Yvonne Elet

October 16, 2019.

Yvonne Elet, Associate Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Vassar College, discusses her article, co-authored with Virginia Duncan for Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes (39:2, 2019) entitled: "Beatrix Farrand and campus landscape at Vassar: pedagogy and practice, 1925-29."  Farrand, one of the great landscape architects of the 20th century and a path-breaking woman in the field, came to Vassar as Consulting Landscape Gardener in 1925. She is well known for her institutional designs (unusual for a woman at the time), notably at Princeton and Yale; Vassar was her one opportunity to work at a womens’ college. Farrand came to campus at a significant moment when the Chair of Botany and pioneering ecologist Edith Roberts was fostering progressive programs in native plant ecology and landscape architecture – efforts that reformed young women’s training and career prospects, and made Vassar an early center for women and landscape. Yvonne Elet discusses the challenges these women faced, and traces Farrand’s design projects, from the forecourt of Main Building to the so-called Euthenics quad around Blodgett Hall. Most significantly, Farrand established an arboretum, conceiving it to comprise the entire campus: she mixed formal and informal design elements, and native and foreign species, to create a beautiful setting that would serve the instructional needs of students and faculty –a notion that has come to be central to Vassar’s identity.

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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."

Wendy N. E. Ikemoto

April 11, 2018.

Wendy N. E. Ikemoto, Associate Curator of American Art at the New York Historical Society and former Vassar professor, talks about her new book Antebellum American Pendant Paintings: New Ways of Looking (Routledge, 2017).

Antebellum American Pendant Paintings: New Ways of Looking marks the first sustained study of pendant paintings: discrete images designed as a pair. It opens with a broad overview that anchors the form in the medieval diptych, religious history, and aesthetic theory and explores its cultural and historical resonance in the 19th-century United States. Three case studies examine how antebellum American artists used the pendant format in ways revelatory of their historical moment and the aesthetic and cultural developments in which they partook. The case studies on John Quidor’s Rip Van Winkle and His Companions at the Inn Door of Nicholas Vedder (1839) and The Return of Rip Van Winkle (1849) and Thomas Cole’s Departure and Return (1837) shed new light on canonical antebellum American artists and their practices. The chapter on Titian Ramsay Peale’s Kilauea by Day and Kilauea by Night (1842) presents new material that pushes the geographical boundaries of American art studies toward the Pacific Rim. The book contributes to American art history the study of a characteristic but as yet overlooked format and models for the discipline a new and productive framework of analysis focused on the fundamental yet complex way images work back and forth with one another.

 

Michael Corris

"Self-Regarding Man" 2017 from The Fourth Book -- Michael Corris

March 7, 2018 (Repeated March 14)

Michael Corris, the artist, critic, art historian, and Professor of Art at the Meadows School of Art at Southern Methodist University in Dallas talks about the Conceptualist art movement and about his book Leaving Skull City: Selected Writings on Art (Press du Réel, 2016).

"Beginning with his work as a participant in the collective Art & Language, Corris's texts include critical surveys of conceptual art, the Artist Placement Group, the early work of Ad Reinhardt, “Young British Art” of the 1990s, and a mordant satire of management in art education. Leaving Skull City is filled with theoretical reflections on the social, philosophical, and political dimensions of contemporary art. Many of these concepts will seem familiar, as they drift in art's contemporary discourse. Yet, these ideas were hardly uncontroversial when first formulated in the context of conversations throughout the New York artworld of the 1970s."


Video of Michael talking about his current exhibition at the Lilian Bloch Gallery in Dallas

Louis Rose

April 19, 2017.

Louis Rose, Executive Director of the Sigmund Freud Archive at the Library of Congress and  Professor of History in the Departments of History and Political Science at Otterbein University talks about his new book,  Psychology, Art, and Antifascism: Ernst Kris, E. H. Gombrich,, and the Politics of Caricature (Yale 2016), as well as the Sigmund Freud Papers and their newly announced digital archive.

“In 1934, Viennese art historian and psychoanalyst Ernst Kris invited his mentee E. H. Gombrich to collaborate on a project that had implications for psychology and neuroscience, and foreshadowed their contributions to the Allied war effort. Their subject: caricature and its use and abuse in propaganda. Their collaboration was a seminal early effort to integrate science, the humanities, and political awareness. In this fascinating biographical and intellectual study, Louis Rose explores the content of Kris and Gombrich’s project and its legacy."


39:01 minutes.

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Mary-Kay Lombino

May 4, 2016.

Mary-Kay Lombino, Emily Hargroves Fisher 1957 and Richard B. Fisher Curator of Collections at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, discusses the exhibition on view April 29 - August 21, 2016: "Touch the Sky: Art and Astronomy."

Astronomy can be traced back to antiquity with its origins in religious and mythological beliefs; its study has been closely linked to artistic endeavors since the Renaissance. Touch the Sky is a multi-media exhibition of images of the moon, sun, planets, and stars made by artists since the nineteenth century. Artistic observation of the skies was advanced by the dawn of photography in 1839, when Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre attempted to capture an image of the moon, and in 1865 when Lewis Rutherfurd, inventor of the first telescope designed for astrophotography, made top-quality spectroscopic images of the moon. Since then, artists’ enthusiasm for recording and interpreting the grandeur and mystery of the cosmos has not waned. The exhibition includes work by nineteen artists, including Vija Celmins, Chris McCaw, Sharon Harper, David Malin, Mungo Thomson, Lisa Oppenheim, and Nancy Graves.

44:12 minutes.

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Mary-Kay Lombino

April 22, 2015.

Mary Kay Lombino, Emily Hargroves Fisher 1957 and Richard B. Fisher Curator of Collections at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, discusses the exhibition on view April 10 - June 14, 2015 entitled Through the Looking Glass: Daguerreotype Masterworks from the Dawn of Photography.

40:16 minutes.

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