Franc Palaia

 May 11, 2022.

Rhinebeck artist Franc Palaia talks about his catalogue raisonné : Wall Works: Frescoes, Photo-Sculpture and Mixed Media 1973-2021. The discussion will help to introduce a restrospective exhibit that will be on view of Palaia's "Large scale frescoes and photo-sculptures installed to simulate a contemporary archeological site"at the Hudson Beach Glass Gallery on view May 14 - June 5, 2022 in Beacon, New York.

"I have been photographing walls, murals, signs, graffiti, street art, architecture and billboards since 1976. In my travels of 26 countries, I have compiled thousands of urban wall images that I use as reference for my wall works. I am a multi-disciplinary artist and work in photography, painting, sculpture and murals where I incorporate all four mediums into mixed media flat wall pieces and 3-dimensional floor sculptures. I have a saying: `walls are drop cloths of a society', whatever you seen on a city's walls gives you a sense of  what is happening in that particular city or country. They signal the current state of their economy, politics and social condition." -- from  Franc Palaia, "Artist Statement."

copies of the catalog are obtainable by emailing Franc Palaia at francpalaia1@gmail.com

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Lindsay Shepherd Cook

May 20, 2020.

Lindsay Shepherd Cook (VC'10), Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar College, returns to discuss her English translation of a new monograph by former Vassar Professor of Art Andrew Tallon and Dany Sandron, University Professor at the University of the Sorbonne, entitled Notre Dame Cathedral: Nine Centuries of History(Penn State, 2020).

Since its construction, Notre Dame Cathedral has played a central role in French cultural identity. In the wake of the tragic fire of 2019, questions of how to restore the fabric of this quintessential French monument are once more at the forefront. This all-too-prescient book, first published in French in 2013, takes a central place in the conversation.

The Gothic cathedral par excellence, Notre Dame set the architectural bar in the competitive years of the third quarter of the twelfth century and dazzled the architects and aesthetes of the Enlightenment with its structural ingenuity. In the nineteenth century, the cathedral became the touchstone of a movement to restore medieval patrimony to its rightful place at the cultural heart of France: it was transformed into a colossal laboratory in which architects Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc anatomized structures, dismembered them, put them back, or built them anew—all the while documenting their work with scientific precision.

Taking as their point of departure a three-dimensional laser scan of the cathedral created in 2010, architectural historians Dany Sandron and the late Andrew Tallon tell the story of the construction and reconstruction of Notre Dame in visual terms. With over a billion points of data, the scan supplies a highly accurate spatial map of the building, which is anatomized and rebuilt virtually. Fourteen double-page images represent the cathedral at specific points in time, while the accompanying text sets out the history of the building, addressing key topics such as the fundraising campaign, the construction of the vaults, and the liturgical function of the choir.

Featuring 170 full-color illustrations and elegantly translated by Lindsay Cook, Notre Dame Cathedral is an enlightening history of one of the world’s most treasured architectural achievements.

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Raquel Rabinovich

December 12, 2018

The  artist Raquel Rabinovich (b. Argentina 1929) will discuss her exhibition Raquel Rabinovich: The Reading Room, on view in the Frederick Thompson Memorial Library at Vassar College October 25 - December 20, 2018.  The exhibition is being held concurrently with the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center exhibition Past Time: Geology in European and American Art and another related exhibition in the Vassar College Art Library: Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Geological Illustration from Catastrophism to the Anthropocene.

"The exhibition title The Reading Room refers to the location where the works are installed (an intervention of sorts in the south transept of Vassar's main library) but also serves as a metaphor for a possible approach to the work.  The selections on view each represent an attempt to transcend the routine of every day, inviting viewers to enter into a place of contemplation in which many layers of meaning can be read in, or into, the individual artworks.  Rabinovich describes this approach as a language of metaphors.  In a recent interview she said, 'Beyond the language of the novel or the poem or the story, there is always an element that is beyond the words, in between the lines, which is not literal.  And that world is, for me, a wonderful world.  I love that world.  I resonate with that world.'"

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Patricia Phagan

Albert Bierstadt, 1830–1902. Geyser, Yellowstone Park. About 1881, 35.24 x 49.53 cm, Boston Museum of Fine Art.

November 7, 2018.

Patricia Phagan, Philip and Lynn Strauss Curator at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, talks about her exhibition Past Time: Geology in European and American Art on view at the Art Center September 21 - December 9, 2018.

"Past Time: Geology in European and American Art looks at sketches and studies made by European and American artists from the 1770s to the 1890s who were engaged with a new, scientific emphasis on the Earth. In this arguably golden age of art and science, artists traveled and investigated the land internationally, noting Earth’s craggy features keenly in their watercolors, drawings, and oil sketches made on the spot or back in the studio. From a topographical, often strata-focused means to a later mode that evoked nature’s great transformational powers over time, this major loan exhibition explores European and American artists pursuing geological wonders."

Mildred Budny

October 12, 1016.

Mildred Budny (VC'71),  a Princeton-based medievalist, iconographer, scholarly impresario, and editor extraordinaire of the monumental Insular, Anglo-Saxon, and Early Anglo-Norman Manuscript Art at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge: An Illustrated Catalogue, talks about her life with manuscripts, interdisciplinary scholarship, the uses of a Vassar education, and her organization, the Research group on Manuscript Evidence and its programs and publications.

Account of the interview by Mildred, with images of mss we discussed.

60:49 minutes (broadcast version)   Listen

71:34 minutes (full interview)  Listen

Barbara A. Olsen

 October 1, 2014.

Barbara A. Olsen, Associate Professor of Greek and Roman Studies at Vassar College, talks about her book Women in Mycenaean Greece: The Linear B Tablets from Pylos and Knossos (Routledge 2014).

"Women in Mycenaean Greece is the first book-length study of women in the Linear B tablets from Mycenaean Greece and the only to collect and compile all the references to women in the documents of the two best attested sites of Late Bronze Age Greece - Pylos on the Greek mainland and Knossos on the island of Crete. The book offers a systematic analysis of women’s tasks, holdings, and social and economic status in the Linear B tablets dating from the 14th and 13th centuries BCE, identifying how Mycenaean women functioned in the economic institutions where they were best attested - production, property control, land tenure, and cult. Analysing all references to women in the Mycenaean documents, the book focuses on the ways in which the economic institutions of these Bronze Age palace states were gendered and effectively extends the framework for the study of women in Greek antiquity back more than 400 years."

1:01:08

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Adina Hoffman & Peter Cole

February 6, 2013.

Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole talk about their book Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, published in 2011 by Schocken.

Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, which was named one of the best twenty books of 2009 by the Barnes & Noble Review and one of the top ten biographies of the year by Booklist.

Peter Cole’s most recent book of poetry is Things on Which I’ve Stumbled—whose title poem revolves around the Cairo Geniza. Cole’s translations from Hebrew and Arabic include War & Love, Love & War: New and Selected Poems by Aharon Shabtai; So What: New & Selected Poems by Taha Muhammad Ali; and The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492, which received the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry and the American Association of Publishers’ 2008 Hawkins Award for the university press book of the year.

61:04 mins.

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K. David Harrison

March 25, 2008.

K. David Harrison, professor of Linguistics at Swarthmore College and Director of Research for the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, discusses his book, When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge, published by Oxford University Press.

60:00 min.

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Eve D'Ambra

May 15, 2007

Eve D'Ambra, art historian and Professor of Art at Vassar College, talks about the subject of her new book, Roman Women, published this year by Cambridge University Press.


55:57 min.

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