Department of Art History

Museums are invaluable sites to learn through close encounters with material objects. Physically present, we get a sense of their scale, texture, weight, color, material, making process, and more. However, recent guidelines for remote learning have posed a challenge for the way we might experience objects in the museum. What does it mean to “visit” the museum virtually? And what kinds of online technologies might we now use to learn from objects in new ways?

Last quarter we focused on the image files in your archive—metadata is the other major component for maintaining a personal image archive. Art Historians deal with object metadata all the time, so this 90 minute workshop will open with a brief overview of cataloging resources as a way to level-up your metadata game. We’ll spend the majority of the session discussing three different potential platforms for managing your image archive, their pros and cons, and how the VRC can help collaborate.

How do you navigate the rights of artists—and the photographers who document their work—in your dissertation, articles, and/or forthcoming book project? This workshop will be an open forum to discuss attendees’ questions and concerns. Anne Young, Director of Legal Affairs and Intellectual Property at Newfields, will discuss copyright related to art history, architecture, and public art and work through student case studies. Please bring your questions to the workshop or submit them in advance for consideration!

This workshop will introduce easy methods for creating and/or customizing your own digital images, maps, or diagrams in Photoshop to illustrate original arguments. We’ll cover different workflows using a desktop and tablet, as well as other software options. Great for students looking to create simple reconstructions of sites, architecture, or objects. 

Please use this link to register for the workshop.

This workshop will build off of the basics covered in Workshop 1 (though not a prerequisite), looking specifically at personal photography of sites, architecture, or objects in an archive. We’ll go over editing colors specific to non-scanned images, and cover how to correct distortions and remove backgrounds.

Please use this link to register for the workshop.

This workshop will introduce photo-editing for images scanned from publications or downloaded from repositories. We’ll start with image editing basics including adjusting color, shadows, and highlights, stitching images together, and removing imperfections to set a foundation for taking your images to publication-quality. 

Please use this link to register for the workshop.

“Migrating Inventions: Brunelleschi's Dome and the East”

Dario Donetti, Collegiate Assistant Professor of Renaissance and Contemporary Architecture

Respondent: Persis Berlekamp, Associate Professor of Art History and the College, Affiliated Faculty in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

Brandon Sward, PhD Candidate, Sociology 

“How to make site specific art when sites themselves have histories: Whittier Boulevard as Asco’s El Camino Real”

Respondent: Adriana Obiols Roca, PhD Student, Art History 

"Calligraphy and Haptic Poetics in the Art of Ōtagaki Rengetsu"

Speaker: Professor Melissa McCormick (Professor of Japanese Art and Culture, Harvard University)

Discussant: Professor Chelsea Foxwell (Associate Professor of Art History and the College, The University of Chicago)

Hunnu Rock: Mongolian Metal and a Global Folk Metal Subculture

Speaker: Sophie Walker (PhD student, Joint program: Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Department of Cinema and Media Studies)

Discussant: Ethan Waddell (PhD student, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations)