Category Archives: faculty news

Local Ecologies initiative and related programs

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Local Ecologies is an inter-campus initiative focused on place-based practice shared between three UMass campuses. The interrelated programming, which will include public talks, course offerings, and new project development, emphasizes contemporary artistic perspectives on ecological sites, from the postindustrial Merrimack River and New Bedford regions to the evolving urban ecologies of Boston and environs. These will be featured in a touring exhibition to be presented in Boston, Lowell, and New Bedford Massachusetts throughout fall 2019 and spring 2020.

The goals of this inter-campus collaboration between UMass Boston (Sam Toabe, Gallery Director), UMass Dartmouth (Rebecca Uchill, Art Education, Art History, and Media Studies), and UMass Lowell (Kirsten Swenson, Art History) is to spark transdisciplinary and cross-institutional exchange that centers on artists’ engagement with environmental, ecological, and land use issues. The ecologies of Eastern Massachusetts will come into focus through the lens of artistic projects on each campus, as well as related courses (“Art + Environment” at UMass Lowell; “Processing Place” at UMass Dartmouth). Confirmed participants include Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Duy Hoàng, Sarah Kanouse+Nick Brown, Jane Marsching, Matthew Mazzotta, and Andrew Yang, with others to be announced.

Andrew Yang, “Two Vehicles,” detail from Flying Gardens of Maybe, 2012-2014. Photograph by the artist.

Rebecca Uchill, Art History Lecture is the new web editor for CAA Art Journal Open

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“CAA’s president, Suzanne Preston Blier, has appointed Rebecca Uchill as the new web editor for Art Journal Open, endorsing the recommendation of the editorial board of Art Journal. Uchill, who currently is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Art, Science, and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joins the College of Visual and Performing Arts at UMass Dartmouth in September as a full-time lecturer. Uchill’s three-year term for Art Journal Open commences on July 1, 2017; she succeeds inaugural web editor Gloria Sutton, assistant professor of contemporary art history and new media at Northeastern University. During her term, Uchill will be responsible for commissioning and vetting content for the website, including artist projects and essays. She will serve on the Art Journal editorial board.

Uchill is the coeditor (with Caroline A. Jones and David Mather) of Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense (MIT Press, 2016), as well as curator of the artist entries for the volume. She organizes interdisciplinary events and programs, including the recent “Being Material” symposium at MIT and a series of curatorial experiments with the collaborative Experience Economies. Uchill has published in journals such as Future Anterior, Museum and Curatorial Studies Review, Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, and Journal of Curatorial Studies. She has curated exhibitions at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Mass MoCA. Uchill earned her PhD in history, theory, and criticism of art at MIT in 2015.”

“Rebecca Uchill is the New Web Editor for Art Journal Open”. CAA News Today. June 1, 2017. http://www.collegeart.org/news/2017/06/01/rebecca-uchill-is-the-new-web-editor-for-art-journal-open/.

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The Destruction of Cultural Heritage: From Napoléon to ISIS

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Art History Faculty News: The Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative is proud to publish a new dossier of original essays, The Destruction of Cultural Heritage: From Napoléon to ISIS, co-edited by CVPA Art History Professor Pamela Karimi.

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Published on the occasion of the recapture of ISIS-controlled areas in Northern Iraq, these essays by prominent scholars of Middle Eastern art and architectural history document, quantify and theorize the demolition of cultural heritage in the Middle East, taking a long historical view that encompasses instances of destruction of the cultural heritage in the Middle East from the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798 to the demolition spree of ISIS today. Exploring the agency of ancient monuments in today’s cultures, the ways in which this agentival capacity has been enacted or rejected through acts of violence, care, mediatization, or indifference, the authors of the essays in this collection describe the impact of obliterating architecture on our psyches, cultures, philosophies, and historiographies.

http://we-aggregate.org/project/the-destruction-of-cultural-heritage-from-napoleon-to-isis

To spur further research and reflection, a compilation of essential sources and news reports of instances of cultural demolition accompanies the essays.

http://we-aggregate.org/piece/appendix-a-selection-of-news-articles-on-the-destruction-of-cultural-heritage-in-the-middle-east

Public Panel

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Dr. Pamela Karimi takes part in a PUBLIC PANEL: Material Speculation, Between ISIS and Islamophobia at Trinity Square Video.

Saturday, February 13, 2016 @ 2:00 – 5:00pm

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On the occasion of Morehshin Allahyari’s solo exhibition: Material Speculation at Trinity Square Video, we are pleased to invite you to a public panel with the artist, in discussion with art historian and critic Pamela Karimi, and researcher and writer Dina Georgis. The panel will discuss their research in relationship to Allahyari’s work, Material Speculation: ISIS, a digital fabrication and 3D printing project focused on the reconstruction of selected artifacts that were destroyed by ISIS in 2015.

Situated in the political, social and cultural web of relations that Material Speculation proposes—from petropolitics, war, conflict materials, and terrorism—the panel explicitly challenges potentially polarizing and Islamophobic responses to the work, while probing its aesthetic, radical and complicated insights. The goal is to offer artistic contexts and theoretical readings of the exhibition while tying it to contemporary events of war, terrorism and the material/political worlds it implicates. More Information: http://www.trinitysquarevideo.com/panel-material-speculation/

 

 

Dr Thomas Stubblefield awarded Josef Breitenbach Research Fellowship from the Center of Creative Photography at the University of Arizona

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Prof. Stubblefield’s project situates the history of photography within a broad historical frame of visual expression which not only includes fine art and popular imagery, but also the larger social and political context of the work.  He will study the life and work of Josef Breitenbach, a photographer whose images bring together the experimentation of Modernism, the psychoanalytic base of Surrealism and the tumultuous political landscape of the early 20th century.

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