In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Asma Naeem, the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Asma shares her circuitous path into the discipline, from her sensitivity to the visual landscape of her childhood within an Indo-Pakistani immigrant family, to the formative chal...

In this episode, which continues the miniseries focused on sound, media, and visual art, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Kaira M. Cabañas, professor of art history at the University of Florida, where she is also affiliate faculty in the Center for Latin American Studies and Center for Gender, Sexualities and Women’s S...

In this episode Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Nancy Um, professor of art history at Binghamton University in New York State, whose research explores the Islamic world from the perspective of the coast, with a focus on material, visual, and built culture on the Arabian Peninsula and around the rims of the Red Sea and Indian...

In this episode Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Joseph Leo Koerner, professor of art history at Harvard University, who teaches and writes about the history of art from the late Middle Ages to the present day, with an emphasis on Northern Renaissance art. Joseph discusses his early focus on literary studies, psychoanalysis, a...

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) continues the miniseries on sound and visual art in conversation with Niall Atkinson, an associate professor of art history at the University of Chicago. Niall's research concerns the relationship between sound, space, and architecture and their role in the construction of pre...

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) continues the miniseries on sound and visual art in conversation with Michael Gaudio, professor of art history at the University of Minnesota, who specializes in visual arts in the early modern Atlantic world. Michael describes his early studies in literature and the influence of d...

In this episode, Alice Matthews ('21 graduate of the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art) speaks with Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, associate professor of the historical and present-day arts of West Africa at Emory University. They discuss the trajectory that ultimately brought Susan to her field, including undergraduate internships with the Baltimore Museum of Art. Susan reflects on...

In this episode Caro Fowler (Starr Director, Research and Academic Program) speaks with Roberto Tejada, a poet and art historian who in a professor in the creative writing program and the department of art history at the University of Houston, Texas. They discuss the decade he spent immersed in the literary culture of Mexico City, including working with Octavio Paz and the historical layers of the...

In this episode, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Joan Kee, professor of art history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Joan describes the influence of growing up in Seoul, Korea, but shares her uneasiness with centering a sense of self within art historical writing. She reflects on modes of description and their poli...

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies:   short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian. Originally adorning a small Greek Orthodox chapel in Cyprus, from 1997 to 2012 these Byzantine frescoes were installed in a specially built space, an “infinity box” that feels akin to being...

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies:   short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian. Amy Freund (Southern Methodist University) reveals the newly discovered Portrait of a Seated Hunter with His Dogs (1661), which dates to nearly forty years before the genre was previously b...

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies:   short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian. Samantha Page (Clark Art Institute)  explores how Hung Liu’s painting Migrant Mother (2015) reimagines Dorothea Lange’s iconic Depression-era photograph; here the materiality of paint draws...

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies:   short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian. Charles Keiffer (Williams College) recounts the heightened atmosphere of intoxicated conviviality on display in Thomas Patch’s oil painting British Gentlemen at Sir Horace Mann’s Home in Fl...

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies:   short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian. Joan Kee (University of Michigan) delves into how Chao-Chen Yang’s color photograph Apprehension (c. 1942) captures the feeling of surveillance, silencing, and precarity, particularly as ex...

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies:   short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian. Jordan Horton (Williams College) explores how Romare Bearden’s collage The Dove (1964) plays with fragmented forms to visually evoke the “broken time” of jazz while also embodying how Black...

In this episode Caroline Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with J. Vanessa Lyon, who is on the faculty at Bennington College, where she teaches the histories of art with an emphasis on gender, race, and post/colonial relationships in Spanish, Flemish, and Transatlantic visual representation. Vanessa speaks about the influence of her grad...

In this episode Caroline Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with two scholars of Renaissance art and architecture: Saundra Weddle, professor of architecture at Drury University and a Clark Fellow in fall 2020, and Lisa Pon, professor of art history at the University of Southern California. They discuss how they met one another by chance i...

In this episode, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Lorraine O’Grady, an artist and cultural critic whose work on Black female subjectivity and modernism has made significant contributions to numerous disciplines. Lorraine discusses her early research on the relationship between Charles Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval and grapples w...

In this episode Caroline Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Alisa LaGamma, a specialist of African art and Ceil and Michael E. Pulitzer Curator in Charge for the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she has been a curator for twenty-five years. Alisa discusses the formative in...

In this episode in the mini-series focused on sound, art, and media, Caitlin Woolsey (Manton Postdoctoral Fellow in the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Robin James, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. Robin explores the intersections of pop music, sound studies, feminism, race, and contemporary continental phi...

In this episode from the mini-series focused on sound and art, Caitlin Woolsey (Manton Postdoctoral Fellow in the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Christoph Cox, professor of philosophy and dean of the faculty at Hampshire College. Christoph writes on aesthetics, theories of sound, and cultural theory. In this conversation he describes his transdisciplinary aca...

In this episode from the mini-series focused on sound, media, and art, Caitlin Woolsey (Manton Postdoctoral Fellow in the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Christina Kubisch, a pioneer of sound art. Trained as a composer and flautist, since the 1970s Christina has worked with techniques like electromagnetic induction to realize her experiential installations. In...

This is the first of a series of four episodes focused on sound, media, and art, in which Caitlin Woolsey (Manton Postdoctoral Fellow in the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Brian Michael Murphy, a writer and media archaeologist who is a faculty member in media studies at Bennington College. Brian explores intersections between race and the materiality of media...

In this episode Caroline Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Anne Helmreich, an art historian and digital humanist. Formerly the Associate Director of Digital Initiatives at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, since April 2020 Anne has been the Associate Director of the Getty Foundation. A specialist of nineteenth-century art...

In this episode Caroline Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Souleymane Bachir Diagne, professor in the departments of French and philosophy and director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. Bachir reflects on his early studies in Senegal as well as formative experiences studying with Louis Althusser and Jacques...