Recent Art History Department faculty activities

• Paul Wilson’s "Performance, Institutional Critique and the Museum" class took a fieldtrip to the Johnson Museum at Cornell two see the installations Fat Cakes and Myopic Voids by Carl Ostendarp. The artist and Andrea Inselmann, the curator of contemporary art, talked about the process of working together on the project in which the artist acted as a curator. Paul also attended the College Art Association meeting in Los Angeles, listening to papers on happenings, performance art, and locative media art. Additionally, he visited several of the “Pacific Standard Time” exhibitions on post-war art in Los Angeles being held at museums across the region and made his own pilgrimage to The Great Wall of Los Angeles.

• On a recent trip to New York City, Stephen Clancy visited saw three special exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art: the Cindy Sherman retrospective, which brings together more than 170 photos of the artist in a number of different guises; "Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art," which provides a rich context for a set of "portable murals" the artist created for specifically a show that ran at MoMA almost eighty years ago; and "Foreclosure: Rethinking the American Dream," a fascinating look at how ideas about housing and civic infrastructure might be imaginatively reconceived at five different urban and suburban sites across the country.

• Gary Wells is the listed co-author with Michael Haaf, Department of Chemistry, of a paper titled "A Chemistry and Art Course for Non-Science Majors at Ithaca College, to be presented at the PittCon 2012 Conference in Orlando, Florida, in March.

• Jennifer Jolly presented at the annual College Art Association Conference in Los Angeles. Her paper, "Seeing Pátzcuaro, Imagining Mexico: Art, Tourism, and the Reintegration of Postrevolutionary Mexico" was part of a series of conference panels and events on the theme of Culture and Tourism. While in Los Angeles, Jennifer visited Judy Baca's newly restored mural, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, and received a tour from one of the muralists (Martha Ramírez) who coordinated with Baca on the mural's restoration. Jennifer teaches the Great Wall in her classes on Latino Art in the US and Art and Activism.

• Stephen Clancy will be serving as the Study Leader on an educational tour conducted by the American Museum of Natural History in May. The tour, which is entitled "Venice, its Sea Empire & the Medieval World," will begin in Venice and end in Cyprus, and will visit ancient and medieval sites in Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Greece, and Turkey along the way.

• Nancy Brcak is beginning a research project on the political cartoons of Carey Orr, the renowned Chicago Tribune graphic artist whose World War II work (and pre-war isolationist images) are among the most revealing of all American political images of that era.

• In November 2011, Professor Itohan Osayimwese and students in ARTH 30100 Architectural Design I worked with Sustainability Coordinator Marian Brown and members of a new student group, the Bomber Bike Initiative, to design and build a mobile information kiosk. The kiosk, which was built using discarded materials found on campus and lit with energy from photovoltaics, was placed on the Academic Quad during the first week of November. Members of the Bomber Bike Initiative “tabled” the college community from the kiosk in an effort to promote bike usage on campus. The project was described in the November 17 issue of The Ithacan. The kiosk has since been used for other sustainability-related activities on campus.

• Jennifer Jolly gave a paper titled "Pátzcuaro desde lo alto: el muralismo, el turismo y una nueva forma de ver durante el Cardenismo,"at the conference El Tercer Encuentro de Pintura Mural, in Guanajuato, México, in November 2011.

• In October 2011, Itohan Osayimwese, together with faculty and staff in the Art History Department, inaugurated the architectural studies major with a series of events including a careers forum, guest speaker, and display of student work. The Handwerker Gallery hosted an architecture-related exhibition, “The Rise of A Landmark: Lewis Hine and the Empire State Building” (October 27–December 16) as part of the celebration.

• Paul Wilson completed a manuscript titled “What’s the Time in Vyborg? The Counter-Restoration of a Functionalist Monument” for the architectural preservation journal Future Anterior. His chapter “Esko Männikkö’s Global Particularities” in the Finnish book Pohjan Tähdet [Northern Stars] will be published this autumn. The book includes essays by a number of scholars on the globalization of contemporary art in Finland.