NEWS RELEASE: Art History Association holds first Graduate Student Symposium

Contact: Liz Parr (parrelizabeth@hotmail.com)

On April 3, 2004, the Art History Association, a student organization affiliated with the Department of Art History, sponsored the first Art History Graduate Student Symposium with support from the Maude I. Kerns Endowment.

The AHA solicited abstracts on the theme “Here and Now, Then and When: The Visualization of Past, Present, and Future in Art and Architecture.” Keynote speaker David Turner, Director of the UO Art Museum, presented on the relationship between the curator and artist in the museum environment.

Three graduate students traveled from other universities to participate. Camile Silva from Louisiana State University presented “Museums: An Evolution of Form, Function, and Social Context.” Ed Schad from the Art Institute of Chicago presented “Historicism and Tim in the Work of Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman.” Marnin Young from University of California at Berkeley presented “Before Bergson: Slowness and Speed in 19^th-Century French Painting.”

Shannon Mudge, an Interdisciplinary Graduate Student at the University of Oregon presented a paper entitled “Approaching Visual Reconstruction as an Archaeological Tool: An Examination of the Roman Form in Virtual Reality.”

Three presenters were from the University of Oregon Art History Department and included Elizabeth Wages who presented “Frieze Frame: Athenian Ritual on the Parthenon Frieze,” Gayle Goudy Kochanski who presented “A Modern Indian Ruin: Le Corbusier’s Assembly Building in Chandigarh,” and Gail Gould, who spoke on, "Baroque Narratives: The History of the Temple Expressed in Architectural Decoration of Venetian Synagogues." Gould’s paper covered one aspect of the thesis research she undertook in Venice last fall under a travel grant sponsored by retired professor Mark Sponenburgh, who returned for the event. 

In attendance were over 80 students, faculty, and community members. The Art History Association is hoping this event will be an annual affair and are currently planning a symposium for spring 2005.