Subject: Lecture

Description: In conjunction with the 2013 Allen R. Hite Memorial Lecture, Professors Caroline Arscott and Jongwoo Jeremy Kim will hold a public conversation on Modern art, victorian science, and the body from 10-11am.

Subject: Art Exhibit

Description: In conjunction with the Symposium, an exhibit curated by the University of Louisville graduate students from the Hite Art Institute is on view in the first floor KMAC gallery. The exhibit examines and challenges the conventional and often arbitrary distinctions between fine art and craft. Local and national contemporary artists who employ media or techniques traditionally associated with “craft” are featured. Artists include Cheryl Donegan, Hui Chi Lee, Bette Levy, Norma Minkowitz, Jeff Ruemeli, Joyce Scott, Peter Voulkos, and Boris Zakic

Subject: Art Exhibit

Description: William Bailey is Professor of Art Emeritus at Yale University. He is a member of The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a Member of the Board, Smithsonian Archives of American Art from 2000 to the present. He is a trustee for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation from 1970 to the present. Bailey has an extensive exhibition history, and his works appear in numerous public and private collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; among many others. Bailey has shown in New York since the late 1960’s. In 2006 a traveling exhibition of works on paper was shown at the Philbroook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK, Alexander Hogue Gallery, University of Tulsa, OK and Wichita Art Museum, KS. This exhibition features over thirty works on paper, which highlight both of Bailey's signature still life and figurative styles and illuminate his distinctive color palette.

Subject: Lecture

Description: Arscott will deliver an Evening Lecture from 6-7 pm. This lecture discusses William Morris’s adoption of tapestry in the 1880s in terms of its allegorisation of the losses and gains of both historical and biological processes. Colour and its role in the natural world, as discussed in evolutionary theory provides a focus. The processes of tapestry itself, the movement of the shuttle and positioning of the weft and the gradual building up of the image are considered in relation to the prophetic mode deployed by Morris in the verses written on his tapestries published in his Poems By the Way of 1891. The lecture centres on the example of the tapestry The Woodpecker (1885, exhibited 1888) where Morris’s woodpecker motif refers to the story of Picus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The context of metamorphosis leads to a discussion of the woodpecker’s significance in that Victorian revisiting of metamorphosis, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. This is contextualised by a discussion of other Victorian theorisations of evolution and the evolutionary emergence of consciousness. The lecture discusses the morphology of form and the sequence of substitutions involved in sexual selection: the move from a reliance on the power of song to a recourse to instrumental music, and then a further move to the use of coloured display in creatures seeking an advantage in courtship. The declarative and the tacit aspects of Morris’s tapestry are addressed in order to assess the potential for the elaboration of grand themes in a form of art that seemingly abjures the grandiose theatre of human action.

Subject:

Description: Hazel Dodge, Louis Claude Purser Associate Professor in Classical Archaeology and Programme Co-Ordinator of Ancient and Medieval History and Culture in the Department of Classics, School of Humanitities and Histories at Trinity College, Dublin will present "Symbols of Victory and Colours of Power: Egyptian Stones for the City of Rome." Egypt, both the land and the culture, fascinated the Romans and once conquered furnished them with a whole array of resources, including stones for building and sculpture. The quarrying and use of stone had a very long tradition in Egypt, involving the transport of blocks 50-60 tons in weight over hundreds of miles. Red granite for the obelisks, such a characteristic type of Egyptian monument, was quarried by the pharaohs at Aswan in Southern Egypt. Obelisks were set up at sites all along the Nile valley, at Luxor, Karnak and Heliopolis. After the Roman conquest of Egypt, obelisks were the first large-scale physical pieces of Egypt to be transported to the imperial capital, where they were erected both as victory monuments and symbols of imperial ideology. Other stones shared in this ideology, in particular two stones which the Romans quarried in the Eastern Desert of Egypt the grey granite from Mons Claudianus and the purple porphyry Mons Porphyrites. This lecture will examine both the evidence from the quarries in Egypt and the effects of this phenomenon on the city of Rome. It will also examine the legacy of this practice in more recent times.