This talk explores two competing notions of “project” that informed Antonio Dias's painting in the early 1970s, one relating to the unfinished project as a subgenre of Conceptual art and the other to Italian debates apropos of the crisis of the historicity of modern art. The lecture is presented in conjunction with the University Galleries’ exhibitions Painting Situations: Sigfredo Chacón and Liliana Porter and Más situaciones: Sigfredo Chacón and Liliana Porter, which is part of the Institute for the Study of Latin American Art (ISLAA) Artist Initiative. Additional sponsors: UF Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment) and UF Center for Latin American Studies.

Intense and immersive, the immediacy of cloth is its evocation of the body. Conveying abstraction, embodiment and corporeality in the shadow of U.S.-based Culture Wars, and the global AIDS epidemic, 1990s-era sculptural textile practices offered dynamic structures in which cloth was manipulated, folded, stacked, clustered, layered, and sewn, through repetitive accretions, to approximate sizes, shapes, and contours of the body. In an era that fostered social and political inequities, textiles were repeatedly employed as allegories of repair, mending, and healing. This paper will address the complexities and biases aimed at 1990s textile-based installation in relation to the female-identified body, ideologies of abjection, and problems of scale.

Meet & Greet at 5:00 PM 

This talk explores the Mexican artist, José Clemente Orozco’s, US-based lithographs on the public life of Blackness, executed during his second and longest sojourn in the United States between 1928 and 1934. I argue that his representation of variety theater in Harlem, in the first lithograph he produced, and his representation of lynching in the last lithograph the produced, speak to a concern with Blackness that was both new and related to the artist’s experiences with racialization while traveling, living, and working in the United States. By bringing Performance Studies scholar José Muñoz’s theorization of “the sense of brown” to bear upon Orozco’s work, I explore these prints as an expression of nascent brown feeling and thereby as a performance of a relational and in-process Latinidad. My focus on brownness in Orozco’s work suggests new pathways for understanding race beyond the Black/white binary that has thus far dominated discussions of race and representation in American art during the inter-war period. Likewise, it opens new questions about the concerns of Mexican artists during the “Mexican Vogue,” suggesting heretofore unconsidered connections with artists and intellectuals during the Harlem Renaissance as well as Mexican-American artists working today.

CW// this talk discusses racial stereotypes, lynching, and the spectacularization of violence in art.

This talk will reflect on two intersecting themes, the rise of women as artists and as female subjects for art, in the context of the evolving status of women in twentieth-century China. Against the backdrop of the nascent modern education for women and the emergence of feminism between 1910 and 1940, it interrogates, in light of contemporary art world patterns and current definitions of feminism, the slowing and even regression in recognition of women as artists in subsequent years. 

Notice 1/9/2023: Rescheduled from Nov. 2022 for Feb. 22, 2023

Calligraphy entered contemporary Chinese art at the time modernist art reappeared in China in the 1980s, and gradually became an important component in contemporary art. Because the Chinese written language is partially ideographic and partially pictographic, calligraphy-related works can be categorized into a few groups. The first group can be traced back to traditional calligraphy, but the artists try to employ modern concepts and methodologies. The second group is to add calligraphic elements to other forms of visual art. These two groups basically explore the use and representation of calligraphic languages and elements. The third group introduces the Chinese writing system, or the structure of the character, to conceptual art, including new media art. In works of contemporary Chinese art, we see that expression of the calligraphic language and application of characters present many serious obstacles. On the other hand, calligraphy and Chinese characters as sources still have great potential. These artists, regardless of what concepts, methods, or formats they use, self-consciously link their art to the construction of cultural identity and social circumstances of contemporary society. This artistic phenomenon has already become an important part of contemporary visual culture. 

Notice 1/9/2023: Rescheduled from Nov. 2022 for Feb. 23rd. 

Join us for a conversation with Deborah Willis, award winning MacArthur Fellow, artist, curator, professor and eminent scholar in the history of Black photography, and Jade Powers, the new Curator of Art at the Harn Museum. Willis and Powers will explore topics presented in the current Harn exhibition Posing Beauty in African American Culture, including themes of beauty, joy, and self-fashioned Black identity in photographs dating from the 1890s to the present. The galleries will be open until 5pm, at which time the Auditorium will open for seating. 

The lecture will focus on material culture, meaning objects in use and representations of an exceptional community: the Signares, mixed-race women from Saint-Louis du Sénégal and the island of Gorée, who, through their matrimonial alliances with European merchants, formed an elite in 1800. Their local political power and economic strength on a transcontinental scale were accompanied by a number of practices related to the accumulation of material goods,  sartorial ostentation, opulent jewelry, and architectural overkill. The multicultural identity of these 'Afropean' women, to borrow an effective concept from Novelist Leonora Miano, was embedded in their ostentatious self-fashioning which invites consideration in light of contemporary theory of Parure by European art writers. Thinking of them together, Afropean Fashionistas and European theorists, might be another way to build the Black Atlantic.