Faculty Updates
Sampade Aranke published a dossier co-edited with Huey Copeland on Afropessimist Aesthetics for ASAP Journal. She will have an essay that will appear in the 14th transmission of Black One Shot (edited by Michael Gillespie and Lisa Uddin); and, a catalogue essay for The Barnes Foundation's upcoming exhibition Elijah Pierce's America (September 27, 2020–January 10, 2021).
Shiben Banerji received a Publication Grant for his forthcoming book Lineages of the Global City from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. This summer, Shiben participated in interdisciplinary conversations organized by the Indian School of Public Policy and the Institute for the Humanities at UIC on the role of the humanities and design in making cities more equitable in a time of crisis. And he received the Faculty of the Year Award in May 2020.
Delinda Collier just published Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa, Duke University Press, 2020. She is also currently serving as Interim Graduate Dean at SAIC.
James Elkins is working on the first year program, trying to find ways to integrate our required world art history survey into the studio classes. Does art history make better artists? If so, how? How much art theory should first-yeat students have? Does theory make better art? He is working at both ends of our curriculum, on first-year problems (teaching a section of 1001) and on advanced grad-level problems. He also just finished a book on the ways art history is written around the world, to be published next year in Germany.
David Getsy has a number of publications forthcoming this autumn, including an article on humor and performance art on Instagram (for ASAP/Journal), a conversation with the late Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks (“Outing Queer Fluxus” for PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art), an essay on melodrama and conceptual performance (for the Clyfford Still Museum), an autobiographical essay for the anthology Living and Sustaining a Creative Life, and a syllabus (co-authored with Che Gossett) on transgender issues in art history (for Art Journal). He is on leave this year to serve as the 2020-2021 Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art at the Freie Universität, Berlin. His exhibition The Gutter Art of Stephen Varble: Genderqueer Performance Art in the 1970s, Photographs by Greg Day is scheduled to travel to Chicago’s Iceberg Projects in March 2021.
Michael J. Golec was awarded an Exploratory Research Grant from the Hagley Museum & Library to support research for his project: "Icons of Expertise: A History of Technical Images and Thoughtful Consumption."
Seth Kim-Cohen was awarded an Andrew Mellon Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago with Leigh Claire La Berge and Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky. They will undertake a year-long research project entitled, "Economic Objects: Capitalism as Medium." His article, "Gnostics of the North, or Music to Recolonize Your Anxious Capitalist Dreams By" will be published in a special issue of Law Culture Text. As "names_of_music," he has produced five albums of original music since the pandemic began. All are available at namesofmusic.bandcamp.com. He was promoted to Full Professor, effective August 2020.
Jennifer Lee, at the invitation of Wu Hung and Wei-Cheng Lin, recently completed a Getty Visiting Lectureship in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago during their Spring Quarter 2020. She has been invited to speak at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco in the annual lecture series of the Society for Asian Art. The 2020 series theme is "Creation of a Modern Hero (or Villain)," and the organizers have asked Jenny to focus on Mao. In fall 2020, Jenny will contribute an article to "Shaping the Past," a Goethe Institut project in partnership with Monument Lab, on new research related to the systematic removal and relocation of Chiang Kai-shek and KMT memorials in Taiwan.
David Raskin reviewed MoMA's Donald Judd retrospective for The Burlington Magazine and was interviewed about Judd on the Art Insiders New York podcast. He is currently serving as an expert witness in legal proceedings concerning art and copyright issues.
Nora A. Taylor contributed an essay on the Vietnamese artist Nguyễn Trung for an upcoming monograph published in Singapore and will have an essay titled “Sedimented Acts: Southeast Asian Artists’ Engagements with History Through Performance,” in the journal Southeast of Now. She is also co-editor with Kevin Chua and Lucy Davis of “Uncontainable Natures: Southeast Asian Ecologies and Visual Culture,” special issue of Antennae: The Journal of Art and Nature. Her essay “Art at Home or in Exile: Where to Situate Hàm Nghi in the Annals of Vietnamese Art History?” will be published in a catalogue for an exhibition on the Artist/Emperor Hàm Nghi at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Nice in 2021.
Lisa Wainwright has a forthcoming article “The Decorative Arts as Found Object,” in the volume Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe, Seventeenth Century to Contemporary, eds. Imogen Hart and Claire Jones, London: Bloomsbury Press. (Forthcoming Fall 2020)
Mechtild Widrich published an opinion piece on the challenging situation of museums in the US in the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung in July 2020. She also joined a collaboration with the London Metropolitan University's new master program in Performance and Public Art. The special volume of Columbia University’s School of Architecture’s journal Future Anterior, “Ex Situ. On Moving Monuments”, which Mechtild co-edited and contributed to, finally came out in print. It is available for free on JStor.
Bess Williamson wrote the cover article for Metropolis Magazine's "Inclusion" issue, "Why Are There So Few Great Accessible Buildings?", reflecting on the state of accessible architecture 30 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
