In honor of the eightieth anniversary of James Watrous, a noted expert on prints and drawings, joining the Art History faculty at UW, our department is pleased to announce a symposium, "Paper: The Place of Discovery." Our speakers will investigate the importance of works on paper to art historical investigation, demonstrating how fifteenth-century silverpoint drawings reveal creative process, how the prints of a jewelry designer indulge the geographic imaginary, how letter writing was vital to the artistic process, and how surviving sheets reveal Rembrandt's failures. In keeping with Professor Watrous’s dedication to making art historical knowledge accessible, our keynote speaker will present his path-breaking development of software to promote techniques of art historical analysis.

Thursday, October 8, 6pm:
"Computer Vision as Art Historical Investigation"
L160 Elvehjem Building
John Resig, Developer, Khan Academy; Creator, jQuery Java Script Library

Friday, October 9, 10am-12:30pm
"Paper: The Place of Discovery"
Chazen Auditorium

Stephanie Buck, Curator of Drawings, The Courtauld Gallery, London
Thomas Rassieur, Curator of Prints and Drawings, The Minneapolis Institute of Art
Shira Brisman, Assistant Professor, Art History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madeleine Viljoen, Curator of Prints, The New York Public Library
Andrew Stevens (Moderator), Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, Chazen Museum of Art

Books and Print between Cultures investigates the role that books (printed books and manuscripts, including maps, scrolls, etc.), prints, and their associated technologies played in mediating and instantiating cultural difference in the early modern period. It approaches these materials as intermediary (“between”), but also as “flows,” a term borrowed from social-cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, to underscore the fluid and yet chaotic manner in which books and prints proliferated and were circulated, reconfigured, and reconstituted around the globe. Rather than considering books and prints through a strictly semiotic or iconographic lens—i.e., as assemblages of signs and symbols, texts and images—this symposium foregrounds the materiality of these objects qua objects. It asks, for example, in what ways the formal features and physical components of books shaped their reception abroad; how artisans, collectors, merchants, priests, and litterateurs made sense of alien alphabets, inks, type, and handwriting, among other book and print technologies; with what other media—including textiles, sculpture, architecture, and drawing—books, prints, and their makers were in conversation; and how book- and print-making, -collecting, and -viewing practices translated across space, from one locale to another. By framing the history of books and print as meandering and material, this interdisciplinary symposium aims to contribute new dialogues to the study of the global early modern.

Our one-day symposium will present research on the impact of books and print on intellectual contact (broadly construed) within Europe as well as between European and non-European cultures.

The symposium is intended to encourage cross-disciplinary conversation, and is therefore defined by a conceptual framework rather than a strict thematic focus. Its title is an homage to Elizabeth Eisenstein’s seminal book, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, which helped to establish the study of print culture as an area of study in its own right, one that has contributed to – and helped to transform – research in intellectual history, literary studies, the history of science and of visual culture, among others. While Eisenstein’s interest was in uncovering the “impact of print on western society and thought” (as she put it in the title of an early article), this symposium will explore the impact of forms of paper-based media on how western society and culture understood other cultures and societies, how western societies and cultures understood each other, and how non-western cultures and societies understood the west.

Participants will present work on how books and print mediated contact across ethnic, cultural and linguistic boundaries in the early modern period. They will explore how such boundaries were produced and reworked by the formal, material features of print and manuscript, by the structures of the production and circulation of books, texts and images – in other words, on how the materiality of textual and visual artifacts articulated connections, distance and difference between cultures, countries and communities.

In order to allow for a stimulating conversation across disciplines as well as for focused scholarly exchanges, the event will consist of a series of panels of 2-3 participants giving short (10-15 min) presentations based on their pre-circulated work, followed by extended discussion.

To celebrate the opening of the special exhibition Corita Kent and the Language of Pop, on view September 3, 2015 to January 3, 2016, the Harvard Art Museums will host a panel discussion to introduce the show’s primary themes. Jennifer L. Roberts, Harvard’s Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, will discuss screenprinting and Kent’s reliance on reversal as a printmaking strategy; history of art and architecture graduate student Taylor Walsh will address Kent’s interactions with the pop art movement; and American studies graduate student Eva Payne will consider the influence of Vatican II on the artist. Exhibition organizer Susan Dackerman, the former Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums, will moderate the discussion.

Before the 6pm talk, visitors will have an opportunity to view the exhibition, which opens to the public that day. Attendees are invited to return to the exhibition after the discussion, as well as to enjoy a reception in the Calderwood Courtyard.

Free admission; seating is first come, first served.

The panel discussion will be held in Menschel Hall, Lower Level.

Just as the North Star has served as a navigational beacon to travelers, so the career, art, and research of Dard Hunter have served as inspiration for papermakers, toolmakers, printers, artists, historians, and educators. Come join us at the Friends of Dard Hunter 2015 Annual Meeting, Paper Points North, where we will build upon his legacy while also honoring his life’s work in continuing the tradition of education, dialogue, and research.

Embarking northward to the beautiful Alberta Rockies, the conference will be held at the internationally recognized Banff Centre, a well­respected confluence of art, science, and research. The primary focus of Paper Points North is to question how we honor the traditional methods of papermaking while expanding into new methods of research, innovation, sustainability, education, and activism. The beautiful setting and retreat environment of the Banff Centre will encourage community, invigoration, and exchange.

Attendees of the conference will have the opportunity to tour the Banff Centre’s world renowned artist residency spaces, view the library’s extensive collection of artist books, take a scenic walk, and participate in the weekend’s activities. Also included in the program will be the keynote address, lectures, demonstrations, members’ exhibition, banquet, silent auction, and keepsake exchange. Please join the Friends of Dard Hunter at this idyllic location to discover fresh perspectives together. We will celebrate the history of Dard Hunter and continue his legacy by seeking new ways to educate, research, and innovate with hand papermaking leading as our North Star.

2015 marks a very special year for Minnesota Center for Book Arts — not only the fourth convening of Book Art Biennial, and the awarding of The MCBA Prize 2015, but our 30th Anniversary as well! Celebrate this milestone by joining us for this very special series of events.

Through workshops, lectures, panel conversations, exhibitions, and a gala celebration and awards ceremony, Book Art Biennial invites artists, educators, curators and scholars to explore current trends in contemporary artists’ books.

A one day symposium on Thursday 9 July will mark the opening of the exhibition RE: Print /RE:Present at the Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University, co-curated by Dr Véronique Chance (MA Fine Art and MA Printmaking Course Leader) and Mark Graver (Director of Wharepuke Print Studio and Gallery, New Zealand).

This exhibition, along with an accompanying symposium, marks the launch of the RE:PRINT International Research Project with the aim of promoting International Networks in discussion, exhibition and exchange.

The project was initiated following discussions with national and international academics and artists whose concerns centre on inter-medial approaches to printed media and the nature of reproduction and reproducibility within current art practice.

A key aim of both exhibition and symposium is to examine, through practice and dialogue, the impact of continuing technological developments in reproductive media on trans-medial art practice and to RE-Present, challenge, question and connect to previously established relationships between media in unexpected, provocative and radical ways.

Tyler Printmaking is pleased to present this year’s Print Think conference, titled Mutable Matrix, on Saturday, May 16. Whether they call what they are producing variable editions, mono-prints, drawings, or something else entirely, contemporary printmakers have increasingly found something plastic within the frozen gestures of their plate, stone, block, or screen. This vision of the matrix as mutable has offered artists a new means of exploring the tension between the gestural and graphic. Traditionally, the gold standard of print production has been the edition—a series of identical prints in which the matrix is the means and the map by which artists finesse a number of uncanny duplicates. The mutable matrix allows for a new sense of play, a new found exploration of chance and intuition within the very process of printing the page, while new ways of working often escape the page altogether.

Please join us in this exploration, conversation, and celebration of the ways printmakers have broken rules, hacked procedures, gone off the rails, and/or invented new ways of working in which the sanctity of the copy has been superseded by a curiosity about the possible.

The conference features: Kathan Brown, Founding Director of Crown Point discussing her work with John Cage, Amy Ingrid Schlegel, Director of Galleries at Tufts University discussing the work of Nancy Spero, artists Rob Swaniston, and Ken Wood and a tour of the Richard Tuttle exhibition at the Fabric Workshop.. We will end our day at The Print Center with gallery talks by artist Ken Wood on his work and John Caperton, the Jensen Bryan Curator on the Michael Mazur exhibition. A reception will follow.

In conjunction with the exhibition, 'A Sense of Place: Modern Japanese Prints,' this symposium will bring together scholars from around the country to put modern Japanese prints into the broader historical, social, and artistic contexts that shaped the work of Japanese printmakers throughout the twentieth century. It will also include a special roundtable session with collectors and dealers specializing in modern Japanese prints.

Please also join us for a reception the evening before: Friday, April 17, 5-7pm, Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania

The Department of Art History is pleased to announce Experiencing Mass Images, a two-day conference to be held this spring at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

On Thursday, April 16, and Friday, April 17, Drs. Jennifer Roberts, Michael Leja, and Jennifer Greenhill will provide interdisciplinary approaches to investigating the impact of mass images on American experience in recent history (circa 1750-1930). These scholars are interested in how developments in the production, consumption and use of widely reproduced images can indicate social change, resistance, or unrest. Their presentations will coalesce around questions relating to the material dimension of mass images and how viewers cognitively and physically interact with them. Effectively, the speakers will seek to address the phenomenological dimension of popular culture and its literacies.

Day 1 - Thursday, April 16: Michael Leja & Jennifer Greenhill
4:00pm, Northrop Auditorium, Crosby Seminar Room (240)
Michael Leja, Professor of History of Art, University of Pennsylvania
“The Beginnings of Mass Visual Culture in the United States”
Jennifer Greenhill, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
“‘Black spots and queer blotches’: Magazine Pictures and the Biodynamic Blur”

Day 2 - Friday, April 17: Jennifer Roberts
12:00 noon, 1030 Heller Hall
Jennifer Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, and Chair of the Program in American Studies, Harvard University
“Currency as Metaprinting: the Case of Benjamin Franklin”

For more information, contact the conference organizer, Christina Michelon (miche355@umn.edu) or Madeline Whitman, Outreach Coordinator (whitm160@umn.edu).