AU VI: Department of Art + Art History Studio Faculty Exhibition Catalog

F E B R U A R Y 9 — A P R I L 7, 2 0 1 9

F E B R U A R Y 9 — A P R I L 7, 2 0 1 9

© 2019 Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University Auburn University is an equal opportunity educational institution/employer.

J U L E CO L L I N S S M I T H M U S E U M O F F I N E A R T AU B U R N U N I V E R S I T Y Bill L. Harbert Gallery and Gallery C

J

ule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University is pleased to introduce AU VI: Department of Art and Art History Studio Faculty Exhibition. This latest, sixth, presentation of the triennial exhibition celebrates the collective creative work of the accomplished community of artists and historians of Auburn University’s art department. As always, the featured range of techniques, media, and research is wide.

This year’s contributions include ceramics, drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and digital media, as well as art historical scholarship on Franco-American exchange in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, visual and material culture and gender issues in early modern Italy, the history and historiography of art exhibitions in twentieth-century Germany, and the visual and literary arts of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. All highlight the individual talents of the creators and the comprehensive program offerings in studio art and art history at Auburn.

Distinguished as a charter member of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design and as the oldest accredited art program in the Southeast, our campus partner emphasizes the support and development of its students, along with the research and production of its members whose consistent accolades include awards and residencies, prestigious publications, and national and international exhibitions and lectures, the

highlights of which are illustrated in the pages that follow. This committed community of teacher-artists and scholars is indicative of the high standards of excellence within the department itself and is certainly worthy of recognition.

With this exhibition we bring together the disparate expertise of that diverse and wellrounded group of fellows and focus on those who so generously give their attention to others, their students. Lest we forget, there are limited hours in the day, yet somehow these artists and scholars find time to create and teach, leading by example and making significant contributions to their fields along the way. Please join me in acknowledging the commitment and talent of Barb Bondy, Noah Breuer, Dr. Emily Burns, Annie Campbell, Allyson Comstock, Wendy DesChene, Dr. Joyce de Vries, Jonathan Durham, Dr. Kathryn Floyd, Alexandra Giannell, Chuck Hemard, Andy Holliday, Dr. Karen Sonik, Lauren Woods, and Department Chair Christopher McNulty.

The museum and members of the art department are grateful to the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Alabama Bicentennial Commission for its generous support of this exhibition and catalogue.

Jessica Hughes Curatorial assistant

STUDIO BARB BONDY NOAH BREUER ANNIE CAMPBELL ALLYSON COMSTOCK WENDY DesCHENE JONATHAN DURHAM ALEXANDRA GIANNELL CHUCK HEMARD ANDY HOLLIDAY CHRISTOPHER McNULTY LAUREN WOODS

BARB BONDY Pro fe ss o r MFA, Southern Illinois University Carbondale BFA, University of Windsor, Ontario A R T I S T ’ S S TAT E M E N T:

The overarching interests in my creative research bridge science, art, and the humanities to explore various aspects of metacognition (thinking about thinking) that are key to understanding how we, as humans, function. Additionally, I am working on a National Endowment for the Artsfunded interdisciplinary research project, a collaboration with cognitive neuroscientist Jeff Katz (Department of Psychology) that studies, through MRI technology, how a student’s brain changes (brain plasticity) after a semester of learning to draw from observation.

In the DeepSeeing series, the drawings are intended to stimulate curiosity in a viewer and entice them to engage with the work through close investigation for a prolonged period of time. I hope a viewer will attempt to decipher the images and reflect upon what it is they see or recognize. Perhaps through this visual process of close S E L E C T E D R E C E N T A C T I V I T Y: 13th International Drawing Annual (INDA 13), Manifest Creative Research Gallery and Drawing Center, Cincinnati, OH, 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Research: Art Works Award, $90,000 to study whether learning to draw changes the brain (brain plasticity), in collaboration with Dr. Jeff Katz, Auburn University Department of Psychology, 2018 Auburn University Intramural Grants Program SEED Grant, Drawing and Cognition, a pilot project that intersects cognitive neuroscience and art, in collaboration with Dr. Jeff Katz, 2016

examination, the images will eventually become embedded in the viewer's memory. In this way, the viewer becomes cognitively entangled with the drawings and, possibly by extension, with the artist’s thought processes that are embodied in the drawings.

DeepSeeing III, IV, V, VI, 2018, from DeepSeeing series (2016—ongoing), graphite on Stonehenge paper, 30 x 22½ inches (each).

NOAH BREUER Ass i st a n t Pro fe sso r MFA, Columbia University BFA, Rhode Island School of Design A R T I S T ’ S S TAT E M E N T:

Exploring the fusion of traditional printmaking techniques such as relief, intaglio, lithography, and serigraphy with new materials and technology like laser-cutters, CNCrouters, and digital printing is fundamental to both my art practice and my teaching philosophy. In my current project, I have been working to realize my conceptual and formal goals on fabric by incorporating reactive dyes and resist printing on raw silk and linen.

S E L E C T E D R E C E N T A C T I V I T Y: Bullseye Projects Residency, Artist in Residence, Emeryville, CA, 2019 CB&S Werkstätte, solo exhibition, Sputnik Press Gallery, Chicago, IL, 2018 Bohemian Showroom, solo exhibition, Space Gallery, Portland, ME, 2018 Lucerna, solo exhibition, Left Field Gallery, San Luis Obispo, CA, 2018 Small Plates Program Residency, San Francisco Center for the Book, CA, 2018 The Tatra Tassels, solo exhibition, Milvia/Addison Windows Gallery, Berkeley, CA, 2018

For the past two years, I have been working with source material from my family's former textile printing business, Carl Breuer and Sons (CB&S). In 1897, my great-greatgrandfather Carl began the business, which included a factory in Bohemia. In 1942, the company, along with all other Jewish-owned property in German-occupied areas, was seized and sold to Nazi-approved owners, my family members were killed, and the product of their work was lost. Through my recent visits to the factory, and by locating its archive of fabric samples and designs at the nearby Czech Textile Museum, I have acquired a rich digital collection of primary source material in the form of scans and photographs. My research has opened a window to the material world of my lost European family and allowed me to create a physical connection to the past.

Factory Recall, solo exhibition, Zughaus Gallery, Berkeley, CA, 2017 Artist in Residence, Summer Craft Forum, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, 2016 Artist in Residence, Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA, 2016

Ariane Forest, 2018, cyanotype and dye on cotton, 54 x 45 inches.

A N N IE CAMPB E L L Ass i st a n t Pro fe sso r MFA, Indiana University BFA, Virginia Commonwealth University A R T I S T ’ S S TAT E M E N T:

S E L E C T E D R E C E N T A C T I V I T Y: Reach Scotland International Artist in Residency, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, UK, 2019 Honorable Mention, First Nations Contemporary Biennial, Tubac Center of the Arts, Tubac, AZ, 2018 Extracted, solo exhibition, invited artist: Southern Studies Conference, Goodwyn Gallery, Auburn University at Montgomery, AL, 2018 First Nations Contemporary Biennial, Tubac Center of the Arts, Tubac, AZ, 2018 Gist Street International Ceramics Exhibition, in conjunction with the 2018 National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) Conference, Gist St. Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA, invitational, 2018 Clay on the Wall, in conjunction with the 2018 Alabama Clay Conference, The Armory Gallery, Montgomery, AL, invitational, 2018 Overburden, Fieldworks Project Space, new faculty solo exhibition, Auburn University, AL, 2017 Breeden Grant for Instruction, Biggio Center, Auburn University, AL, 2017 Nature: Surface, Form, Content, national juried ceramics exhibition, The Clay Studio of Missoula, MT, 2017 Distinguished Fellow, Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences, Rabun Gap, GA, 2015

Our bodies mirror nature in undeniable ways.

Vascular systems, neurons, and their synapses enable communication and move sustenance through our systems, not unlike the roots and branches of a tree. Yet, our society has created an artificial construct that allows us to see ourselves as separate from nature. We believe it is our right to control and conquer whatever resources we “need” or desire.

Two years ago, my son was born with a rare brain malformation of the right hemisphere that caused him to experience dangerous, intractable epilepsy. The only solution was a dramatic brain surgery in which the entire affected hemisphere was disconnected from the healthy left side. Now, every bit of progress my child makes is the product of neuroplasticity. This experience introduced a new visual vocabulary into my work.

My newest body of work depicts neurons and the amorphous danger of an irregular electric storm of seizure activity. These forms serve as a metaphor and symbol of our dysfunctional relationship with nature and, subsequently, ourselves. They are malformed, diseased and deteriorating, their connections weakened by abnormal impulses—a dissonance caused by a detachment from their origins.

Incubate (details), 2019, porcelain, stoneware, and wire, variable dimensions.

ALLYSON COMSTOCK Profe ss o r MFA, Arizona State University BA, Occidental College A R T I S T ’ S S TAT E M E N T:

We live in time when it feels quite literally that everything takes only a moment. Everything is fast and instantaneous.

With a few clicks of a button, we can find any information, send a message and have it answered immediately, or locate ourselves in the world. We live in a time when it feels as though everything has accelerated.

S E L E C T E D R E C E N T A C T I V I T Y: Illustrations for A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia (INDA 13), University of Georgia Press, in press Antarctica: Micro, Macro and In-between, 621 Gallery, Tallahassee, FL, 2018 Antarctica: Beyond Ice, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Rapids, IA, 2017 Artist Lecture, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Rapids, IA, 2017 Juror, 29th Annual ArtsQuest Fine Art Festival, Sandestin, FL, 2017 B16: The Wiregrass Biennial, The Wiregrass Museum of Art, Dothan, AL, 2016 Contemporary Photography Exhibition, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Gimpo, South Korea, 2016 Scope 2016, Visual Arts Exchange, Raleigh, NC, 2016 Grant Reviewer, National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program 2014, 2015, and 2018 National Science Foundation Antarctic Artist and Writers Program Grant, 2013

I am interested in slowing down. I seek experiences that come from extended observation—possible only with the passage of time. My recent work explores the natural world that we see and the invisible one that lies behind it. In the words of Claude Bernard, “man can learn nothing unless he proceeds from the known to the unknown.”

Following the practices of earlier naturalist explorers who traveled to investigate unfamiliar species and habitats, study has taken me to the lake that forms my backyard, the rainforests of Costa Rica, the Galapagos Islands, and most recently, Antarctica. I rely on careful observation to inform my artistic practice, but it departs from scientific inquiry in the subjectivity of the results. The work is not a description of place, rather a record of my perception and my reaction.

It is an indication.

My creative process is slow and labor intensive, requiring many repetitions of marking. This echoes the repetitions found in nature—the many needles on a pine tree branch, the countless grains of sand on an ocean floor, the endless cycles of planets leading to the rising and setting of the sun, or the reoccurring change of seasons. In all these examples, something greater is made through repetition— a tree, a beach, a span of time. It is meaningful to me to create my artwork in a manner that speaks of the flow of the natural world. It is meaningful to me to slow down.

The Vanishing Colors of Antarctica, 2017, chalk pastel on paper, photographs and map pins, variable dimensions.

WENDY DesCHENE Pro fe ss o r MFA, Tyler School of Art at Temple University BFA, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec A R T I S T ’ S S TAT E M E N T:

S E L E C T E D R E C E N T A C T I V I T Y: Υέα Οikologία, solo exhibition and residency grant, Lakkos Art Center, Heraklion, Greece, 2018* Pollinate, HUBweek, City Hall Plaza, sponsored by Harvard and MIT, Boston, MA, 2017* Digital Culture, CICA Museum, Gimpo, South Korea, 2016* Moth, solo exhibition, Entomica, Sault Ste Marie, ONT, Canada, 2016* Arrr…t, solo exhibition, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Beppu, Japan 2015 Espacio Enter: International Festival of Innovation + Digital Culture, Canary Islands, 2015* Moth Project, solo exhibition, De Hortus Botanicus, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Residency Grant Landscape Laboratory Buitenwerkplaats, NL, 2014* The Institutionalists, The Drawing Center, New York, NY, 2014* PlantBot Responds, solo project/exhibition, Oulu Museum of Art, Oulu, Finland Residency Grant; Kauppilanti KulttuuriKauppila Art Center, Finland, 2014* Art in Odd Places: The Artifacts, Colonel's Row, Governors Island, New York, NY, 2014* *In collaboration with Jeff Schmuki, Professor, Georgia Southern University

To banish or exile a member of society, citizens of fifthcentury Athens would create a ballot by inscribing the name of the person they wanted to neutralize on a shard of broken pottery, called ostraka. Once 6,000 unfavorable votes were cast for any one name, the person was exiled from the city for 10 years, giving rise to the term "ostracism."

Ostraka were created by reusing pieces of broken pottery from the homes of the citizens. During particularly contentious periods, pots were broken, and circular disks were wheel thrown to add to the number of ballots available.

Carried by participants, these potsherds landed in the Athenian Agora, the foundational site of democratic freedom and free speech. Here, thousands of citizens, wielding their ostraka incised with the name of their vote, uttered their inscription, while forcibly casting them over a circular barrier to be tallied.

This intense and expulsive public action allowed physical expression not possible by secret ballot and provided the opportunity to functionally and symbolically dispose of those financially dishonest, tyrannical, treasonous, or abusive. A growing accumulation of ostraka was a compelling symbol of unity, while providing a visual confirmation of both the number and consensus of the voters.

Besides names, Athenians also wrote expletives, short epigrams, or cryptic injunctions. Ancient examples include Kallixenes, son of Aristonimos, "the traitor"; Archen, "lover of foreigners"; Agasias, "the donkey"; and Megacles, "the liar."

Mirroring this history and collective democratic action, participants to this contemporary counterpart are invited to inscribe a handmade pottery shard with the name of a person they wish to banish. Over time, the array of ostracon will grow as the work travels from community to community, building a collective voice of dissent.

What name will you inscribe?

Ostraka (detail), 2018, screen printed ceramic, variable dimensions.

Created in collaboration with Jeff Schmuki.

JONATHAN DURHAM In stru cto r MFA, University of California, Los Angeles BA, Studio Art and Psychology, University of Virginia

A R T I S T ’ S S TAT E M E N T:

My heterogeneous practice consists of sculptures, videos, and performances that are interconnected but with no beginning or end and no set pathways through a system.

The work resists rigid organization, which is contrary to the influences of my early life growing up in a strictly religious family. I have used clay, steel, plaster, tobacco, plastics, birdseed, helicopter parts, and church pews, often to paradoxical effect. The materials I select point toward capitalist overproduction, and, therefore, a crisis of resources, but I am also interested in unexplainable slippages in meaning across media and how memory is SELECTED RECENT ACTIVITY:

altered by our encounter with objects. I have made videos

PLAYA Residency, Summer Lake, OR, 2017

of exploding helicopter parts, police surveillance, and oil

Astral Oil, Global Family Jonathan Durham and Rindon Johnson, curated by Sorry Archive, Java Projects, Brooklyn, NY, 2017

pipeline leakages captured with infrared cameras—each

Jonathan Durham 01: ADMIN, Luke Glanton Gallery, Amsterdam, NY, 2017

material slippages, and reorientation of function, I uncover

BAM Presents: The Alan Gala, Brooklyn, NY, 2017

industry. In all my work, the presence or absence of a

Material Art Fair, Mexico City, Mexico, 2017 Bemis Artist Residency, Omaha, NE, Summer 2016 From Now On (Anymore), organized by Sorry Archive, Claire Mirocha and Vanessa Thill, Brooklyn, NY, 2015 IN GOD WE TRUST, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland, 2013 Session projects, Recess, Inc., New York, NY, 2011 Emerging Artist Fellowship: Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY, 2010

projects a critique of the violence we impress on the earth and one another. Through unlikely couplings, recasting, buried impulses within functional objects and relics of body, its memories, traumas, and material transactions, is a primary concern.

Diffuser, 2018, epoxy resin and nylon stocking, 13 x 6 x 5 inches.

ALEXANDRA GIANNELL Vi s i t i n g A ssi st a nt P ro fe sso r MFA, Clemson University BFA, University of North Carolina at Charlotte A R T I S T ’ S S TAT E M E N T:

Through the act of touch, I use my body as my tool to embed raw evidence of indexical marks, suggesting the phenomenological process of self-situation and the act of becoming. I employ this mode of mark making to create SELECTED RECENT ACTIVITY:

a seemingly influx interplay and connection between the physical and the ephemeral, maintaining a history of the

Artist in Residence, Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, Spring 2019

bodily presence within the drawing, while further alluding

The Auburn Plainsman, newspaper interview, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, 2018

form takes a on a central twist, speaking to our core, while

Artist Residency, STAR Arc Residency, Chattanooga, TN, Fall 2018

activating our periphery. Aligning such bodily sensations

Drawing to Sound Collaboration, Department of Art & Art History and Department of Music, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, 2018

a reconsideration of the ideological boundaries between

to space beyond the body, after the body. Structurally, the simultaneously imploding, pulling, and expanding outward, with suggestions of perpetuating visual fields encourages “thing” and “space,” “self” and “other.”

Rod MacKillop Alumni Biennial Exhibition, Rowe Gallery, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 2018 Aporia, solo exhibition, Jeanne Rauch Gallery, Gaston College, Dallas, NC, 2018 Displaced, solo exhibition, Baku Gallery, Charlotte, NC, 2017 TRAHC's 29th Annual Juried Exhibition, Regional Arts Center, Texarkana Regional Arts & Humanities Council, Texarkana, TX, 2017 The Summer Exhibition, Municipal Building Gallery, Greater Augusta Arts Council, Augusta, GA, 2017 Invitational Conference Presentation, Portfolio & Resume: BFA Senior Seminar, NC Community College Fine Arts Conference, Salisbury, NC, 2017 Fallacies of Structure (details), 2018, graphite on paper, 60 x 120 inches.

CHUCK HEMARD Ass o ci ate P ro fe sso r MFA, University of Georgia, Lamar Dodd School of Art BA, University of Southern Mississippi

A R T I S T ’ S S TAT E M E N T:

Fire’s natural and historic role in the landscape is vital, and as we are coming to find out on increasingly larger scales, it is indeed inevitable. Associations of danger, destruction, and awe combine with its life-sustaining and renewing capabilities to offer complex metaphors and rich visual SELECTED RECENT ACTIVITY: The Pines, Whitney Center for the Arts, Sheridan College, Sheridan, WY, 2018 Contemporary Alabama Photography, Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL, 2018

possibilities. These pictures are from an offshoot from my recent project, The Pines. This supplementary series is loosely titled Pyrosustenance and considers fire’s vital, natural role in pine forest landscapes of the Deep South.

A healthy (pine tree and grassland) ecosystem is a postwilderness landscape that relies on regularly recurring

Hyperallergic.com, Allison Meier, “Photographs of the Vanishing Southern Pinelands, an Ecosystem that Thrives Through Fire,” January 24, 2018

fire to exist. Like the larger body of work they grew out

Smithsonian.com, Jennifer Nalewicki, “Photos Document the Last Remaining Old-Growth Pine Forests of the American South,” January 19, 2018

and beauty can coexist to motivate a better future.

of, these images are a meditation on this landscape’s significant past and present, and they consider how loss

ArtDaily.org, “New book from Daylight Books: The Pines

by Chuck Hemard,” January 2018 Garden & Gun, Elizabeth Hutchinson, “A Photographer’s Ode to the Longleaf Pine,” 2018 The Pines: Southern Forests, Daylight Books, 2017 Pinelands – Deep South, Rankin Arts Photography Center, Columbus State University, Columbus, GA, 2016 CICA Contemporary Photography Exhibition, Czong Institute of Contemporary Art Museum, South Korea, 2016 Eight Juried Annuale, The Light Factory, Charlotte, NC, 2016

#2 Lee County, Alabama, 2016, pigment print, 26 x 33 inches.

ANDY HOLLIDAY Visiting Assistant Professor MFA, Southern Illinois University Carbondale BFA, Auburn University A R T I S T ’ S S TAT E M E N T:

This group of works, Ling Dai, is an exploration of constructing family across culture and distance. The Chinese phrase refers to a knot, a metaphor for the tying of families together through marriage. What results is a cultural hybrid, displaying the benefits and tensions of a combined family structure. The work attempts to capture a sense of layered responsibilities, which are at odds with the realities of distance, time, separation, and loss.

Relationships between functionality and dysfunction are also present through constantly shifting relationships and the abrasive nature of compromise.

SELECTED RECENT ACTIVITY: Back and Forth, solo exhibition, Heze Museum, Heze University, Shandong, China, 2019 Artist in Residence, Heze University, Shandong, China, 2018 The Print Effect: Small Works/Big Impact, juried exhibition, Manhattan Graphics Center, NY, 2018 Delta National Small Prints Exhibition, juried exhibition, Bradbury Art Museum, Jonesboro, AR, 2018 Looking Deeper, solo exhibition, The University Museum, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, 2017 Silver Lining, Expose Art House, Montgomery, AL, 2017 Expose Art Magazine, December 2016, pages 21-22 Windgate Graduate Research Grant Award, 2016

Ling Dai, 2018, sand, soil, and Joss Paper money, 6 x 6 x 6 inches.

CHRISTOPHER McNULTY Professor and Department Chair MFA, University of Wisconsin, Madison BA, Lawrence University A R T I S T ’ S S TAT E M E N T:

Over the last decade, my work has examined the persistence of Cartesian ideas about the mind’s relationship with the material world. My current body of work extends that effort to examine how the mind and individuals are construed as autonomous from their environment. While space can appear to separate bodies, it actually connects them in incredibly intimate ways. Inspired by Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2011), Juliana Spahr's post-9/11 poetry, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (University of California, 2005), and the NIH's Human Microbiome Project, I am attempting to portray how environmental space penetrates the body, creating relationships among individuals, species, and objects.

SELECTED RECENT ACTIVITY:

This interpenetration of the body and the “environment”

Northern Illinois University Art Museum, DeKalb, IL

undermines simplistic notions of borderlines between our

Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco, CA

bodies and the space around us, and radically challenges

Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA

our imagined separateness from the world. At the

OFF Space Gallery, Oakland, CA Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, LA Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA

level of the breath, for example, the “outside” is always already “inside” rendering such distinctions ambiguous and problematic. My current sculptures represent the intimate connections that the spaces of the respiratory system form among individuals and the environment by inverting space and form: the forms of the sculptures

Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, TX

represent the space within and between bodies, while the

Rochester Art Center, Rochester, NY

space around the modeled forms imply the bodies' absent

Corcoran Gallery of Art/College of Art + Design, Washington, DC

anatomical forms.

Exchange II, 2016, urethane and stainless steel, 62 x 21 x 18 inches.

LAUREN WOODS Assistant Professor MFA, New York Academy of Art BA, Spring Hill College A R T I S T ’ S S TAT E M E N T:

SELECTED RECENT ACTIVITY: Night, Strathmore Hall Foundation, Bethesda, MD, 2019 Activating the Apparatus: Vol II, Strange Matter ATL, Atlanta, GA, 2018 And Now for Something New Vol 1, LeMieux Galleries, New Orleans, LA, 2018 Gulf Coast Contemporary: Selected Works from Artists in Lower Alabama, Tennessee Valley Museum of Art, Tuscumbia, AL, 2018 do it, conceived by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL, 2018 She Is of the South, Amelia Center Gallery, Gulf Coast State College, Panama City, FL, 2018 Contemporary Nostalgia, Spring Hill College Eichold Gallery, Mobile, AL, 2016 Hot Dry Men, Cold Wet Women, Mark Miller Gallery, New York, NY, 2015 Hippie Priest, Honey Ramka Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2014

My body of work is an ongoing visual development of a personal mythology, both in terms of subject matter and what it means to be a female artist. Influenced by the visual language of allegorical figure paintings in the “grand narrative” of Western art history, I stage scenes overwrought with artifice to create a delusive vision of whimsical romance. Through a veneer of lightheartedness, paintings become a theatrical space to examine deeper notions of gender, sentimentality, desire, beauty, and artistic power. Poetic situations emerge from mixing revered visual sources with disoriented signs of masculinity and femininity.

Ethereal environments emphasize the tension between idealized figures and visual allusions to the hushed violence of death. Through the practice of painting, I can utilize the medium’s potential for ambiguity, creating images that are at once singular and unchanging, while simultaneously remaining vulnerable to individual interpretation. This method allows paintings to exist in a space that oscillates between conflicting states, such as informed innocence, playful seriousness, perverse prettiness, clandestine sincerity, and contemporary nostalgia. With this, my work becomes a mirror for one to project their own experiences and understanding, encouraging empathy and a living dialogue within the viewer. Some specific imagery and themes I explore include the reclining male nude through the feminine gaze and experience, woman as archetypal hunter in control of her destiny and the world around her, and mythic time experienced through the atmosphere of the theater where nature and magic can coexist.

The Red Clay Survey, Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL, 2014 Lady Killer, 2017, oil on wood, 72 x 48 inches.

ART HISTORY EMILY BURNS JOYCE de VRIES KATHRYN FLOYD KAREN SONIK

EMILY BURNS R E S E A R C H S TAT E M E N T:

Assistant Professor of Art History

My research analyzes the circulation of artists and

PhD, Washington University in St. Louis

objects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and interprets how mobility shapes visual culture and cultural discourses of nationalism. My book Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France

SELECTED RECENT ACTIVITY: Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France.

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018.

“Political Contestation in Cyrus Dallin’s American Indian Equestrian Monuments,” Archives of American Art Journal 57, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 4–21.

“A baby’s unconsciousness” in “Sculpture: Modernism, Nationalism, Frederick MacMonnies and George Grey Barnard in fin-de-siècle Paris,” Sculpture Journal 27, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 89–103. “‘Of A Kind Hitherto Unknown’: The American Art Association of Paris in 1908,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 14, no. 1, Spring 2015.

“Art, Ethnography and Politics: the Transnational Context of Bierstadt’s The Last of the Buffalo in Paris,” in Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West, edited

by Peter H. Hassrick, 123–150. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018.

“Taming a ‘Savage’ Paris: The Masculine Visual Culture of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and France as a New American Frontier,” in The Popular Frontier: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Transnational Mass Culture, edited by Frank Christianson, 129–154. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017.

(2018) analyzes appropriations of the American West in “Wandering Pictures: Locating Cosmopolitanism in Frederick A. Bridgman’s The Funeral of a Mummy on the Nile,” in Locating American Art: Finding Art’s Meaning in Museums, Colonial Period to the Present, edited by Cynthia Fowler, 109–124. Farnham: Ashgate, 2016.

“Revising Bohemia: The American Artist Colony in Paris, 1890–1914,” in Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870–1914, edited by Susan Waller and Karen L. Carter, 186–209. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.

“The Itinerant John Mix Stanley and the Circulating Spectacle of the West in Mid-Century America,” in Painted Journeys: The Art of John Mix Stanley, edited by Peter H. Hassrick and Mindy Besaw, 3–31. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015.

“The Old World Anew: The Atlantic as the Liminal Site of Expectations,” in Framing the Ocean, 1700 to the Present: Envisaging the Sea as Social Space, edited by Tricia Cusack, 37–54. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.

France in performance and visual and material culture in the tripartite international relationships between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between 1867 and 1914. My ongoing book project, "Innocence Abroad: The Cultural Politics and Paradox of American Artistic Belatedness in Fin-de-Siècle Paris," will offer a thematic analysis of constructions of American cultural innocence in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury France. This discursive history analyzes artists’ letters and journals, and visual and material culture including painting, photography, magazine and book illustrations, pottery, furniture, cultural

T R A N S NAT IONA L F RON T I E R S

The American West in France E M I LY C . B U R N S

performances, architectural spaces, and sculpture of the US artists’ colony and tourist travel in Paris to show that Americans abroad enhanced a mythology that claimed cultural innocence in response to European expectations. Each chapter deconstructs a distinct period-specific use of innocence and considers the mechanisms of its performance for its transnational audience. The exploration of this paradox will contribute to transnational art history and to the study of Franco-American exchange.

Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France.

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018.

JOYCE de VRIES Professor of Art History PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign

SELECTED RECENT ACTIVITY: “Collezionismo in Early Modern Bologna: The Fantuzzi family’s acquisition and display of drawings and paintings by local masters,” in Understanding 17th-Century Bolognese Art. Rediscoveries in the Archives, edited by Babette Bohn and Raffaella Morselli, Amsterdam University Press, in press.

Co-editor with Barbara Baker, and author of the epilogue, Outside In: Voices from the Margins of Academe, Common Ground Publishing, 2018.

“What Women Owned: Gender and Material Culture in Early Modern Bologna,” plenary lecture, Attending to Early Modern Women Conference, Milwaukee, June 2018.

"The Fantuzzi Family’s Art Collection in Early Modern Bologna," conference presentation, Renaissance Society of America Conference, Chicago, March–April 2017.

Co-authored with Barbara Baker, “Neighbors, Allies, and Partners in Inclusion: an HBCU and an SEC Land Grant Institution,” in Breaking the Zero-Sum Game: Transforming Societies Through Inclusive Leadership, edited by Aldo Boitano, H. Eric Schockman, and Raul Lagomarsino, 271–282. Emerald Group Publishing, 2017.

R E S E A R C H S TAT E M E N T:

I specialize in the visual and material culture and gender issues of early modern Italy (1400–1700).

I am the author of Caterina Sforza and the Art of Appearances: Gender, Art, and Culture in Early Modern Italy (2010; 2016) and currently work on the art and material culture of the domestic sphere in Bologna. I will present new research, “Artisan Women’s Clothing in seventeenthcentury Bologna,” at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Toronto in March 2019, and am working on an essay, “Setting up House: Artisan Women’s Dowries in seventeenth-century Bologna.” While non-elite women are now at the forefront of my work, I continue to publish material that explores the art and material culture of the Italian nobility. A book chapter, “Collezionismo in Early Modern Bologna,” looks at the collection strategies of a nobleman with limited resources in early eighteenth-century Bologna and the costs and valuations of his art over the century. This chapter presents extremely rare and previously unpublished diagrams of the art in the collector’s gallery; in the essay I constellate the drawings with dozens of other documents to recreate how the art was once displayed. I ground my research in archival evidence, and I have worked in archives and libraries throughout Italy, including Bologna, Ferrara, Florence, Forlì, Mantua, Milan, Modena, Naples, Rome, the Vatican, and Venice.

I have served as the Director of the Women’s Studies Program at Auburn (2011–17) and completed research in this discipline in addition to art history. For instance, I co-edited Outside In, a collection of essays that explore issues of diversity, inclusion, and the resilience of women, particularly women of color, in higher education.

Professor de Vries on a research trip in Venice.

KATHRYN FLOYD Associate Professor of Art History PhD, The University of Iowa, School of Art and Art History

R E S E A R C H S TAT E M E N T: SELECTED RECENT ACTIVITY: College of Liberal Arts Competitive Professional Improvement Leave, 2018 DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Research Grant, 2017 College of Liberal Arts Teaching Excellence Award, Auburn University, 2017 Guest editor, special issue of the journal Dada/Surrealism on “Exhibiting Dada and Surrealism,” Dada/Surrealism 21, 2017.

“Writing the Histories of Dada and Surrealist Exhibitions: Problems and Possibilities,” Dada/Surrealism 21, (2017): 1-19. “‘d’ is for documenta: institutional identity for a periodic exhibition,” On Curating (special issue on documenta) 33, edited by Nanne Buurman and Dorothee Richter, (June 2017): 9–19.

“The Museum Exhibited: documenta and the Museum Fridericianum,” in Images of the Art Museum: Connecting Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology, edited by M. Savino and E. Troelenberg, 65–90. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017.

“Moving Statues: Arthur Grimm, the “Entartete Kunst” Exhibition, and Installation Photography as Standfotografie,” in Exhibiting the German Past: Museums, Film, and Musealization, edited by P. McIsaac & G. Mueller, 187–208. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.

My research concerns the history and historiography of art exhibitions, especially in twentieth-century Germany, as well as the remediation of exhibitions in catalogues, ephemera, installation photographs, and films. I have conducted extensive research on the history of documenta, an on-going exhibition series founded in 1955 in Kassel, Germany that takes place twice a decade.

Two recent publications on this topic concern the institutional identity of the series as it is expressed in photographs of documenta’s main venue, the Museum Fridericianum, and its original “d” logo. My current book project attempts to define photographs of exhibitions as a photographic genre. I have also recently returned to research I first pursued while working at the University of Iowa on the art and exhibitions of the early twentieth-century Dada movement and its reception in postwar Germany and the United States.

Poster for documenta 1955, Kassel, Germany.

“Georges Adéagbo: Between Artwork and Exhibition,” in Exhibiting Outside the Academy, Salon, and Biennial, 1775–1999, edited by A. Graciano, 235-258. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2015.

Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, 1955.

KAREN SONIK R E S E A R C H S TAT E M E N T:

Assistant Professor PhD, University of Pennsylvania

SELECTED RECENT ACTIVITY: Journey to the City: A Companion to the Middle East Galleries at the Penn Museum (co-edited with S. Tinney).

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum Press, in press.

The Materiality of Divine Agency (co-edited with B. Pongratz-Leisten). Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2015.

“Divine (Re-)Presentation: Authoritative Images and a Pictorial Stream of Tradition in Mesopotamia,” in The Materiality of Divine Agency, edited by B. PongratzLeisten and K. Sonik, 142–193. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2015.

“Pictorial Mythology and Narrative in the Ancient Near East,” in Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art, edited by M. Feldman and B. Brown, 265–293. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2014.

Eastern Languages and Civilizations. His research focuses on the Sumerian language and the cultural and

“From Hesiod’s Abyss to Ovid’s rudis indigestaque moles: intellectual history of ancient Mesopotamia, particularly ancient education and scholarship, and he directs the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project. He has Chaos and Cosmos in the Babylonian Epic of Creation,” worked with cuneiform tablets for more than 30 years, 20 of those in the Babylonian Section. in Creation and Chaos: A Reconsideration of Herman Karen Sonik, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Gunkel’s Chaoskampf Hypothesis, edited by J. Scurlock Department of Art and Art History at Auburn She earned her PhD at the University and R. Beal, 1–25. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns,University. of 2013.

Pennsylvania in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World and has since been an American

Council for Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow in “Breaching the Boundaries of Being: Metamorphoses the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles; a postdoctoral fellow in Egyptology and in the Mesopotamian Literary Texts,” Journal ofAncient theWestern Asian Studies at Brown University; and a Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University.

American Oriental Society 132.3 (2012): 385–393.

The Penn Museum Founded in 1887, the Penn Museum has always been one of the world’s great archaeology and anthropology research museums, and the largest university museum in the United States. With roughly one million objects in our care, the Penn Museum encapsulates and illustrates the human story of who we are and where we come from.

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With Beate Pongratz-Leisten. “Between Cognition and Culture: Theorizing the Materiality of Divine Agency in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” in The Materiality of Divine Agency, edited by B. Pongratz-Leisten and K. Sonik, 3–69.

Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2015.

“Mesopotamian Conceptions of the Supernatural: The Editors Steve Tinney, Ph.D., Coordinating Curator of the A Taxonomy of Zwischenwesen,” Archiv für Middle East Galleries, is Associate Curator-in-Charge of the Babylonian Section and the Clark Research Associate Religionsgeschichte 14 (2013): 103–116.

Professor in Assyriology in Penn’s Department of Near

JOURNEY TO THE CITY

“Emotion and the Ancient Arts: Visualizing, Materializing, and Producing States of Being,” in Visualizing Emotions in the Ancient Near East, edited by S. Kipfer, 219–261. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017.

“The Monster’s Gaze: Vision as Mediator Between Time and Space in the Art of Mesopotamia,” in Time and History in the Ancient Near East: Proceedings of the 56th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale at Barcelona, 26–30 July 2010, edited by Lluís Feliu, Jaume Llop, Adelina Millet Albà, and Joaqín Sanmartín, 285–300.

Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013.

I specialize in the visual and literary arts of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, with an emphasis on ancient Mesopotamia. My recent work has addressed topics including Assyrian rock reliefs and royal memory, the materialization and visualization of emotion in the ancient Near East, the authorization and legitimation of divine images, and the relationship between pictorial and written myth in Mesopotamia. My publications include the edited volumes Journey to the City: A Companion to the Middle East Galleries at the Penn Museum (with S. Tinney, forthcoming with University of Pennsylvania Museum Press), The Materiality of Divine Agency (with B. Pongratz-Leisten, de Gruyter 2015), A Common Cultural Heritage: Studies in the Mesopotamian & Biblical World in Honor of Barry L. Eichler (with G. Frame et al., CDL Press 2010), and numerous articles and book chapters.

Edited by Steve Tinney and Karen Sonik

Journey to the City: A Companion to the Middle East Galleries at the Penn Museum (co-edited with S. Tinney). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum Press, in press.

US $29.95

Presented in part with generous support from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Alabama Bicentennial Commission, in recognition and celebration of the 200th anniversary of Alabama statehood in 2019.

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