Art & Art History News - August 23, 2022

We are excited to welcome Graham Oddie as Department Chair.

Graham, a philosopher, fell in love with the discipline while an undergraduate at the University of Otago (in New Zealand). He went on to do a PhD at the University of London—on the subject of closeness to the truth, or truthlikeness—and after completion he returned to the University of Otago as an Assistant Professor, moving a few years later to be Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Massey University. After seven years of chairing that department he moved to CU Boulder (1994), where he also served as Chair (1997-2002), and then as divisional dean for Humanities and the Arts (2002-2010). As the dean who oversaw Art and Art History (and the Art Museum) he developed a warm appreciation for their crucial role in the study, preservation and creation of art, as well as the training of the next generation of art scholars and art makers. As dean, he was privileged to be a member of the team that oversaw the planning and building of the new Visual Arts Complex. Oddie’s interests in philosophy are broad—from formal logic to philosophy of art. After leaving the Dean’s office he has taken a strong interest in fostering and reviving the philosophy of art in the Department, and as part of that effort, he has regularly taught an upper-division class in Aesthetic Theory.

cam nelson joins Art History! 

crystal am nelson is an assistant professor of art history whose research and teaching focuses on Black art and Black visual culture(s) as articulated through painting, photography, film/video, and performance. Her other interests include identity and representation, critical pleasure studies, and contemporary Black life. Her current project examines the visual culture of Black pleasure and the aesthetics of Black joy and safe space in the visual representations of quotidian Blackness as depicted by the painters labeled by Thelma Golden as the Black romantic. Professor nelson’s writing has appeared in Feminist Media Histories, Contact Sheet, Brooklyn Rail, caa.reviews, among other places. She has an essay in A Picture Gallery of the Soul, the catalogue (University of California Press, forthcoming fall 2022) for the exhibition which opens at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota in September 2022. Alongside her research and teaching, Professor nelson has organized and co-organized several exhibitions including Heterotopia, Dark Desires, and Pictures and Progress: The Black Panther, 1966-2016 (with Drs. Cathy T. Thomas and Kiran Garcha).

Before coming to CU Boulder, Professor nelson was a Just Transformations Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in African American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She received her PhD and MA in visual studies from UC Santa Cruz and her MFA in photography from San Francisco Art Institute.

This semester cam will be teaching two new art history courses: The Black Female Body (a graduate seminar) and Special Topics in Art History:  Black Art in America

Brianne Cohen has been awarded an American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship. With this fellowship, she will be on sabbatical during AY 2022-2023 to work on her new book, “The Empathic Lens: Contemporary Art, Ecology, and Kinship in Southeast Asia.” This project focuses on lens-based artwork in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Singapore that envisions ecological kinship through emotional charge and a critical awareness of Indigenous cosmologies of human-nature connectedness. Such artwork advocates border-crossing empathy and the prevention of socio-environmental violence.

In June, Anna Tsouhlarakis joined the Board of Directors for the Harpo Foundation. The foundation is dedicated to supporting “emerging and under-recognized visual artists. Through grants and residency programs, the foundation seeks to stimulate creative inquiry and encourage new modes of making and thinking about art.”

“Air” is a new exhibition at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) that makes the invisible visible, through visual art that explores how air connects us to each other and to the planet. On view Saturday, July 16-Sunday, December 11. The exhibition is comprised of work by Kim Abeles, Ai Weiwei, Naomi Bebo, Elisabeth Bunker, Virginia Catherall, Nicholas Galanin, Graviky Labs, Ed Kosmicki, Merritt Johnson, Julianknxx, Michael Rakowitz, Daan Roosegaarde and Studio Roosegaarde, Cara Romero, Diego Romero, Anna Tsouhlarakis, Will Wilson, and local community members. The exhibit was recently featured in the High Country News.

How a Sculptor Made an Art of Documenting Her Life 
Published in the New Yorker (June 15, 2022)

Artists and writers have turned to Anne Truitt’s diaries for a way forward. In “Yield,” her final journal, the Minimalist iconoclast looks back.

The artist Anne Truitt began keeping a journal in 1974, at fifty-three, after retrospectives of her work at the Whitney Museum and the Corcoran Gallery of Art left her feeling “crazed,” she wrote, “as china is crazed, with tiny fissures.” Seeing her sculptures again—all together at once, exposed to public view—she was faced with the “reactivation of feelings” she had sought to contain within them. Keeping a journal became a way to integrate her identity as an artist alongside her roles as a mother and breadwinner—after her divorce, in 1971, from the journalist James Truitt, she took on financial responsibility for their three children. Journalling also allowed her to refine her sense of purpose in making art, or what she describes as “the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.” — Read more — 

Volumes
August 19, 2022 – September 25, 2022
Lane Meyer Projects (https://www.lanemeyerprojects.com/)

A two-person exhibition by Marina Kassianidou and Maia Ruth Lee. The body’s relationship to language is the focus for works in the exhibition, with each artist interpreting the subtleties of marks, impermanence, and poetics stemming from the ever-evolving concept of language.

geometric frustrations
August 25 – October 28, 2022
east window SOUTH (https://eastwindow.org/)

A solo exhibition by Marina Kassianidou. The exhibition revolves around a series of drawings on crumpled graph paper. The act of crumpling paper and recording its creases becomes a meditation on how we attempt to organize and represent space and place. Part of the Environmental Futures initiative at the University of Colorado Boulder with funding and support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and NEST Studio for the Arts.

Receptacles of Memories

Lara Mashayekh speaks with artist Albert Chong and scholar Marci Kwon about the role of the archive and mysticism, their lived experiences as professionals in the art world, and their forthcoming endeavors.

Link to read the full interview in the Gagosian Quarterly

Madeline Sturm, recent BFA printmaking graduate at CU Boulder, will be attending The University of Alberta for her MFA in printmaking this upcoming year. Her work has focused on using birds to tell stories and represent family relationships

Accepted a Visiting Assistant Professor position at the University of Texas in Tyler. 

Amy recently took a position as an Arts Specialist for the City of Boulder. She will be providing project management and program support to the Office of Arts and Culture's Public Art Program.