Research and Innovation

Vermeer and the Art of Love deals with private emotions evoked in domestic interiors in which a young woman may be writing a letter to her absent beloved or playing a virginal in the presence of an admirer. But it is also about the love we sense in the painter’s attentiveness to every detail within those rooms, which lends even the most mundane of objects the quality of something extraordinary. In this engaging book, the author uncovers the ways in which Vermeer challenges the dichotomies between 'good' and 'bad' love, the sensual and the spiritual, placing him within the context of his contemporaries, as well as within the broader discourse on love and art in early modern Europe.

Surveys the representations and constructions of the human being in American art.

Humans are organisms, but “the human being” is a term referring to a complicated, self-contradictory, and historically evolving set of concepts and practices. Humans explores competing versions, constructs, and ideas of the human being that have figured prominently in the arts of the United States. These essays consider a range of artworks from the colonial period to the present, examining how they have reflected, shaped, and modeled ideas of the human in American culture and politics. The book addresses to what extent artworks have conferred more humanity on some human beings than others, how art has shaped ideas about the relationships between humans and other beings and things, and in what ways different artistic constructions of the human being evolved, clashed, and intermingled over the course of American history. Humans both tells the history of a concept foundational to US civilization and proposes new means for its urgently needed rethinking.

Entries on Hamish Fulton, Chryssa, Jimmie Durham, Joseph Cornell, and Paul Gauguin in Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: The Collection. edited by Stéphane Aquin and Anne Reeve. New York: Delmonico Books, 2022

Re•Cast is organized by UMD Department of Art History and Archaeology Graduate Students Marco Polo Juárez Cruz, Cléa Massiani, and Gabrielle Tillenburg, under the direction of Associate Professor Abigail McEwen.

This essay addresses Rubens’s perspective on the human/animal relationship as exemplified by the figure of the satyr. As the author argues, in addition to established associations with ideas of unbridled sensuality, this liminal character relates to deeper philosophical considerations about the interconnectedness of all living beings. Furthermore, a closer look at the connection between the satyr and the literary satire demonstrates that Rubens’s satiric images bear a number of salient qualities of this genre as one that destabilizes all boundaries: be it between the beautiful and the repulsive, the tragic and the comical, or the sublime and the grotesque.

Humans are organisms, but “the human being” is a term referring to a complicated, self-contradictory, and historically evolving set of concepts and practices. Humans explores competing versions, constructs, and ideas of the human being that have figured prominently in the arts of the United States. These essays consider a range of artworks from the colonial period to the present, examining how they have reflected, shaped, and modeled ideas of the human in American culture and politics. The book addresses to what extent artworks have conferred more humanity on some human beings than others, how art has shaped ideas about the relationships between humans and other beings and things, and in what ways different artistic constructions of the human being evolved, clashed, and intermingled over the course of American history. Humans both tells the history of a concept foundational to US civilization and proposes new means for its urgently needed rethinking.

I have co-organized this international virtual conference with colleagues at the University of New South Wales in Australia; the conference will be held virtually on April 28, 2021 with the support of the Asia Society, Sydney and the Center for East Asian Studies at UMD. Since the end of the 1980s, contemporary art produced by artists of Chinese cultural identity has been exhibited internationally in accordance with Westernized curatorial discourses and practices associated with the White Cube and its postmodernist/contemporary variants. This symposium will intervene critically with those discourses and practices by exploring the possibility of alternative approaches to the curation of a culturally Chinese contemporary art. The symposium will bring together scholars as well as critics, artists, curators, and architects/designers who will be invited to respond critically to the symposium's theme with reference to their particular professional experiences and concerns. In addition to presentations by the symposium's co-organizers and invited speakers, ample time will be given for collective discussion and responses to audience questions. The co-organizers will seek to publish a peer-reviewed edited collection related to the theme of the symposium.

Anthony Colantuono's article titled "Visceral Responses: Unexplained Expressions of Astonishment, Disbelief and Marvel in Poussin's Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus" proceeds from the observation that in Poussin's famous altarpiece of 1628 (Vatican Museums), the pagan men who are shown in the act of disemboweling the saint exhibit unexpected facial expressions and bodily gestures, seemingly designed to express the unexpected sentiments of astonishment, disbelief and marvel or wonder -- as opposed to the expected expression of simple hatred and cruelty. Colantuono shows that these expressions are explained when we realize that the artist has added iconographic details designed to imply an analogy between the saint's disembowelment and the pagan religious ritual of haruspicy -- the practice in which the ancient Romans would examine the entrails of sacrificial animals in order to perceive the future. Colantuono argues that Erasmus's torturers are examining the entrails and in them foresee the end of paganism and the future triumph of Christianity.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) burst onto the art scene in the summer of 1980 as one of approximately one hundred artists exhibiting at the 1980 Times Square Show in New York City. By 1982, at the age of twenty-one, Basquiat had solo exhibitions in galleries in Italy, New York, and Los Angeles. Basquiat's artistic career followed the rapid trajectory of Wall Street, which boomed from 1983 to 1987. In the span of just a few years, this Black boy from Brooklyn had become one of the most famous American artists of the 1980s. The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader is the first comprehensive sourcebook on the artist, closing gaps that have until now limited the sustained study and definitive archiving of his work and its impact. Eight years after his first exhibition, Basquiat was dead, but his popularity has only grown. Through a combination of interviews with the artist, criticism from the artist's lifetime and immediately after, previously unpublished research by the author, and a selection of the most important critical essays on the artist's work, this collection provides a full picture of the artist's views on art and culture, his working process, and the critical significance of his work both then and now.

This session further explores the challenges and the potential within writing African American art history in the absence of archives. Of particular interest is the reclamation of overlooked histories as reparative gestures. Each presentation reveals the historic failures of the discipline to recognize black artists, as well as the deep tensions one must confront working with artists and their estates. We also consider the labor that goes into archive-building projects. Such work does not qualify as original scholarship under the requirements for academic promotions, and institutional commitments to building these archives and collections are often temporary. We ask, therefore, not only what it means to perform this work, but what are its consequences.