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Current Newsletter

Please view our newsletter for more detailed information on our latest news and events. The current newsletter can be downloaded by clicking here.

Our previoius newletter may be downloaded here.

Upcoming Events

  • Call for Papers
    "In Sight/On View: The Museum as Site of Inquiry"
    University of Illinois at Chicago Art History Graduate Student Association Symposium with the Museum and Exhibition Studies Program and the College of Architecture and the Arts, October 25-26, 2012.
    More information

Recent Events

Lectures

  • Elias Archias, Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at California State University Chico spoke on “On Imitating As Precisely As Possible: Yvonne Rainer’s Spiraling Down and a model of art for the present” on September 15, 2011.
  • “Performing Pictures: Enacting the Mulata Cubana” was the topic of a lecture by Alison Fraunhar of St. Xavier University in Chicago, on October 18, 2011.
  • Cecile Whiting spoke on “The Sublime and the Banal in Post-War Photography of the West” on March 26 in Gallery 400.
  • The topic for Jenny Lin’s talk on April 2 in Gallery 400 was “A New Heaven on Earth? Notes on Visual Culture from Shanghai’s Underground”.
  • A lecture by Blake Stimson took place on April 4 in Gallery 400. He spoke on “The Enclosure of Contemporary Art”.
  • Ila Sheren’s lecture on April 6 in Gallery 400 was on “Border Art Beyond the Border”.
  • "The Limits of Documentary: Identity and Urban Transformation in Agnes Varda's Parisian Daguerreotypes" was the subject of a talk by Rebecca DeRoo in Gallery 400 on April 9.
  • Julian Myers spoke on "Permanent Revolution in Sculpture" in Gallery 400 on April 12.

UIC Art History Department and Art History Society Events

  • On October 22, 2011, Professors Pollak and Mekinda took undergraduate students on a tour of the Bertrand Goldberg exhibition at the Art Institute.
  • On February 23, 2012, recently-retired Foreign Service Officer Bennett Y. Lowenthal spoke to undergraduates about how his BA in Art History prepared him for his life as a diplomat. He was joined by Doria Rosen, UIC’s Diplomat in Residence, who provided information on preparing for a career in the State Department and the nature of Foreign Service work.

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Graduate Student Degrees

    MAs awarded, fall 2010/spring 2011:
  • Megan Lundy, There's No Place like Home: Architectural Expression in Afro-Mexican Communities (advisor Virginia E. Miller)
  • Savannah Esquivel, The Retablo Commission of San Miguel, Huejotzingo: A Case Study in Constructing the Sacred (advisor Ellen T. Baird)
    Two Paper Option:
  • Allan Berry
  • Chaz Evans
  • Patricia Pac
  • Sharon Smith
    •

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News from Current and Incoming Students

  • PhD candidate Alex Najda is a Dean's scholar this year, completing his dissertation on Kandinsky.
  • PhD candidate Mirela Tanta is writing her dissertation at the Institute for the Humanities at UIC. She spoke on her topic, “State Propaganda or Sites of Resistance: Socialist Realism in Romania, 1970-1989”, on Thursday February 16. Mirela was also just awarded a Mellon Fellowship for Research in Original Sources for 2012-2013. She will spend the year in Romania. She and her husband Gene welcomed daughter Mira Alexandra, a sister for Tristan, in late March.
  • Doctoral student Cara Smulevitz represented the department at the annual Graduate Student Seminar sponsored by the Art Institute of Chicago, April 14, 2012. Her topic was “The Camera is a Mirror, the Personal is Political: Negotiating Narcissism in Women’s Video Art”. Cara also received a Provost’s Award for research on “Visualizing the Backlash: Networks in Feminist Art at the turn of the 20th Century”.
  • This summer, PhD student Khristin Landry will join the Yucatec Maya language program sponsored by the University of North Carolina-Duke Consortium, in North Carolina and Mexico. She received a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship in support of her participation. Khristin will also be a UIC Lincoln Fellow next year.
  • Anna Lindquist, a MAMES student, won a Provost’s Award for research on Cape Town’s District Six Museum.
  • MAMES student Sarah Weber will be a summer intern at the St. Louis Art Museum.
  • New student Aleksandr Vujkov will be supported by a University Fellowship while working on his doctorate at UIC.
  • The recipient of the McNee Award, given each year to the top graduating senior in Art History, goes to Anne Mahady in 2012.
  • Annmarie Bilonic and Heather MacGregor each received our new award for transfer students, based on academic achievement at UIC.
  • Two undergraduates received travel awards from the Department for summer research. Hannah Landsman will travel to Berlin to study Africa art collections there. Paulina Budzioch will view Islamic art exhibitions at the Metropolitan and Brooklyn museums.

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News from Alumni

  • Catherine Burdick (PhD 2010), who moved to Santiago, Chile in 2011, was recently awarded a two-year fellowship at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile to write about a colonial Chilean map.
  • Candice Weber (MA 2009) is now Research Administrator in the School of Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University.
  • Jonathan Kinkley (MA 2009) works as Manager of Foundation and Government Relations at the Museum of Contemporary Art and is also a contributing art critic to Time Out Chicago.
  • Melissa Holbert (MA 2006) married Jonathan Kinkley in 2008. She recently left the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago for an e-learning company called Nogginlabs, Inc.
  • Analisa Leppanen-Guerra (MA 2000) published her first book, Children's Stories and 'Child-Time' in the Works of Joseph Cornell and the Transatlantic Avant-Garde in fall 2011.
  • Marilyn W. Kelly (MA 1992) recently moved from Guayaquil, Ecuador to Panama City, Panama. She and her late husband Phil also lived for a time in Thailand after leaving Chicago.
  • Deborah Rael-Buckley (BA 1994) curated an exhibition in March 2012 at the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos. “The Art of the Dress: Four Personal Fittings” features her own and three other artists’ work, and is part of the “Remarkable Women of Taos” year-long series of events honoring the history of local women.
  • Susan MacDonald (BA 1975) recently moved to the Atlanta area after two years in Costa Rica. See her paintings of Costa Rica on her website, http://www.postcardsfromcostarica.com.

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News from the Art History faculty

  • Esra Akcan has been on leave for 2011-2012, first at the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts and then at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. She is working on "Urban Renewal and its Discontents: IBA 1984'87".
  • Ellen T. Baird retired in December 2011.
  • Catherine Becker is a fellow at UIC's Institute for the Humanities for 2011-2012. She gave a public lecture on her research topic, "Scattered Stones: Situating Sculpture from the Buddhist Stupas of Andhra Pradesh," on October 12, 2011, at the Institute.
  • Peter Hales retired in May 2011, but is teaching part-time. Hales is finishing revisions on his book, Civic Chicago: Contests for the Public Space, and editing his study of the cultural landscapes of America since World War II, Outside the Gates. His shorter essays on the significance of the American vernacular landscape, which are fragments of his next book, are published online at peterbhales.blogspot.com.
  • Hannah Higgins is finishing her last year as the Director of Graduate Studies. She was named a University Scholar at UIC for 2011-2014, a prestigious award given to faculty of high academic accomplishment. Professor Higgins’s anthology, Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art, is in press.
  • Retired Professor David Sokol has been appointed to the Illinois State Museum Board and is developing a Master Plan for Public Art for Michigan City, Indiana.
  • Visiting faculty in the Art History Department for Fall 2011 included Nora Taylor (School of the Art Institute) and Curt Hansman (DePaul), both teaching Asian art courses, and Margaret Denny (PhD UIC), who covered the history of photography. Those teaching all year were Christa Robbins (PhD University of Chicago), modern and contemporary art, Jonathan Mekinda (PhD University of Pennsylvania), design history and Chicago architecture, and Annie Pedret (UIC Architecture), architectural history and theory. Byron Hamann (PhD University of Chicago) is teaching a graduate seminar on Mexico City this spring.

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