Handwerker Gallery Series to Feature Art Historian

An art critic and historian will be the first speaker of the spring in the Handwerker Gallery Critical Forum series. Michael Ann Holly, chair of the Department of Art and Art History and professor of art history/visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester, will discuss "Art History as Melancholy" at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, February 4. Her talk at the gallery is free and open to the public.

Holly’s scholarly interests include art historiography and criticism; the intellectual history of the history of art; and ancient, medieval, and Renaissance art. She is the editor of The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspectives, published last year by Cambridge University Press, as well as Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation and Visual Culture: Images and Interpretation. She is the author of the books Iconography and Iconology, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image, and Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History.

Among Holly’s awards are two National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute grants, an American Council for Learned Societies grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1996–97 she was an Ailsa Bruce Mellon Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and in 1998 she was codirector of the Getty Summer Institute on Visual and Cultural Studies, which she will codirect again this summer.

Holly says her talk will "explore some of the ways in which art historical narrative might be construed as a response to the paradox of writing about an absent past through the material presence of works of art. The very materiality of the objects with which we deal presents historians of art with an interpretative paradox absent in other historical inquiries," she notes, "for the works are both lost and found, both present and past, at the same time."

Jelena Stojanovic, director of the Handwerker Gallery, hopes these talks will help create a challenging environment that enhances critical understanding of both art production and art consumption. "The forum aims to expose the different strategies used to produce images, thereby helping art history students and the larger community become perceptive critics," she says.

For more information, call 274-3018 or 274-3548.