Andy Lei

On Saturday, March 2, 2019 As part of the symposium Canonicity Revisited, Archaeologies of Knowledge featured talks by Kishwar Rizvi from Yale University, and Claire Grace and Benjamin Chafee, both from Wesleyan University. The symposium was envisioned as a critical interrogation of the problem of canons and canonicity in art history. This subject was a matter of intense debate in the mid 1990s, unfurling across the pages of a number of major publications in the field. By then, revisionist approaches had already begun to transform the discipline’s operating assumptions about what constitutes its canonical texts and artifacts, and about the very meaning and value of canonicity itself. Art history’s reevaluation has only increased in recent years thanks to the crucial work, now decades in the making, of feminist, postcolonial, and queer interventions, and to the development of visual and cultural studies. Nevertheless, it seems to us that canons and their variants in many ways still shape—or perhaps haunt—both the teaching and scholarship of art history. What accounts for their persistence? And how do they bear down on art historical thinking today?

Photos by Richard Marinelli. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.

On Tuesday, February 5, 2019 a walk through the exhibition Audible Bacillus took place with Smith Curator of Paleontology of the Joe Webb Peoples Museum of Natural History, Harold T. Stearns Professor of Integrative Sciences, and Research Professor, Earth and Environmental Sciences Ellen Thomas; Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for Writing in the Social Sciences Tess Bird; Professor of Art Jeffrey Schiff; and Curator and Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee.

Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.

On Monday, February 18, 2019 artist, Sky Hopinka, gave a talk in conjunction with the exhibition, Audible Bacillus, which includes his work Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary.
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California; Portland, Oregon; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is currently based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the lower Columbia River basin. His video work centers around personal positions of indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture, and the play between the known and the unknowable. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Portland State University in Liberal Arts, and his Master of Fine Arts in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019.

Photos by Richard Marinelli. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.

On Thursday, February 7, 2019 the opening reception for Bestiary was held at the Davison Art Center, with a gallery talk by Kari Weil, University Professor, Environmental Studies, College of the Environment and College of Letters, and Co-Coordinator, Animal Studies, and author of “Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now” (Columbia, 2012).

Bestiary takes its inspiration from medieval compendia of wondrous creatures, both natural and fantastic. This exhibition stages creaturely encounters between gallery visitors and their non-human counterparts. In viewing these works, we might wonder at changing conceptions of bestial subjectivity across different cultural contexts and movements including the Renaissance, Romanticism, Surrealism, and our own contemporary moment. Works in this exhibition include an anonymous fifteenth-century engraving of a lion, a dragon, and a fox quarreling; a monumental lobster by Richard Mueller; and an ethereal anemone by Kiki Smith.

The exhibition will be on display through Thursday, March 7, 2019.

Photos by Richard Marinelli. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.