Michael Wolf (1954-2019), a German artist and photographer, passed away on April 26, 2019. His amazing photography compressed space and dimensionality in a way that is beyond words. His work focusing on daily life in big cities and his disorienting buildings, particularly those in Hong Kong, are well described in the New York Times obituary, here
Diatrope Blog
Vision and Justice: The Racial Bias Built Into Photography
Recently, Sarah Lewis, a Harvard professor organized a two-day Vision and Justice conference on the role of the arts in relation to citizenship, race, and justice. As it turned out, she experienced some of this unconscious bias at this very event. Her essay exploring the relationship between racism and the camera, titled The Racial Bias Built Into Photography, was published by the New York Times on April 25, 2019.
At the conference, a technician categorizing light skin as the norm saw other skin tones as needing special corrective care. As Lewis, a black women, explains:
“My work looks at how the right to be recognized justly in a democracy has been tied to the impact of images and representation in the public realm. It examines how the construction of public pictures limits and enlarges our notion of who counts in American society. It is the subject of my core curriculum class at Harvard University. It also happened to be the subject of my presentation that day.”
What stands out in her article is how she interweaves a personal example of the how unconscious bias is built into photography, (and I would add life itself) into the larger culture. In a nut shell, she asks: “What is preventing us from correcting the inherited bias in camera and film technology?” Continue reading “Vision and Justice: The Racial Bias Built Into Photography”
CFP: American Art and Visual Culture Seminar
CALL FOR PROPOSALS:
Submission Deadline: Monday, June 3, 2019
The Newberry Seminar in American Art and Visual Culture is open to those working in the art history and visual culture of the United States, from the colonial era to the present. They are inviting papers that cross and challenge borders both within and outside the discipline that engage questions of methodology and ideology, examine exhibition and provenance history, probe the categories of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, and reflect critically on the state and outlook of the field.
They also welcome topics focusing on Chicago art and design within the larger national and international contexts, such as: thematic studies on world’s fairs, Chicago’s Gilded Age, institutional/private/corporate display practices, urban landscapes, African-American art past and present, and self-taught artists.
Flyer about the seminar
More information: scholarlyseminars@newberry.org
Submit a proposal at https://www.newberry.org/seminar-proposal-form
Continue reading “CFP: American Art and Visual Culture Seminar”
OPPORTUNITY: Jackson Wild Media Lab (JWML) Cross-disciplinary science filmmaking workshop
Deadline: May 6
The Jackson Wild Media Lab (JWML) is an immersive, cross-disciplinary science filmmaking workshop that brings scientists and media creators together to learn from leaders in the profession and work together to develop effective tools to communicate about science, nature and conservation with diverse audiences across the world’s evolving media platforms.
This highly competitive program will accept up to 16 domestic and international participants, covering all expenses associated with travel, food and lodging during the workshop and the 2019 Jackson Wild Summit (September 21-27, 2019).
Notre Dame Cathedral Reconstruction
An American art historian, Andrew Tallon, a late professor of art at Vassar College, created a spatial map of Notre Dame using more than a billion laser-measured points in an effort to better understand how medieval Gothic architecture was built. His digital model will immensely aid restoration efforts because it details precisely what the church looked like before the fire’s destruction. This painstakingly project, performed in 2015, offers a perfect digital replica of the Gothic structure that could help architects and engineers rebuild it after the April 15-16, 2019 fire.
Exhibition: “Small Steps, Giant Leaps: Apollo 11 at Fifty”
Exhibition: “Small Steps, Giant Leaps: Apollo 11 at Fifty”
April 30-August 3rd, 2019
Marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Combines works from Houghton’s history of science collections, including first editions of Copernicus, Newton, and Galileo, with highlights on loan from a private spaceflight collection, including materials used in the Apollo mission and on the lunar surface.
The exhibition is accompanied by a commemorative catalog which focuses on the loaned items only and is also available for free online here.
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SCHILLER, G: Iconography of Christian Art (Volumes I and II)
Gertrud Schiller. Iconography of Christian Art (Volumes I and II). Lund Humphries, 1972. A few pages have highlighting. Also pencil checks, asterisks, and brackets in some margins. One volume has a marked out name on front end page. Both volumes in dust jackets. Good in good dust jacket. Hardcover. (#29884) (Out of Stock) Continue reading “SCHILLER, G: Iconography of Christian Art (Volumes I and II)” |
Thinking 3D: From Leonardo to the Present
For centuries, artists and scientists have wrestled with how to convey three-dimensional objects on the page. Using some of the Bodleian Libraries’ finest books, manuscripts, prints and drawings, Thinking 3D tells the story of the development of three-dimensional communication over the last 500 years.
The exhibition shows how new techniques, developed from the Renaissance onwards, revolutionized the way that ideas in the fields of anatomy, architecture, astronomy and geometry were relayed and ultimately how this has influenced how we perceive the world today. Timed to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci, the exhibition shows how Leonardo and his contemporaries made great strides in the realistic depiction of 3D forms. Thinking 3D explores technological advances up to the present day including 3D modelling, photography and stereoscopy; and also highlights the works of modern practitioners and researchers in Oxford.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a range of other exhibitions and events across Oxford in 2019 as part of the Thinking 3D research project.
For more information, see: https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/news/2019/mar-5
New Publication: Essential Mysteries in Art and Science (Trudy Myrrh Reagan)
Myrrh (AKA Trudy Myrrh Reagan), with her bright circular abstractions, “portholes into the unknown,” interprets a dozen different realms of science. In her new book, Essential Mysteries in Art and Science, she elaborates on the science behind the paintings in a dozen well- researched essays about these realms.
The friendly aspect of this book is its visual appearance. The first section is an art book, presenting Myrrh’s Essential Mysteries series of vivid paintings. The second section is a charming personal account of the artist’s encounter with science, illustrated with her other science-related works, together with many small illustrations that support points in the essays.
This has been Myrrh’s 50-year project. She began as a “newbie” married to a physicist, picking out patterns in nature to use in her work. She soon fastened onto the powerful ideas in science, those that define the outlines of the cosmos in which we live. “As I changed, so did science,” she says halfway through the book. It includes several sections on the explosion of interest, beginning in the late 1980s, in complex, dynamic, and chaotic phenomena. As well, she explores questions under investigation and those that are simply enigmas. In an age where cultural ideas and branches of sciences themselves are silos that do not communicate well, hers is an account that gracefully relates them all.
$45.00 + tax and shipping, available at http://www.myrrh- art.com/gift shop or directly from the artist at trudy@myrrh-art.com.
Review of A Different Kind of Animal: How Culture Transformed Our Species
Reviewed by Amy Ione, March 2019
Published: Leonardo Reviews
A Different Kind of Animal is based on two lectures Robert Boyd delivered in 2016 at Princeton University as a part of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values series. In these lectures Boyd introduces his theory that biology and culture are both evolutionary, a topic he’s been working on with Peter Richerson for three decades. Needless to say, this is a broad topic, a point brought home by the four Responses to the lectures also included in the volume. All four commentators endorse the contours of Boyd’s theory and their critiques also raise valid questions: Is Boyd too reductive? Does Boyd’s view of social learning and cooperation rely too much on copying others? Does he adequately define the ways that norms arise and change? Is he ignoring how individuals manipulate norms?
At the beginning of the book Boyd points out that his lectures are about human uniqueness and cumulative cultural adaptation, not the inventive capacities of individuals. He writes:
“We are much better at learning from others than other species are, and equally important, we are motivated to learn from others even when we do not understand why our models are doing what they are doing. This psychology allows human populations to accumulate pools of adaptive information that greatly exceed the inventive capacities of individuals. Cumulative cultural evolution is critical for human adaptation.” (p. 16)
Continue reading “Review of A Different Kind of Animal: How Culture Transformed Our Species”