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Recent Events
This year marks a rejuvenation of the department’s Lectures Committee, with a number of presentations scheduled or planned:
- What I Did With My BA in Art History, a lecture where three grads talked about their careers, in planning, arts marketing, curatorial and museum work
took place on Thursday, September 29 in Henry Hall 107. The event was cosponsored with the Undergraduate Art History Society
- Opening Up the Alhambra: Comparative Consideration of a 'Unique' Monument in the Context of Nasrid Court Life
Thursday, October 1
Gallery 400 Lecture Hall 6pmCynthia Robinson of Cornell University, a distinguished specialist on medieval Islamic art and architecture, gave the Third Annual Harvey Stahl Memorial Lecture at UIC, thanks to the work of our medievalist, Heather Grossman. The talk was hosted by the department in conjunction with the International Center for Medieval Art in New York. The lecture, "Opening Up the Alhambra: Comparative Consideration of a 'Unique' Monument in the Context of Nasrid Court Life,” took place at 6pm on October 1st in the Gallery 400 Lecture Hall.
- The Art History Anual Undergraduate Symposium took place Tuesday, October
20th at the Institute for Humanities (Stevenson Hall Lower level). This year's speakers were:
Sarah Denten An Investigation into Leonardo da Vinci’s Role as Architect between 1516 and 1519
Katharine Solheim Artistic Discourse and Emotionality: Peter Paul Rubens, 1600-1620
Joshua Rutherford Happenstance Responsibility: Violent Art in the Age of Mass Destruction
- The Art History Anual MA Symposium, which brings recent recipients of the M.A. back to UIC to discuss their work, took place Wednesday October 28th in Jefferson Hall. This year's speakers were:
Candice Weber (MA 2009)
"The Artifact Piece and the Museum: James Luna‚s Critique of Ethnographic and Cultural Authority"
Jonathan Kinkley (MA 2009)
"The Postnational Sodalities of Second Life: An Iconographic Approach"
Valerie Rangel (MA 2009)
"Archigram: Tailoring the Future"
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News from the Art History faculty
- Esra Akcan, who was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute for the last academic year, will be a Visiting Scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture this Fall, and will return back to teaching for Spring 2010. Her book "Ceviride Modern Olan" came out in Turkey this year.
- Catherine Becker spent the past year as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University’s South Asia Initiative. Thanks to awards from the Dean’ office and the Vice-Provost’s Faculty Scholarship Support program she traveled to India this summer for further research on her book manuscript.Her article, “Not Your Average Boar: The colossal Varaha at Eran, an iconographic innovation,” will be published in a special volume of Artibus Isiae later this year. She will present papers this fall at the American Council of Southern Asian Art Symposium and the Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Catherine invites all to attend, “They Might Be Giants: The Effect and Affect of Colossal Imagery,” the session she has organized for the upcoming College Art Association Conference.
- Robert Bruegmann’s work on the Chicago architect Harry Weese is complete and scheduled for publication by W.W. Norton in the next few months. He continues to work on a variety of other projects, including a sequel to his bestselling Sprawl: A Compact History.
- Nina Dubin’s first book, Futures and Ruins: Hubert Robert in Paris, is due out from the Getty Research Press in a few months. This year she is immersed in revisions of the department’s curriculum, including the survey course, which she’ll be teaching for the first time this Spring.
- Heather Grossman, specializing in Byzantine and medieval architecture, this spring received the Dean's Research Prize as well as an award from the Vice-Provost's Faculty Scholarship Support Program for ongoing work on her book manuscript, Building Identity: Architecture and Cultural Interaction in a Medieval Mediterranean Society. She used these to travel to Greece for research this past summer after completing her period as a fellow at the Institute for the Humanities last academic year. She will speak on her work at the CAA Meetings this winter and as part of the Robert and Avis Burke Lecture Series at Indiana University this Spring.
- Peter Hales completes his final year as Chair of the Art History Department this 2009-2010 academic year. His co-authored study of the Farm Security Administration’s photographic program, The Likes of US, was published by David R. Godine last Spring, as was another coauthored work, Spectacle in the White City. His work on Levittown will be part of a conference on “Diverse Suburbs” at Hofstra University in October. He spent the summer on the final chapters of his study of postwar American cultural landscapes.
- Hannah Higgins’s The Grid Book came out this Spring with MIT Press, and has been receiving glowing reviews. She’s off this year at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, continuing her work on avant-garde American arts and their institutions.
- Jonathan Mekinda comes to UIC after two years at the School of Architecture at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught architectural history and theory. His research looks at the reconstruction of Milan, Italy, after World War II, and explores how architects in Italy radically re-oriented modern architecture following the collapse of the fascist regime and the difficult birth of the Italian republic. Currently, Prof. Mekinda is finalizing preparations for a panel that he is chairing with Prof. Alexander Eisenschmidt of the School of Architecture at UIC at the 2010 conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, which will be held in Chicago. Entitled “Chicago in the World,” this panel seeks to understand the city as a site of international exchange and a catalyst for architectural and urban ideas, speculations, and provocations around the globe.
- Sjoukje van der Meulen arrives this year for a two-year appointment in modern and contemporary art and theory. Her work on the question of media in recent art was begun as a dissertation under Professors Kenneth Frampton and Rosalind Krauss. She has a previous career as a critic and curator of contemporary arts in Europe, and will be teaching a mix of graduate and undergraduate classes.
- Virginia Miller presented her most recent work in a paper, “The Ornamentation of Mayan Revival Monuments in Yucatan,” at the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, Pasadena, April 1-5, 2009.
- Martha Pollak's monograph CITIES AT WAR IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE is being prepared for publication by Cambridge University Press. The publication date for the book, which deals with the physical effect of war on urbanism, is set for June 2010.
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News from Current Students
- Marianne Richter (Ph.D., ABD) left the curatorship of the Union League Club in Chicago to move to San Antonio, Texas, where she is Curator of the Briscoe Western Art Museum.
- Catherine Burdick (Ph.D., ABD) received the highly competitive UIC Dean’s Scholar Award for the 2009-2010 academic year.
- Sarah Dreller (Ph.D., ABD) won first place award for her paper, “A Bird’s Eye View of the Bank of England: An Iconography of Financial Crisis,” at the 35th Annual Cleveland Symposium.
- Erica Morawski, Tiffany Funk, and Sarita Heer (Ph.D.s in progress) and Chaz Evans (MA in progress) all delivered papers at the National Conference of the American Culture Association in New Orleans.
- Erica Morawski also won funding to attend the London seminar of the Victorian Society of America this summer.
- Margaret Denny (Ph.D., ABD) delivered a paper, “Nature/Nurture: Portraits of Ecological Change,” at the 4th Internation Conference on the Arts in Society in Venice, Italy.
- Monica Obniski (Ph.D. in progress) delivered “Bringing the Outdoors In: the Evolution of the American Sunroom, 1900-1930” at the 12th Annual Salve Regina University Conference on Cultural and Historic Preservation, in Newport, Rhode Island.
- Georgina Ruff (Ph.D. in progress) presented her paper, “Light Art: Environments of Perception,” at the symposium 1968: A Global Perspective at the University of Texas, Austin.
- Mirela Tanta (Ph.D., ABD) presented “Portraits of Utopia: Inside Ceausescu’s Palace,” at the Indiana University Romanian Studies Conference.
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