MICA Art History

MICA Art History MICA offers both an undergraduate major in Art History, Theory & Criticism, as well as a minor in Art History.

Ways of Seeing students in 's classes visit the Center for Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the BMA to do an object s...
10/30/2024

Ways of Seeing students in 's classes visit the Center for Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the BMA to do an object study session for their final assignment. Thank you to for a wonderful study session!

Next Wednesday, April 03rd, we will be having our last Art@Lunch of the semester. Art History faculty member Jennifer Ho...
03/29/2024

Next Wednesday, April 03rd, we will be having our last Art@Lunch of the semester. Art History faculty member Jennifer Hock will be giving a lecture titled "Beyond Redlining: How Racism Shaped the Midcentury American City".

Please join us in Bunting 480 or on Zoom. You can find the link in our LinkTree.

Lecture Description: Recent public scholarship has introduced many of us to the numerous ways in which racism shaped the midcentury American city, including the large-scale displacement associated with highway construction and urban renewal and the disinvestment associated with redlining--that is, the systematic, state-sponsored practice of denying mortgage credit to a community because of the presence of people of color. But how did racism shape the houses, neighborhoods, shopping centers, schools, and parks that were built during these years? We'll explore midcentury understandings of the concept of racism and popular strategies for combating it, racialized discourses around architectural design, and the emerging dynamics of racial equity and racial representation that all show up in a single competition for the design of a shopping center in 1960s Boston.

The Liberal Arts department is very excited for our upcoming thesis symposium. Please join us next Friday, March 22nd 1-...
03/15/2024

The Liberal Arts department is very excited for our upcoming thesis symposium. Please join us next Friday, March 22nd 1-4PM to support our majors, and to learn more about their great work! We will be in the Main Building, room 110. Light refreshments will be provided.

For this month's Art@Lunch, Kerr Houston, faculty in our department, will be speaking. You can join us in person next We...
03/13/2024

For this month's Art@Lunch, Kerr Houston, faculty in our department, will be speaking. You can join us in person next Wednesday in Bunting 480 or on Zoom (https://mica-edu.zoom.us/j/9661092235).

Lecture Description: Begun in 1732 and in use by late 1735, the Pennsylvania State House (now known as Independence Hall) has been called "the grandest public building in all of the British New World colonies." Its associations with the American Revolution are well known--but the structure is also notable for the prominent clock on its western end. Likely installed in the 1750s and featuring a monumental case and marble hood, the timepiece was apparently unique, in form and scale, in the history of clock design. In this talk, Kerr Houston will consider several previously undiscussed early accounts of the clock, and argue that the timepiece embodied colonial ideologies in imposing a temporal discipline upon the alleged "wilderness" of Pennsylvania. Erected at what was then the edge of the city and towering over an area that had long traditionally served as an Indigenous camping ground, the clock played a prominent role in the pointed creation of a timescape that was closely connected to notions of discipline and that formed part of a more general effort to measure, subdue, and possess Penn's Woods.

Professor Amor’s Archives, Museums, Practices class went to Glenstone to explore the insides of the institution. Thanks ...
02/28/2024

Professor Amor’s Archives, Museums, Practices class went to Glenstone to explore the insides of the institution. Thanks to archivist Nathan Avant who opened up flat files with cards by Charles Ray and Roni Horn, as well as the Artist Material Archive with beads from Felix Gonzales Torres’ curtains and yarn from Fred Sandback’s sculptures. Thanks to Jose Castro (projects manager); Sophia Figueroa (design); Amanda Muhlena (registrar); Carly Davis (Librarian) for enlightening conversations about collaboration. Thanks to curator Mia Matthias who guided us through Iconoclasts with her insightful observations (and passion) and to Andrea DesJardins, Francisca Moraga Lopez, and Valentía Nahon for hosting us and keeping it all organized and smooth. And of course thanks to Emily Rales who made possible our trip to Glenstone and keeps things magical. 🙏🙏🙏❤️❤️❤️

The first Art@Lunch of the semester will be on Thursday, February 29th. You can join us in Bunting or on Zoom to hear fr...
02/26/2024

The first Art@Lunch of the semester will be on Thursday, February 29th. You can join us in Bunting or on Zoom to hear from one of our department's faculty, Kerry Roeder.

Lecture Description:
The 1913 Armory Show was a transformative event when American audiences were first exposed to European avant-garde art. In response, critics and cartoonists flooded newspapers with parodies of the art on display. While these comics often expressed a surface disdain for modern art, their experimental form belied their professed skepticism. In this talk I plan to examine the role print comics played in slyly acclimating mass audiences to modernism in the early decades of the twentieth century.
https://mica-edu.zoom.us/j/9661092235

Join us next Monday for 4U on the 4th! For the month of March, we will be thinking about mindfulness. We'll have some cr...
02/26/2024

Join us next Monday for 4U on the 4th! For the month of March, we will be thinking about mindfulness. We'll have some craft, tarot card readings, essential oils, and lunch. Hope to see you there!

Unfortunately, we've had to cancel our December Art@Lunch event. We will be rescheduling this event and look forward to ...
11/30/2023

Unfortunately, we've had to cancel our December Art@Lunch event. We will be rescheduling this event and look forward to seeing you all at Art@Lunch in the spring.

Join us at Art@Lunch, this Wednesday at 12PM. This month, our very own, Monica Amor will be giving a talk on her book, G...
10/23/2023

Join us at Art@Lunch, this Wednesday at 12PM. This month, our very own, Monica Amor will be giving a talk on her book, Gego: Weaving the Space in Between. This is a hybrid event. You can join us in B480 or on Zoom (https://mica-edu.zoom.us/j/9661092235).

Talk Description: Though known mainly as a "sculptor" of airy metal meshes, Gego's practice is multidisciplinary and intermedial. This talk address weaving, both as technique and artifact, to refer to the knotting and linking of triangular modules made of various metals that takes place in Gego's works, which feature a distinctive recursive relationality. Weaving allowed Gego to use alternative imaginaries, to produce an aesthetic of affects and the everyday, to unravel the possibilities of mediums, disciplines, institutions, and materials. Thus, this talk also engages with her architecture training, her furniture workshop, her teaching, as well as the artists’ various bodies of work: her Drawings Without Paper, her work on paper, and her late Weavings. Indeed, as Gego’s advanced age made the demanding handling of metal difficult, she began to focus more on malleable filaments and interwoven strips of paper cut from old catalogs, photographs and magazines. The residues of the studio became central to a form of labor and a way of life.

Join us Thursday for a lecture with John Beardsley titled, "Land Matters: Earth Art, Landscape Architecture, and What Ge...
10/09/2023

Join us Thursday for a lecture with John Beardsley titled, "Land Matters: Earth Art, Landscape Architecture, and What Gets Left Out of the Story". This talk will take us back 50 years to a time when landscape re-emerged as a significant focus of avant-garde art, when artists like Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and Walter DeMaria began working in the landscape itself, drawing our attention to its material, spatial, and experiential qualities. This art would subsequently have a significant impact on public art, and eventually on contemporary landscape architecture, helping to shape an idea of advanced practice across several disciplines. At the same time, the prevailing narratives of land art left out culturally distinct landscape practices, not only but especially among African American "yard artists," whose work, in retrospect, challenges what it means to be avant-garde.

This is a virtual lecture: bit.ly/LandMattersLecture

Join us for the first Art@Lunch of the semester on Wednesday, September 20th at 12PM. One of our faculty members, Vicky ...
09/07/2023

Join us for the first Art@Lunch of the semester on Wednesday, September 20th at 12PM. One of our faculty members, Vicky Pass will be giving a talk titled "Banishing the Bustle: Constructing Whiteness Through Dress Reform".

This talk will examine the relationship between scientific racism and fashionable dress during the 19th and 20th century. It will explore how undergarments such as the bustle and brassiere have been used to shape white women’s bodies into forms associated with the bodies of women of color, and in turn to give those women a sexual allure that was achieved through technological means that did not inherently taint their racial or sexual purity. It will consider how these garments were written about by both their advocates and detractors to understand how their framing functioned to reinforce a white supremacist hierarchy. It will also explore how the rhetoric of fashion and science bolstered and reinforced each other in unlikely ways. It will show the ways that the ideas promulgated by scientific racism permeated the everyday lives of people through fashionable dress and the discourse around fashionable dress. (Content Warning: this talk will include discussions of racist imagery and will include some of these images)

This is a hybrid event. You can join us in person in Bunting 480 or on Zoom (https://mica-edu.zoom.us/j/9661092235).

For April's Art@Lunch, Mimi Cheng, Max Kade Postdoctoral Fellow, Freie Universität Berlin, 2022-2023, will be joining us...
04/03/2023

For April's Art@Lunch, Mimi Cheng, Max Kade Postdoctoral Fellow, Freie Universität Berlin, 2022-2023, will be joining us to give a talk titled "China Refracted: The Afterlives of Ernst Ohlmer’s Glass Negatives of the European Palaces." You can find the Zoom link in our Linktree in our bio.

Lecture Info:
In 1873, a young German customs agent named Ernst Ohlmer created the first photographic accounts of the European Palaces [Xiyanglou], a sprawling eighteenth century imperial complex located adjacent to the Garden of Perfect Clarity [Yuanmingyuan] in Beijing. Ohlmer’s plates passed through several hands and now constitute a cornerstone in the complex’s visual archive. Commissioned by the Qianlong emperor, designed by Jesuit artists and engineers, and constructed by artisans of the Qing court in the mid-eighteenth century, the complex was material testament to imperial power and the court’s westward gaze. French and British troops burned and looted the palaces and gardens as an act of retribution at the conclusion of the Second O***m War. Today, the complex is the subject of intense architectural study while also serving as the locus for discussions on the nature and uses of collective memory in modern China.

Lecturer's Bio:
Mimi Cheng '11 is a cultural historian of the global nineteenth century with research interests in three overlapping areas: transnational visual culture between Europe and East Asia, comparative histories of cartography and the built environment, and the relationship between knowledge and imperialism. She received her PhD from the University of Rochester in 2022 and is currently a Max Kade Postdoctoral Fellow at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität. Her research has been supported by the American Council for Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, and the Forschungzentrum Gotha at the Universität Erfurt, among others.

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