisciplinary workshop repositions this important periodical in the broad context of its influence.

In this lecture/presentation, Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom employ tactics of spectacle and humor to provide critical re-evaluations of cultural and historical narratives through the lens of the historic record and art history. Displayed as immersive projections or installations, their work simultaneously fuses video art’s tendencies towards the visually spectacular and its legacy as a tool for social change. Carlson and Strom examine the moving body within a range of ”landscapes”: the physical western vista, the economic terrain of late-capitalist America, and the artistic tradition of constructing these literal and ideological images. Part of the School of Art & Design's Distinguished Vistors Program.

Not sure what classes to take next term? Enjoy free pizza and soda as History of Art professors talk about their fall ‘09 courses. Sponsored by Helicon, the UM History of Art undergraduate student organization.

Martin Jay, Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, presents this year's Werner Grilk Lecture, "Magical Nominalism: Photography and the Reenchantment of the World." Part of the German Studies Colloquium.

UM History of Art graduate students give 30-minute talks followed by Q & A. Today: Jessica Fripp on "Friendship and Fantasy at the French Academy in Rome," and Christina Chang on "Looking at/with Rauschenberg's Photographs."

"Powerful Stones: Inventing, Re-inventing, and Controlling Early Medieval Amulets," a lecture by independent scholar Genevra Kornbluth. Sponsored by the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program, the Department of the History of Art, the Department of History, and the Rackham School of Graduate Studies.

A lecture by Swati Chattopadhyay, associate professor of art and architectural history at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Chattopadhyay is interested in the ties between colonialism and modernism, and in the spatial aspects of race, gender, and ethnicity in modern cities. She is the author of Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge), and co-editor of a special issue of PostColonial Studies.

A lecture by Alex Potts, Max Loehr Collegiate Professor of the History of Art. Twentieth-century art is conventionally seen as being dominated by the imperatives of abstraction. This talk, which focuses on a moment of intensive experimentation in Europe and American art in the late 1950s and early 1960s, presents a rather different picture, highlighting the key role played by new forms of realism in the postwar art world. Such realism came to the fore in a diverse body of work ranging from French New Realism to British and American Pop. It was not the same as nineteenth-century realism though it shared some of the latter’s radical ambitions. New kinds of image making based on literal appropriation rather than visual depiction were developed with a view to conveying a more compelling sense of the material and cultural realities of the contemporary world than was thought to be possible either with modern non-objective abstraction or traditional visual representation.

Please join us at the 97th Annual Conference of the College Art Association. All faculty, alumni, students, and friends of the department are welcome.

A lecture by Stephen Melville, Professor of History of Art at Ohio State University. Melville has published widely on contemporary art as well as on issues in contemporary theory and historiography. His recent publications include As Painting: Division and Displacement, the catalog to accompany the 2001 exhibit, and Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context.(New York: Gordon and Breach, 1996).

History of Art Honors students give 20-minute talks followed by a short Q & A. Introduction begins at 7:00, followed by student presentations. 7:15: Suzanne Lipton, "Renoir's Radicalism: Painting le peuple at the Moulin de la Galette"; 7:45: Ornella Dubaz, "Dressed Up: Finding Value in Restored Works of Art"; 8:15: Kaleigh Winchell, "Cézanne and the Practice of Painting"; 8:45: Rachel Fullmer, "Vibrations and the Void: Kandinsky, Klein, and the Effects of Color"; 9:15: John Gunnell, "Sesshu Toyo: Lineage & Legacy." See also Thursday, December 4.

History of Art Honors students give 20-minute talks followed by a short Q & A. Introduction begins at 7:00, followed by student presentations. 7:15: Jane Steinberg, "Matisse and the Boundaries of Art and Decoration"; 7:45: Megan Muma, "Manet and Jesus"; 8:15: Emily Angell, "Fashion and the City: The Ashcan School in Turn-of-the-Century New York"; 8:45: Natalie Newton, "Performance and Representation: Rubens and the Medusa Effect"; 9:15: Liz Georgoff, "Banksy to the Rescue!: Spectacular Society's Spray-Can Superhero." See also Friday, December 5.

Not sure what classes to take next term? Enjoy free pizza and soda as History of Art professors talk about their winter ‘09 courses. Sponsored by Helicon, the UM History of Art undergraduate student organization.

The concept of ephemerality has come to evoke a broad range of associations, from the transience of individuals, objects, and events, to the complexities of memory, transformation, displacement, replacement, and restoration. This symposium seeks to provide a forum for exploring how ephemerality relates not only to the work of art itself, but also to the larger nexus of medium, artistic practice, viewership, community, the market, and institutional frameworks. Keynote speaker is James Meyer, Winship Distinguished Associate Professor in the Art History Department at Emory University.

"Style and Substance, or Why the Cacaxtla Paintings Were Buried." During the tumultuous period between A.D. 650 and 950, artists at the Central Mexican city of Cacaxtla produced a series of murals that bear striking stylistic and technical similarities to the paintings of Maya city-states over 400 miles to the south. Life-sized images of gods, historical figures, and supernatural creatures lined the walls of the city’s most important sacred and public spaces, structuring civic experience and articulating a vision of the Cacaxtla polity. Although these works have often been attributed to imported Maya artists, I argue that the Cacaxtla murals constitute a sustained and distinctive painting tradition, which departed from Maya origins in response to profoundly local concerns. This paper examines the intentional burial of the Cacaxtla paintings and the evidence for their later commemoration, arguing that this practice responded not only to the iconographic content of the murals and their distinctive style, but also to their substance, which was itself imbued with meaning.

In "Sculpting Mondrian's Furniture," University of Southern California History of Art Professor Nancy Troy draws from “The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian,” in which Troy seeks to understand how the Dutch artist’s reputation and stature were shaped in elite and popular culture during the decades after his death in New York in 1944. Here, she explores the forces at work in the posthumous transformation of the furniture Mondrian made for his last studio out of discarded materials into sculptures of potentially great monetary value.

Jane Evelyn Atwood is one of the world's leading photojournalists. Fascinated by people and concepts of exclusion, she has managed to penetrate worlds that most of us do not know, producing work that reflects her deep involvement with her subjects over time. In 1976, Atwood bought her first camera and began taking pictures of a group of street prostitutes in Paris. In her presentation, Atwood will speak about how she started and how she works, beginning with pictures from the prostitute series and including work from a story of the first person with AIDS in France to allow himself to be photographed for publication; a ten-year study of blind children; photos from Too Much Time (2000), her investigation of female incarceration in forty prisons and nine countries; and, finally, pictures from a four-year project on landmine survivors in Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.

In "Acts of Memory," Steve Pyke presents an overview of his career as a photographer, explaining how he started and the subjects that have occupied him until the present day. He will discuss a number of his ongoing photographic projects including his Acts of Memory and Philosophers series. He will also discuss the photographs from I Could Read the Sky, a collaboration with the novelist Timothy O’ Grady, as well as his most recent work for The New Yorker.

Michigan has been included among the venues for this fall's launch of the Forsyth Lecture series, a program sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art (New York). The series will present lectures by distinguished scholars at multiple venues within the international scope of the Center. At this inaugural series, Jannic Durand, Conservateur (Curator) in the Départment des Objets d'art at the Louvre and an acclaimed expert on Byzantine art, will deliver a talk, "Byzantine Reliquaries in France," dealing with his research on Byzantine reliquaries. Reception to follow.

Helicon, the UM History of Art Student Society, presents this 30-minute lecture geared toward undergraduate students. Today, Professor Kevin Carr on "When Cute and Sexy Collide: Lolita's New Home in Japanese Visual Culture."

UM History of Art graduate students give 30-minute talks followed by Q & A. Today: Ksenya Gurshtein on "TransStates: On the Uses and Limits of Conceptual Art in Eastern Europe" and Lauren Graber on "Gruppe SPUR and the Situationist International: Assessing Subversive Avant-Garde Strategies in Cold War Europe."

This symposium brings four innovative scholars —Robert Farris Thompson , Zoe S. Strother , Glenn Adamson, and Norman M. Klein—to discuss how Wonder has been experienced and employed around the globe.

THIS PRESENTATION WAS RESCHEDULED FROM ITS ORIGINAL APRIL 15 DATE. Going on a field trip? Taking photos for research? Last minute copy photography? Attend this session for basic photography tips, from file format and white balance to exposure and how to avoid pitfalls in copy photography. Presented by Sally Bjork, Media Services Coordinator at History of Art.

Douglas Biow is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of several important books that bridge the literary, intellectual and cultural history of Renaissance Italy: Mirabile Dictu: Representations of the Marvelous in Medieval and Renaissance Epic (University of Michigan Press, 1996); followed by Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2002), and most recently The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy (Cornell University Press, 2006). His new book project, provisionally titled In Your Face: Professional Improprieties and the Art of Being Conspicuous in Sixteenth-Century Italy, pursues the development of professional cultures by examining the deliberate anti-professionalism of writers and visual artists who eschewed the smooth courtly comportment defined by Baldassar Castiglione in favor of aggressively conspicuous eccentricity. Following a chapter on Castiglione and "the Art of Being Inconspicuously Conspicuous," Biow marshals four case studies of highly successful writers and visual artists whose strategies of self-fashioning stand in stark opposition to those of predecessors who sought attention and acceptance in elite courtly societies by cultivating moderation, limitation and discretion. Through their outrageous behavior, and especially through their respective works of art, Pietro Aretino, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Benvenuto Cellini and Anton Francesco Doni created distinctly anti-courtly personae as a means of broadcasting their insubordinate and intractable eccentricities as signs and guarantees of artistic inimitability. It is from this new work that both Professor Biow's pre-circulated paper for discussion at the Premodern Colloquium and the material for his public lecture will be drawn.

Prof. Biow will visit the Premodern Colloquium and lead discussion of a work in progress titled "Anton Francesco Doni and the Art of Conspicuous Reproduction," drawn from the manuscript of his new book In Your Face: Professional Improprieties and the Art of Being Conspicuous in Sixteenth-Century Italy. His pre-circulated text will be distributed two weeks in advance by the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program. See also Monday, April 14 event.

Before Ludwig Mies van der Rohe returned to Berlin to build the New National Gallery in the 1960s, his American work had come back to Germany in photographs. How did this photographic return influence the transmission of architectural ideas to a German audience in the postwar years? How did the photographic return condition or prepare the subsequent architectural return? This question seems nearly impossible to answer. The difficulty of gauging reader reception is magnified in the case of photography, since few readers of images comment on the relationship between photography and building in anything other than passing fashion.

For the past two years Silverman has worked with the citizens of the town of Techiman to create a community-focused cultural center, a space for performing and preserving local heritage. This discussion will focus on the process and challenges of building a collaborative environment involving a diverse group of participants: members of a multi-ethnic community, representatives of the municipal government, members of the district's Traditional Council of Chiefs, and students and faculty from UM and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.

Kari Smith, Head of the VRC and Media Services, will present some tips, tools, and tricks for personal digital asset management. Kari will talk about considerations for how you might name, organize, and use software tools for retrieval of digital files of images, documents, presentation files and other digital assets that you might have on your computer or in your file spaces. The presentation will also talk about the pros and cons of keeping personal copies (digital collections) of University- or Department-maintained content.

Thomas Lentes is a specialist in late medieval theology at the Universität Münster in Germany, and he will talk about the very unusual imagery and narrative exposition in a fourteenth-century Italian altarpiece related to the mystical visions of the holy man Beato Chiarito del Voglia.

The U-M Dance for Mother Earth Pow Wow is one of the largest university-run pow wows in the country, with more than 1,000 of North America's greatest singers, dancers, artists and craftspeople. For more information visit http://www.umich.edu/~powwow/index.html

Christopher Wild, Associate Professor of Art History at UCLA, presents the annual Grilk Lecture in German Studies, "Enlightenment Aesthetics and the Eucharistic Sign: Lessing's Laokoon."

A lecture by Robert Justin Goldstein, emeritus professor of political science at Oakland University and currently CREES Research Associate. Prof. Goldstein, the curator of the exhibit, has published and lectured widely on political caricature and political censorship in Europe between 1815 and 1914.

Louise Marshall is Professor of Art History and Theory at University of Sydney, Australia. One of the leading experts on plague imagery in early Renaissance Italy, Marshall will examine Giovanni di Paolo's representation of plague and funereal practices in order to suggest a new identification for the panel's subject.

This session will provide basic tips on how to effectively search for images. In addition, the presentation will highlight numerous image resources for participants to use to prepare classroom lectures.

History of Art fall course preview. Not sure what classes to take? Come listen to the History of Art professors talk about their fall '08 courses. Pizza and soda provided by Helicon, the UM History of Art undergraduate student organization.

Margaret Betz is Professor of Art History at the Savannah School of Art and Design. She wrote her dissertation on caricature and the 1905 Russian Revolution and has written and lectured widely on the subject. Her lecture will feature many illustrative slides. Related exhibit, "Caricature and the 1905 Russian Revolution" runs April 1 -18 at the Hatcher Library Gallery during normal library hours. See also related lecture April 2 by Robert Goldstein.

UM History of Art graduate students give 30 minute talks followed by Q & A. Today, Phil Guilbeau on "Filiation and Patronage in Carthusian Houses in Late Medieval Castile"and Chris Coltrin on "Destruction or Deliverance: The Politics of the Catastrophe in the Art of John Martin."

Reinhold Martin is an architect and partner of Martin/ Baxi Architects, and Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, where he directs the Master of Science Program in Advanced Architectural Design. He holds a Ph.D. From Princeton University, as well as degrees from the Architectural Association and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. A founding co-editor of the journal Grey Room, he is the author of The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Science (MIT Press, 2003).

Does prepping files for a digital presentation make you want to scream? Are halftone dots wreaking havoc when viewed digitally? Not sure what your publisher means by "1200 on the long side"? Don't let resolution and image quality get you down. Learn to translate digital images with this informational session on file preparation. Presented by Sally Bjork, Media Services Coordinator at History of Art.

This event has been rescheduled for March 28. See "Tappan Talks" on March 28 for more info.

This one-day conference explores recent archaeological work in China and how exciting new discoveries in Yunnan, Henan, Shandong and other regions have greatly expanded our knowledge of the Chinese past. While providing a context for the larger UM community to learn about current archaeological and art historical research from leading Chinese scholars, the conference also brings together research collaborators and helps to facilitate and move forward ongoing UM-China research collaborations in archaeology and art history.

Vienna - today the capital of Austria but once the heart of the Habsburg monarchy - is a city of great collections and museums. Moreover, Vienna is known for its contribution to the institutionalization of art history through the Vienna School of Art History in the second half of the nineteenth and beginning of twentieth century. Influential institutions of art history arose out of a necessity to sustain the idea of a common trans-national imperial heritage and universal "objective" art history. This lecture will deal with the ideas around art-historical knowledge, education and display in the Museum of Art and Industry in Vienna at the time when Alois Riegl was a curator in the museum. It will examine the processes of re-thinking the "minor arts" and transforming the displays in the Museum of Applied Arts, as well as the shift from Collection of Models to the Study Collection/Studiensammlung and Show Collection/Schausammlung in the 1980s, staged by internationally renowned artists Donald Judd, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Bloom.

This talk was originally presented at the 2005 symposium, "Women in the Service of Art History" that was held at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. It deals with the role of women curators in Slovakia, in the past and present. During the first half of the twentieth century there was a distinct division of labor based on gender not only in everyday life but also in the art-historical profession. Slovak women art historians were not expected to conduct research but to focus on practical experience, classification, preservation of art objects in museums and educating the public. They were expected to manage collections even if they were very well educated. Because the retrieval of Slovak national heritage has been an important task, women in lower positions were assisting patriotic men in higher positions. Museum hierarchy and gender division continues today. However, women in museums have become more visible as exhibition curators. Curating means entering into the public sphere and undermining gender stereotypes in our society.

The Campus Lockdown conference will center women of color in the academic industrial complex. Structural constraints, as well as the implications of scholarship, will be considered. For complete speaker info and to register, visit http://www.woclockdown.org

The Atlantic Studies Initiative is holding this interdisciplinary conference which brings to campus a dozen internationally renowned scholars who will present aspects of their research on the circulation of musical and visual cultures throughout the early modern Atlantic-American world. See also March 15. For more information visit http://www.lsa.umich.edu/history/Atlantic%20Studies%20Conference%20Description.pdf

A lecutre by David Doris, Assistant Professor in History of Art and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies.

The Atlantic Studies Initiative is holding this interdisciplinary conference which brings to campus a dozen internationally renowned scholars who will present aspects of their research on the circulation of musical and visual cultures throughout the early modern Atlantic-American world. See also March 15. For more information visit http://www.lsa.umich.edu/history/Atlantic%20Studies%20Conference%20Description.pdf

Maria Oriskova is Associate Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovak Republic. This lecture deals with the question of national culture in the new European/global context. Since 1989 East European nation states (and recently new EU members) have been struggling with a problem of interpretation of their past in museums. However, the need for a new self-interpretation goes hand in hand with the issue of a new geographical cultural arena, a competitive global system within which some cultures seem to be unplugged, disconnected. In recent years in Slovakia there have been attempts at reconstructing the past, mostly within defensive patterns or romantic aspirations and illusions about wholeness, purity, coherence, continuity or parallel developments with Western art. But the question is not only about preserving place-bound traditions but globally "translating traditions." New geographies are in fact about the renaissance of locality and region as well as the vitality of local culture within global culture. Dr. Oriskova's residence at the University of Michigan is under the auspices of the Center for Russian and East European Studies, as a recipient of a Ronald and Eileen Weiser Professional Development Fellowship. See also March 17 & March 20.

The picturesque ruin of the Cistercian abbey church of Villers-en-Brabant (Belgium) represents a case study for some of the most recent debates on medieval monastic culture. Its three separate construction campaigns in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries provide a source for the investigation of construction techniques, for studies on liturgy (monastic, funerary), but also for a wider socio-historical consideration of the methodology of architectural history. Coomans is Professor of History of Art & Archaeology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

University of Pennsylvania Visiting Scholar Warren Woodfin discusses the Chingul Project. The study and publication of the finds from Chingul Kurgan is a collaborative effort of specialists in archaeology, history, and the history of art. The original excavation, conducted in 1981 near the village of Zamozhne in the Zaporizhska oblast of southern Ukraine, uncovered the grave of a nomadic khan, the leader of the Turkic steppe people. The Polovtsian khan's burial was inserted into a kurgan, or burial mound, of the late Bronze Age, which was reused and enlarged for the purpose. The body of the khan, along with his arms, armor, and other grave goods, was placed in a large wooden sarcophagus in the heart of the mound. Along with the body itself, the kurgan contained the remains of five horses, four of which wore elaborately decorated saddles and bridles, and ten sheep sacrificed as part of the burial rites. The research is geared towards understanding how this impressive array of works of art arrived in the possession of a steppe nomad and how they might have been used and interpreted as expressions of power of a leader on the borders between the Mediterranean and Eurasian worlds.

In 1986, in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, an art vandal mutilated Barnett Newman's "Who is afraid of red, yellow and blue? III." This event, the subsequent 'restoration' by Daniel Goldreyer and a 'blasphemous' pastiche of Newman's painting made by the archbishopric of Utrecht,brought about a heated debate on modern art in the Netherlands. Taking this debate as a starting point, De Mul will discuss the religious function art has assumed in secular Western societies and interpret from this perspective the debate about the 'end of art', as it has been started by Hegel and, more recently, has been reanimated by artists, art historians, and art critics such as Herve Fischer, Hans Belting, and Arthur Danto. De Mul is a professor of philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and a specialist on modern art, art theory and aesthetics, philosophy of culture, information, and communication technology. He is developing a theory of virtual power influenced by his conceptualization of virtuality in his book, Cyberspace Odyssey, and on his earlier research on Foucault's notion of power relationships. He is currently in residence at the Department of the History of Art.

History of Art Honors students give 20-minute talks followed by a short Q & A. More details TBA.

During the last decades of the nineteenth century, as the forces of colonialism and industrialization transformed the lives of coastal east Africans, Mombasa became the site of intense contestation. Diverse foreigners and long-term residents sought to lay claim to the city's densely built-up harbor area, the historical heart of mercantile trade and local social networks. Its architectural spaces and their symbolic power were translated within new and old hierarchies of cultural difference, creating unexpected frameworks for the narrations of self and belonging. Charting the elaborations and reinventions of several merchant houses along the Mombasa waterfront, this presentation will examine the larger processes by which meaning is produced and elided in African architecture. A talk by Africanist art historian Dr. Prita Meier, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins.

In this presentation, Meghan Musolff, Assistant Coordinator of the Visual Resources Collection, will introduce the online digital library ARTstor. Topics to be covered include recent and upcoming additions to ARTstor, how to search and group images, how to present images using ARTstor's Offline Image Viewer presentation software, and more.

A lecture by Claire Zimmerman, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Assistant Professor of History of Art.

A guided tour of the exhibit "Persion Visions: Contemporary Photography from Iran" sponsored by Helicon, UM's History of Art student organization. For more info about Helicon visit: www.umich.edu/~helicon

History of Art winter course preview. Not sure what classes to take? Come listen to the History of Art professors talk about their winter courses. Pizza and soda provided by Helicon, the UM History of Art undergraduate student organization.

This talk will focus on the relationships and affinities between camouflage and contemporary art. A brief historical account of this relationship will be proposed, from the contribution that Cubism made to the invention of military camouflage, to the strategic use of camouflage in today's art. A talk by Maria Teresa Mendez-Baiges, Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Malaga (Spain).

Roundtable discussion with David Halperin, Nadine Hubbs, Helmut Puff, Pat Simons (History of Art), Valerie Traub. Queer Theory burst on the academic scene in February 1990, in the form of a conference of that title organized by Teresa de Lauretis at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The phrase was a provocation and a challenge, but it quickly turned into the name of a hot-shot new theory, the supposed successor to feminism, endowed with the political chic of activist groups like Queer Nation (which in fact came into being later) and surrounded by the transgressive glamour of radical gender performances. The theory had to be invented to satisfy the lucrative desire for it, but after a decade of effervescence and increasing scholarly legitimacy it has started to seem passé, especially now that the market for academic books in queer theory has collapsed. U-M's most distinguished queer theorists take stock of the situation.

Art historian and Iran native Dr. Sussan Babaie will explore the distinctive and rich styles of image making in contemporary Iranian visual culture in this lecture offered in conjunction with "Persian Visions: Contemporary Photography from Iran," currently on view at UMMA Off/Site.

Following in the footsteps of Robert Branner's 1960 seminal study, this paper attempts a fresh look at the architecture of the duchy during a period of intense artistic creativity in northern France. It proposes that the importance of ecclesiastic reform and monasticism in the region, together with the lack of a centralized government, created unique conditions which bring a new perspective to the study of Gothic architecture. A talk by Visiting Assistant Professor, History of Art, Alexandra Gajewski.

In late Medieval Spain, it became traditional for art historians to distinguish between major arts (painting, sculpture and architecture) and minor arts (all the rest). But in the 14th and 15th century, this was not the case. A survey of documentation of painters active in Catalonia and Valencia during this period groups painters of retablos, furniture, shields with coats of arms, "interior decoration" paintings on linen, banners, and painted bridles and clogs (outdoor sandals) all together. The differences between categories had to do more with payment values than with the type of painting (retablos, being bigger, usually paid more). By means of such documentation and a very unusual merchant's house inventory, the greater world of the painters of this time and place will be discussed, with a focus on the Crown of Aragon.

"Materialism and the Materiality of the Image," a one-day symposium at the University of Michigan.