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.

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.

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.

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.

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