The School of Art at the University of Arkansas will host the 35th Annual Arkansas College Art History Symposium on March 6 - 7.
Established in 1990 by Dr. Floyd Martin (UA, Little Rock) and Dr. Gayle Seymour (UCA), the symposium is meant to recognize and encourage original art historical and interdisciplinary research on art, visual culture, and architecture from any historical period and geographical focus by students from the state.
This year’s symposium includes an exciting line-up of presentations by undergraduate students from our university and across Arkansas, including the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, the University of Central Arkansas, the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith, Harding University, and Hendrix College.
The fifteen-minute presentations, organized into five panels, will be held at the Fine Arts Center (FNAR), and focus on painting, ceramics, sculpture, printmaking, photography, architecture, and cinema. Through an engagement with art historical and critical methods, they address matters related to the art historical canon, the archive, collections, and issues such as race, gender, Indigeneity, the economy, power, and difference.
A keynote lecture at this year’s symposium will be delivered by Prof. Jennifer Jane Marshall, a Samuel Russell Endowed Professor of Art History at the University of Minnesota. Prof. Marshall’s talk, drawn from her ongoing book project, will be on the work of William Edmondson, a self-taught sculptor active in Nashville in the 1930s and ’40s and best remembered as the first Black artist to anchor a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Keynote
About Dr. Marshall
Jennifer Jane Marshall is a Samuel Russell Endowed Professor of Art History at the University of Minnesota, where her research focuses on the art and visual/ material culture of the United States, from the late nineteenth century to World War II. Her work centers on questions related to making, materiality, sculpture, and museum display; and she is the author of Machine Art, 1934 (University of Chicago Press, 2012), winner of the Dedalus Foundation’s Robert Motherwell Book Award. Dr. Marshall has published in American Art, the Art Bulletin, and Winterthur Portfolio; and she was a founding editor of the journal Panorama. She is at work on a book about William Edmondson, a self-taught sculptor active in Nashville in the 1930s and ’40s and best remembered as the first Black artist to anchor a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
About the lecture
William Edmondson's Boxers: The Lives of Artworks
One of two known works by the artist to depict a fighter, William Edmondson's Boxer made headlines in 2016 when it sold at Christie's for $785,000. It was the most money ever spent on a work made by a so-called outsider artist in the U.S., and press coverage of the sale mostly focused on Edmondson's life story. Called to art-making late in life by God, Edmondson taught himself how to sculpt human, animal, and religious forms out of limestone scrap. He was a Black man living in segregated Nashville and, as taste-makers put it when he rose to prominence during the Great Depression, he had "probably never seen a sculpture except his own." But if art-world interest in Edmondson has always centered narrowly on his life story, works like his pair of boxers should expand our view. This talk will explore the many lives that intersect in these artworks--from Joe Louis to Jack Johnson, from a Klansman to a dandy, from a bride to an art collector--in order to consider how Edmondson's sculpture defies the medium's traditional association with individualism.
Agenda
Below is a brief listing of events taking place during the symposium. For the latest agenda and details, click the link below.
| Thursday March 6 |
Organized tour of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art Student Panels Welcome Reception Keynote Lecture by Dr. Jennifer Jane Marshall |
| Friday March 7 |
Breakfast Student Panels Lunch Student Panels Coffee Closing Remarks |
Register
Register using the link below and stay tuned here and on our social media for more updates.