Art & Art History
Special Series in Modern and Contemporary Art
Gallery 400 Lecture Room
400 South Peoria Street
C cile Whiting
“The Sublime and the Banal in Post-War Photography of the West”
Monday, March 26, 5pm
C cile Whiting is Chair of the Department of Art History and a member of the faculty in the Graduate Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She specializes in the history of American art with a focus on the mid twentieth century, about which she has published three books: Antifascism in American Art (Yale Press, 1989); A Taste for Pop: Pop Art, Gender, and Consumer Culture (Cambridge Press, 1997); and Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2006). Pop L.A. was awarded the 2009 Charles C. Eldredge Prize from the Smithsonian Institution for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art. Whiting received a BA from Swarthmore College and a PhD from Stanford University.
Jenny Lin
“A New Heaven on Earth? Notes on Visual Culture from Shanghai’s Underground”
Monday, April 2, 12pm
Jenny Lin is a PhD candidate in the Art History Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Lin’s dissertation, Above Sea: Modern and Contemporary Art from the Ruins of Shanghai s New Heaven on Earth, studies imaginations and constructions of cosmopolitan Shanghai vis- -vis art, architecture, and film. She is interested in the relations between twentieth and twenty-first century art praxes and social phenomena, such as colonialism, urbanization and globalization. Her research has been supported by fellowships from UCLA s Graduate Division and Art History Department, the U.S. State Department s FLAS program, the Confucius Institute, and the UC Pacific Rim Research program. Her work has been published in X-TRA and Frieze. Lin received a BA from Brown University and will complete her PhD this June.
Blake Stimson
“The Enclosure of Contemporary Art”
Wednesday, April 4, 5pm
Blake Stimson is a professor in the Art History Program at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches postwar and contemporary art, theory, and methodology, and the history of photography. He co-directed the Critical Theory Program at UC Davis from 2001 to 2003. He is the author of The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (2004), and coeditor (with Alexander Alberro) of Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (2000), both published by the MIT Press. Stimson earned an MA and PhD in Art History at Cornell University, and an MFA in Sculpture at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Ila Sheren
“Border Art Beyond the Border”
Friday, April 6, 3:15pm
Ila Sheren is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto s Jackman Humanities Institute. At the end of February, Sheren finished a book manuscript focusing on performance art, politics, and economics on the U.S.- Mexico border. The book, titled Portable Borders/Mythical Sites: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera, 1968-Present, is based on her doctoral work at MIT. Over the past three years, Ila s work has been published in such journals as Contemporaneity, Hemisphere, and The Journal of Arts in Society. She completed her PhD last year through MIT s History, Theory and Criticism Program in the Department of Architecture.
Rebecca DeRoo
“The Limits of Documentary: Identity and Urban Transformation in Agnes Varda’s Parisian Daguerreotypes”
Monday, April 9, 5pm
Rebecca DeRoo is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Archeology at Washington University, St. Louis. DeRoo was honored with the 2008 Wylie Prizein French Cultural Studies for her book, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968 (Cambridge Press, 2006), which provides an in-depth account of protests that shook France and served as a catalyst for a radical reconsideration of artistic practice. DeRoo has also received fellowships from the Fulbright Commission and the Javits Foundation, as well as an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has contributed to parallax and The Oxford Art Journal and curated the exhibition Beyond the Photographic Frame at the Art Institute of Chicago (1999). She received a BA in Art History from Bryn Mawr College and an MA and PhD in Art History and Archeology from the University of Chicago.
Julian Myers
“Permanent Revolution In Sculpture”
Thursday, April 12, 5pm
Julian Myers is an Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts, where he teaches art history and theory. His research is concentrated on sculpture and spatial politics in the 20th century, the social and political dynamics of consumer society, and the sociohistorical frameworks for contemporary art and exhibition. His writing has appeared in Documents, October, Afterall, and Frieze, among others. In 2009 Myers received an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for Mirror-Travel in the Motor City, a book collaboratively written with artist Edgar Arceneaux on earthworks, drawing, Detroit, urban warfare, and guerrilla historiography. Myers received a BA from Cornell University and an MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.