The Arts at the University of Virginia is dedicated to building on innovative research and fostering inspired expression that equips us for the future.
by Christopher Tilghman The Right-Hand Shore (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; April 2012)
Read about Ted Coffey and his work with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company on Story/Time NYT > & Boston.com >
Judith Shatin named one of the Virginia Women in History 2012More>
Chris Tilghman's The Right-Hand Shore is getting rave reviews!! More>
Check out Michael Puri's newest: Ravel the Decadent; Memory, Sublimation, and DesireMore>
New review for Jennifer Farrell's Get There First, Decide PromptlyMore>
H. Caitlin McLeod, Assistant Professor, Department of Drama, awarded Mead Honored Teaching Fellow, 2012 - 2013
Richard Warner, Professor, Department of Drama, was invited to become an inaugural member of the University Academy of Teaching
Sarah Betzer Assistant Professor, Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century European Art
Ingres and the Studio: Women, Painting, History
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres has long been recognized as one of the great painters of the modern era and among the greatest portraitists of all time. Over a century and a half of scholarly writing on the artist has grappled with Ingres’s singular identity, his relationship to past and future masters, and the idiosyncrasies of his art. Ingres and the Studio: Women, Painting, History makes a unique contribution to this literature by focusing on the importance of Ingres’s training of students and the crucial role played by portraits—and their subjects—for Ingres’s studio and its developing aesthetic project. Rather than understanding the portrait as merely a screen onto which the artist’s desires were projected, the book insists on the importance of accounting for the active role of portrait sitters themselves. Through careful analysis of familiar and long-overlooked works, Ingres and the Studio traces a series of encounters between painters and portrait subjects in which women sitters—such as the artist Julie Mottez, art critic, salonnière, and historian Marie d’Agoult, and tragic actress Rachel—emerge as vital interlocutors in a shared aesthetic project.
"Archaeology Meets Fantasy: Chasseriau's Pompeii in Nineteenth-Century Paris" in Pompeii in the Public Imagination from its Rediscovery to Today Edited by Shelley Hales and Joanna Paul
"Marie d'Agoult: une critique d'art 'ingriste'" in Plumes et Pinceaux d’Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun à Johanna von Haza – L’art français vu par les Européennes (1750-1850) – Volume 2, Anthologie : journaux, mémoires, correspondances
by Sarah Betzer Ingres and the Studio
(Penn State University Press, April 2012)
Edited by Shelley Hales & Joanna Paul Pompeii in the Public Imagination from its Rediscovery to Today
(Oxford University Press, November 2011)
Daniel Bluestone Professor and Director of Historic Preservation Program
Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory: Case Studies in Historic Preservation
Exploring ten extraordinary places, this provocative analysis of historic preservation's past and future will transform contemporary understanding of the movement.
This book examines assumptions about why history, heritage, and place should matter. It ranges from a discussion of the commemoration of place in the Marquis de Lafayette's triumphal tour of the United States in 1824-25 to speculation about the cultural and political import of interpreting history on superfund toxic waste sites.
by Daniel Bluestone Buildings, Landscape, and Memory (New York: W.W. Norton, December 2010)
Bruce Boucher Director, University of Virginia Art Museum
The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the "Age of Discovery" to the Age of Abolition, Part 3: The Eighteenth Century Edited by David Bindman & Henry Louis Gates, Jr
In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.
The Eighteenth Century features a particularly rich collection of images of Africans representing slavery’s apogee and the beginnings of abolition. Old visual tropes of a master with adoring black slave gave way to depictions of Africans as victims and individuals, while at the same time the intellectual foundations of scientific racism were established.
Co-authored by Bruce Boucher The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III
(Harvard University Press, November 2011)
Sheila Crane Assistant Professor, Architecture
Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory: Case Studies in Historic Preservation
Examining Marseille as a significant center for the evolution of architectural and urban modernism
Drawing together a cast of architects, photographers, and cultural theorists, Mediterranean Crossroads examines how mythic ideas about Marseille helped shape its urban landscape. By exploring how architects and planners negotiated highly localized pressures, evolving imperial visions, and transnational aspirations at the borders of Europe and the Mediterranean region, Mediterranean Crossroads brings to life a lost chapter in the history of modern architecture.
On the Edge: The Internal Frontiers of Architecture in Algiers/Marseille Journal of Architecture, 16:6 (December 2011): 941–73.
by Shelia Crane Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture, (University of Minnesota Press. April 2011)
Daniel Ehnbom Associate Professor, South Asian Art
"Masters of the Dispersed Bhagavata Purana", in Masters of Indian Painting: 1100-1900 Beach, Milo; Fischer, Eberhard, Goswamy, B.N., editors; Britschgi, Jorrit, project director
This massive, two volume publication presents the greatest artists of India. Leading scholars around the globe have contributed to this comprehensive study which accompanies a large exhibition at the Museum Rietberg, Zürich (1 May – 21 August 2011) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (26 September 2011 – 8 January 2012). The two volumes with more than 840 pages and over 600 color illustrations are a substantial reference book for the study of Indian Painting.
Accompanying an exhibition that promises to be the most comprehensive survey of Indian painting that the West has ever seen, this beautiful twovolume catalogue spans 800 years of Indian painting, and some 240 masterpieces by more than 40 artists. These great Indian masters are unquestionably the equals of Du?rer, Michelangelo or Vermeer. The artworks shown in the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, and later at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, come from such outstanding collections as the Royal Collection of Windsor Castle, the Golestan Palace in Tehran or the Institute for Oriental Manuscripts in St Petersburg.
Submission by Daniel Ehnbom Masters of Indian Painting: 1100-1900
(Zürich: Artibus Asiae Publishers, Supplementum 48, I/II, 2011, volume 1, pp. 77-88)
Kevin Everson Associate Professor, Cinema and Performance
The Alpert Award in the Arts 2012 Winner
The Alpert Award in the Arts provides unrestricted, annual prizes of $75,000 to five engaged, independent artists working in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theatre and the visual arts. Initiated and funded by The Herb Alpert Foundation and administered by California Institute of the Arts, the Award rewards experimenters who are challenging and transforming art, their respective disciplines, and society.
Kevin Jerome Everson (b. 1965) works in film, painting, sculpture, and photography. His filmic fables, the focus of this exhibition, articulate the profound within the ordinariness of everyday life. Everson, who was born in the working-class community of Mansfield, Ohio, depicts details in the lives of people living and working in similar American communities: a mechanic repairing an old car in a backyard, a black beauty queen in a segregated pageant, men boxing, snowplow operators in winter, young men walking into a courtroom, the aftermath of a murder. Some of Everson’s films are constructed from appropriated news and film footage, uncovering forgotten details of African-American life in the 1960s and 70s. In other films, the artist explores the waxing and waning of a community’s sense of itself and the migration of black people from the South to the North in order to find work. Everson, whose work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, approaches race, sexuality, and economic circumstances with a poetic yet unflinching eye. Adopting the stance of an observer, his interest in labor has both a political and a formal aspect, exploring the relationship between the human body and the materiality of the labor it performs as both an expression of class and identity, and as a performative gesture. More Than That: Films by Kevin Jerome Everson is curated by Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator Chrissie Iles.
Kevin Jerome Everson (b.1965), production still from The Equestrians, 2011. Super 8 film, color and black-and-white, silent; 12 minutes. Image courtesy the artist and Picture Palace Pictures
Jennifer Farrell Curator of Exhibitions, University of Virginia Art Museum
Get There First, Decide Promptly: The Richard Brown Baker Collection of Postwar Art Jennifer Farrell; With essays by Thomas Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Jan Howard, Robert Storr, and Judith Tannenbaum
Richard Brown Baker (1912-2002) began collecting works by emerging artists in the 1940s, becoming one of the first collectors to embrace both Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. He eventually amassed a collection of more than 1,600 works from the postwar period, including works by such groundbreaking American artists as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Morris, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and James Rosenquist, as well as European and Asian artists such as Alberto Burri, Jean Dubuffet, Georges Mathieu, and Kurt Schwitters.
Baker bequeathed the majority of his collection to the Yale University Art Gallery, and the balance to the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. Highlighting 130 works, this is the first complete history of Baker's important collection. Essays by renowned art historians contextualize each of the five decades of Baker's collecting efforts, while entries on individual artists illustrate the remarkable scope of Baker's holdings. Throughout the publication, firsthand accounts from Baker's extensive personal journals describe his collecting activities within the dynamic New York art scene of the day.
by Jennifer Farrell Get There First, Decide Promptly
(Yale Univeristy Press, December 2011)
Maurie McInnis Professor, American Art and Material Culture
Associate Dean of Undergraduate Academic Programs
Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade
In 1853, Eyre Crowe, a young British artist, visited a slave auction in Richmond, Virginia. Harrowed by what he witnessed, he captured the scene in sketches that he would later develop into a series of illustrations and paintings, including the culminating painting, Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia.
This innovative book uses Crowe’s paintings to explore the texture of the slave trade in Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans, the evolving iconography of abolitionist art, and the role of visual culture in the transatlantic world of abolitionism. Tracing Crowe’s trajectory from Richmond across the American South and back to London—where his paintings were exhibited just a few weeks after the start of the Civil War—Maurie D. McInnis illuminates not only how his abolitionist art was inspired and made, but also how it influenced the international public’s grasp of slavery in America. With almost 140 illustrations, Slaves Waiting for Sale brings a fresh perspective to the American slave trade and abolitionism as we enter the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.
by Maurie McInnis Slaves Waiting for Sale
(University of Chicago Press, December 2011)
Louis Nelson Associate Professor, Architecture
Shaping the Body Politic: Art and Political Formation in the New Nation Edited by Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson
Traditional narratives imply that art in early America was severely limited in scope. By contrast, these essays collectively argue that visual arts played a critical role in shaping an early American understanding of the body politic. American artists in the late colonial and early national periods enlisted the arts to explore and exploit their visions of the relationship of the American colonies to the mother country and, later, to give material shape to the ideals of modern republican nationhood. Taking a uniquely broad view of both politics and art, Shaping the Body Politic ranges in topic from national politics to the politics of national identity, and from presidential portraits to the architectures of the ordinary.
The book covers subject matter from the 1760s to the 1820s, ranging from Patience Wright's embodiment of late colonial political tension to Thomas Jefferson's designs for the entry hall at Monticello as a museum. Paul Staiti, Maurie McInnis, and Roger Stein offer new readings of canonical presidential images and spaces: Jean-Antoine Houdon's George Washington, Gilbert Stuart's the Lansdowne portrait of Washington, and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. In essays that engage print and painting, portraiture and landscape, Wendy Bellion, David Steinberg, and John Crowley explore the formation of national identity. The volume's concluding essays, by Susan Rather and Bernard Herman, examine the politics of the everyday. The accompanying eighty-five illustrations and color plates demonstrate the broad range of politically resonant visual material in early America.
ContributorsWendy Bellion, University of Delaware * John E. Crowley, Dalhousie University * Bernard L. Herman, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill * Maurie D. McInnis, University of Virginia * Louis P. Nelson, University of Virginia * Susan Rather, University of Texas, Austin * Paul Staiti, Mount Holyoke College * Roger B. Stein, emeritus, University of Virginia * David Steinberg, Independent Scholar
Edited by Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson Shaping the Body Politic: Art and Political Formation in the New Nation (University of Virginia Press, 2011)
Deborah Parker Professor of Italian
Chair, Dept. of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
A Hymn to Intellectual Beauty: Creative Minds and Fashions A blog
One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art. Oscar Wilde
Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes. Henry David Thoreau
Two great thinkers positing two very different attidudes to dress. The choice is clear—we’re with Oscar Wilde. Taking its title from Shelley’s poem, this blog celebrates “intellectual beauty”— the style and dress of artists, composer, writers, and other creative people. The exuberant self-styling of figures such as Oscar Wilde and Salvador Dalí is well known, but the mode of dress favored by other artists has received little attention.
Why artist and writers? I want to debunk once and for all the notion that an interest in dress is frivolous, that one can’t be an intellectual and serious about clothes at the same time. To invoke Wilde again: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”
I seek to address this clichéd notion in two ways—through words and images. The words come from varied sources: the resplendent subjects themselves, biographers, and contemporay witnesses, many famous in their own right. When pronounced by the artists themselves, the remarks read like manifestoes. This is certainly the case with Mishima’s statements about body building and Louise Nevelson’s confession of how her lifelong interest in clothes affected the way she was seen by others.
The eloquence of the citations equals the power of the images. Refinement in dress inspires rapture. We look at the images of Byron and Poe more searchingly after reading Coleridge’s and Baudelaire’s comments about them. Taken together, these creative individuals form a peacock’s gallery who enahnced the world in which they lived embodying the idea of “intellectual beauty” at its finest.
Michael Puri Associate Professor, Department of Music
Ravel the Decadent Memory, Sublimation, and Desire
The music of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), beloved by musicians and audiences since its debut, has been a difficult topic for scholars. The traditional stylistic categories of impressionism, symbolism, and neoclassicism, while relevant, have offered too little purchase on this fascinating but enigmatic work. In Ravel the Decadent, author Michael Puri provides an innovative and productive solution by locating the aesthetic origins of this music in the French Decadence and demonstrating the extension of this influence across the length of his oeuvre. From an array of Decadent topics Puri selects three--memory, sublimation, and desire--and uses them to delineate the content of this music, pinpoint its overlap with contemporary cultural discourse, and link it to its biographical context, as well as to create new methods altogether for the analysis and interpretation of music.
"Ravel the Decadent represents an enormous advance in our understanding of both the composer's music and French musical culture following the fin-de-siècle, then in the throes of one of music's many modernisms. In a series of elegant and urbane reflections, Michael J. Puri dissolves our vague notions of the music's impressionism and neoclassicism into a much more meaningful engagement with its abiding sense of historical memory, its inclination to 'dwell in the past.' He grounds this in-dwelling in its thematic procedures, which form an intricate, mnemotechnical apparatus that mediates but also destructures our experience of the music: in moments of calm reflection, these processes disrupt the seamless aesthetic surface of the music, rendering it momentarily formless. It is to these moments, in which memory becomes music, that Puri encourages us to listen." --Brian Hyer, Professor of Music Theory, University of Wisconsin - Madison
"Puri's writing is elegant, clear, and engaging. His ear for musical detail, through close readings of works and intertextual reference, is always sure. He moves persuasively between critical theory and musical discussion, between context and aesthetics, in what surely ranks as not only one of the finest studies of Maurice Ravel ever written, but also a model for musical scholarship of early twentieth-century repertory in general." --Steven Huebner, Professor of Music, McGill University
By Michael Puri Ravel the Decadent
Memory, Sublimation, and Desire (Oxford University Press, February 2012)
Michael Rasbury Associate Professor, Sound Design Director, College Arts Scholars
Earth Recordings &
Sound Design Portfolio
Support for EarthRecordings.com was provided by the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia and was developed during my sesquicentennial leave. The purpose of this website is to expand my research as a sound designer through field recording. A primary goal of this endeavor is to explore HRTF sound recording.
Definition of Sound Design for the Theatre
The sound designer is a collaborative and conceptual artist that exploits the expressive possibility of sound by employing a synthesis of sound and music proficiency with technology to enhance a theatrical performance. Sound occurs ephemerally in the air and exists in time. It cannot be studied visually for an extended period of time (without recording equipment) in the way costumes, set pieces, or even lighting can. Sound is also difficult to describe in objective ways.
Azoy Tsu Tsveyt, the first release on Tzadik by one of the most celebrated and skilled clarinetists in the New Jewish Renaissance features Joel Rubin in a surprising and exciting new context—the fascinating and vibrant intersection between Jewish music and jazz. Joined by the versatile virtuoso Uri Caine on piano, they perform a freewheeling repertoire of Old and New World nigunim, cantorial music, klezmer classics and more. A fervent jazz fan since the age of nine, Joel shines like never before in this passionate meeting of modern Jewish masters.
Features compositions by Steve Greenman, Kal Opperman, Joel Rubin, Alicia Svigals and Kalmen Opperman, along with rethinkings of traditional klezmer tunes and hasidic nigunim.
"In the midst of an ancient ritual: The Clarinet in Klezmer Music" in The Posen Library of Jewish Civilisation and Culture, Vol. X Edited by Neil Levin | Series editors Deborah Dash Moore and James Young
(New Haven: Yale University Press: 2011)
By Joel Rubin and Uri Caine Azoy Tsu Tsveyt
(Tzadik CD 8163, New York 2011)
Judith Shatin William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor, Composition
Judith Shatin named one of the Virginia Women in History 2012. Library of Virginia honors women from Virginia who have made lasting contributions to their communities, the nation, and the world. Read more >
Work featured in Women of Influence in Contemporary Music: Nine American Composers Edited by Michael K. Slayton
In Women of Influence in Contemporary Music: Nine American Composers, Michael K. Slayton has collected essays, which focus on women who have made significant contributions to American music: Elizabeth Austin, Susan Botti, Gabriela Lena Frank, Jennifer Higdon, Libby Larsen, Tania Le-n, Cindy McTee, Marga Richter, and Judith Shatin. While these composers have much in common, not least of all dedication to their art, their individual stories reveal different impulses in American music. Their works reflect the shifting societal landscapes in the United States over the last seven decades, as well as different stylistic approaches to writing music. Each chapter includes a biography of the composer, an interview, and a detailed analysis of one major composition. The composers openly reflect on their individual journeys, in which they have discovered respective musical languages and have found success during different times in history. Because few music books focus solely on female composers, Women of Influence in Contemporary Music offers a rare glimpse into the styles and attitudes of gifted women and their work.
A setting of four psalms for female vocal quartet and harp, Selah was commissioned by the Scottish Voices, with conductor Graham Hair, and premiered by them in the Glasgow University Cathedral as part of the 7th International Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology in August, 2011.
Sic Transit
For percussion and 6 percussion robot arms created by EMMI, a company founded by U.Va. grad students, was commissioned for a concert celebrating the 70th anniversary of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and premiered there in March, 2011.
Composer-in-Residence Women Composers Festival of Hartford, Connecticut
March 7 - 10, 2012
Essay on Judith Shatin in Women of Influence in Contemporary Music: Nine American Composers (Scarecrow Press, 2011)
Howard Singerman Chair & Associate Professor, Contemporary Art and Theory
Art History, After Sherrie Levine
This book examines the career of New York-based artist Sherrie Levine, whose 1981 series of photographs “after Walker Evans”—taken not from life but from Evans’s famous depression-era documents of rural Alabama—became central examples in theorizing postmodernism in the visual arts in the 1980s. For the first in-depth examination of Levine, Howard Singerman surveys a wide variety of sources, both historical and theoretical, to assess an artist whose work was understood from the outset to challenge both the label “artist” and the idea of oeuvre—and who has over the past three decades crafted a significant oeuvre of her own. Singerman addresses Levine’s work after Evans, Brancusi, Malevich, and others as an experimental art historical practice—material reenactments of the way the work of art history is always doubled in and structured by language, and of the ways the art itself resists.
by Howard Singerman Art History, After Sherrie Levine (Univeristy of California Press, 2011 - 2012)
Chris Tilghman Professor and Director, Creative Writing Program
The Right-Hand Shore
It is 1920, and Edward Mason is making a call upon Miss Mary Bayly, the current owner of the legendary Mason family estate, the Retreat. Miss Mary is dying. She plans to give the Retreat to the closest direct descendant of the original immigrant owner that she can find. Edward believes he can charm the old lady, secure the estate and be back in Baltimore by lunchtime.
Instead, over the course of a long day, he hears the stories that will forever bind him and his family to the land. He hears of Miss Mary’s grandfather brutally selling all his slaves in 1857 in order to avoid the reprisals he believes will come with Emancipation. He hears of the doomed efforts by Wyatt Bayly, Miss Mary’s father, to turn the Retreat into a vast peach orchard, and of Miss Mary and her brother growing up in a fractured and warring household. He learns of Abel Terrell, son of free blacks who becomes head orchardist, and whose family becomes intimately connected to the Baylys and to the Mason legacy.
Review
Constructed, Wuthering Heights style, . . . The Right-Hand Shore represents an outing of some of America’s most troubled ghosts . . . Tilghman unfolds his harsh lesson with precision, delicacy and startling humor . . . The Right-Hand Shore is the dark, magisterial creation of a writer with an uncanny feel for the intersections of place and character in American history. His readers will want to hear more stories from the Eastern Shore estate. Let’s just hope he doesn’t keep us waiting for another 16 years. —Fernanda Eberstadt, New York Times Book Review
by Chris Tilghman The Right-Hand Shore (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; April 2012)
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