The Engaged Art History Event Series features a range of conversations, presentations, and workshops.
What’s Next:
Art and Empathy in the Aesthetic Encounter
A presentation and discussion with Gregory Blair Friday, March 29, 2024. 12-1pm EDT – online via Zoom
Experiencing a work of art can be thought of as entering a dialogue. The exchange with an artwork is somewhat distinct from other dialogues because it most often does not include speech acts or verbal interaction. What potential impact does this dialogue have on the viewer?
The exchange that arises contains elements of the polyphony and heteroglossia discussed in Bakhtin’s concept of dialogical interplay. To detail the nature of the non-verbal exchange in the aesthetic encounter and further tease out one of its critical outcomes, Blair draws upon Derrida’s reassessment of Levinas’s theory of encountering the face of the other and Bakhtin’s notion of the “sideways glance.” Both concepts demonstrate how experiencing art can be “an activity that gives things a face.” When confronted with the face of the other as in the presentation of an artwork, we are thrown into an interruption of the self. This interruption holds the potential of an ethical moment as we are opened to the world of the other and experience an awakening of responsibility for the other. As Bakhtin would argue, the aesthetic encounter is one that “joins self and other.” Not only does this awakening dismantle the traditional subject/object divide, according to Levinas, this new consciousness urges us into “ways of being that are different from impassive contemplation.”
While theoretically interesting, this discussion has a practical application in the classroom. Blair will discuss how these ideas are incorporated into some class projects, but also how they inform his overall pedagogy for teaching art history.
Originally from Red Deer, Canada, Gregory Blair is an artist, writer, educator, and activist that resides in Evansville, Indiana with his wife, two children, and their wildly energetic dog. Blair is an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at the University of Southern Indiana where he teaches contemporary art history, digital design, and gender studies courses. Blair has exhibited his artwork and presented his research both nationally and internationally. Blair’s current book project, What Punk Taught Me, will be published by Vernon Press in 2025. Blair has also had the good fortune to hang out with the Guerilla Girls for an entire day.
How do you get individuals to engage with each other about art? And more specifically, how do you do that in ways that cultivate empathy and understanding? This session explored these questions and more through group discussion sparked by brief presentations from Laura Holzman (Indiana University Indianapolis) and Justine Andrews (University of New Mexico).
A contemporary concern for many museum professionals and art historians is how to build meaningful relationships as well as engage in challenging conversations with audiences, communities, and students. In this talk, Dr. Megan Arney Johnston shares the process of Slow Curating, a reflective framework that embraces polyvocality, human connection, and place-based, contextual exhibition making. Join us as she considers the tenants of Slow Curating and shares several case studies that demonstrate its potential value as a socially engaged approach.
Dr. Megan Arney Johnston is an independent curator, educator, and museologist based in Minneapolis/St Paul area and Belfast, Northern Ireland (UK/IRE). Currently a Professor of Practice at several universities, her book Slow Curating: A Handbook for Socially Engaged Curatorial Practices, will be published by Routledge, UK – Heritage and Museum Studies in 2024.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is a new art museum under construction in Los Angeles, founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson. Anticipated to open in 2025, its exhibitions and collection focus on “narrative art,” a term that first appeared in the mid-1960s but that describes a central function of much of the world’s art. At a time when many sectors have undergone a “storytelling turn,” this session of the Engaged Art History series will explore how the construct of narrative art can rigorously expand art historical discourse and museum practice.
Nenette Luarca-Shoaf is Managing Director of Learning and Engagement at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. She was previously the director of adult learning and associate curator of interpretation at the Art Institute of Chicago and holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Delaware in the art and visual culture of the United States. She has taught undergraduate and graduate students at Ursinus College and the School of the Art Institute and held fellowships at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Advanced Study, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the St. Louis Art Museum.
This presentation contends that art history fosters forms of shared experience with profound ontological value that challenge the alienation, intellectual routinization, and shallow commodification of contemporary society. Philosophers of aesthetics have long probed the experiential nature of viewing art, but little has been written about the experience of art history. By briefly considering how even traditional frameworks of art history and aesthetic philosophy may serve to articulate the nature of art-historical experience, this paper highlights art-historical conversation as fertile ground for radical empathy between viewers of artworks.
Kerry Boeye received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2010. He is an associate professor at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore, where he teaches a wide range of courses on medieval, Islamic, and African American art, as well as courses in aesthetics and museum studies. His research focuses upon English and French manuscripts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but he has also published co-authored articles on art history pedagogy and a twelfth-century Italian altar frontal. Currently he is working on a survey of western medieval illustrations of the Solomonic books of the Bible.
This informal talk will address the process of developing and leading a project-based course involving multiple types of partners. In fall 2022 the Museum Studies Program at Indiana University IUPUI launched a collaboration with the Museum of Broken Relationships to develop The Museum of Broken Relationships Indianapolis, a crowd-sourced exhibit about love, loss, and growth that will open at the Herron Galleries at IUPUI and sites around Indianapolis in February 2023. Blurring the ostensible boundaries between research, teaching, and service, the project involves multiple courses, each of which includes a constellation of partners within and beyond the university. Focusing on her fall 2022 Curatorial Practices course, one part of the larger project, Laura Holzman will identify the types of partners, explain how the work and relationships developed, show how they connect with student learning activities, and reflect on the products and processes of the layered collaborations. There will be ample time for discussion.
This event is an open-ended conversation intended to provide those interested in engaged art history the opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals. Come to ask questions, get feedback, or simply reconnect at the start of the semester. See you there!
Since antiquity, walls have been sites for decoration, for mobilizing political action, and for coalescing community. More recently, murals (and other forms of public art) have become integral to the urban process of gentrification in major cities, offering pleasant decorative filler in spaces that were formerly seen as ‘abandoned.’ How do these sites animate local histories, erase or create collective memory, and ignite change? During the spring of 2020, students and faculty at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH partnered with the urban planning and public art non-profit LAND Studio to pursue these questions. The case study discussed in this talk emerged from this community-partnered course and quickly blossomed into a larger Public Humanities project. At its core, Painting on Walls explores what happens when we take up the “gritty spadework of community activism” (Cooper 2014) in the context of Art History—a discipline still deeply mired in colonialist discourses and largely confined to academic and museum settings. Weaving together history, theory, and practice, Painting on Walls asks us to consider what art history (and the humanities writ large) can do for society.
Erin Benay is associate professor of early modern art at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of three books and numerous articles, including Italy by Way of India: Translating Art and Devotion in the Early Modern World (Brepols / Harvey Miller, 2021). Benay works closely with Cleveland nonprofit organizations to build community-engaged art historical curricula and programs.
In April 2021, a group of interested individuals met for two days to consider engaged art history as a set of practices. A year later, engaged art historical projects are thriving, a new website (engagedarthistory.org) has recently been launched, and its practices are becoming more common. Join us in a conversation about engaged art history as we launch a series of events devoted to expanding and supporting its practices. In this conversation led by Cindy Persinger and Azar Rejaie, we will discuss where this set of practices stands today as well as consider where things are headed. The engaged art history event series will consist of conversations, lectures, and workshops, and are intended to serve as a hub for those interested in engaged art history – in universities, in libraries, in museums, in the world.
Cindy Persinger and Azar Rejaie are long-time collaborators on the topic of socially engaged art history. Their collaborative efforts led to the first book on the subject, Socially Engaged Art History and Beyond: Alternative Approaches to the Theory and Practice of Art History, a volume of theoretical essays and case studies co-edited by Persinger and Rejaie and published in 2021. The volume includes contributions from an international array of art workers, including Persinger and Rejaie.
Persinger began thinking explicitly about the benefits of practicing a socially engaged art history in 2014, when she first explored its possibilities in a paper titled “Writing a Socially Engaged Art History,” which she presented at the 2014 annual SECAC meeting in Sarasota, Fl, for the Writing Art History: Past, Present, and Future, a panel dedicated to thinking about the ways art history is and could be practiced. Ideas generated from that panel led Persinger and Rejaie to co-organize a panel entitled Socially Engaged Art History the following year at the SECAC meeting in Pittsburgh, PA. Since 2015, Persinger and Rejaie have continued to organize panels devoted to engaged art history at various venues, including the Interventions in the Future of Art History Saturday Symposium at College Art Association (CAA) in 2017 and the Midwest Art History Society (MAHS) annual meeting in 2022. They also co-facilitated a workshop with Carolyn Butler Palmer for a virtual symposium on the topic held in spring 2021.
Dr. Cindy Persinger is Associate Professor of Art History at California University of Pennsylvania. In addition to her work on socially engaged art history, Persinger’s teaching and scholarship focus on art historiography as well as modern and contemporary art.
Dr. Azar Rejaie is Associate Professor of Art History in and Chair of the Department of Arts and Communication at the University of Houston – Downtown. Rejaie is a scholar of the Italian Renaissance.
The Engaged Art History Event Series is organized by Cindy Persinger (persinger@pennwest.edu) and Azar Rejaie (RejaieA@uhd.edu). If there’s a topic you’d like to discuss or see addressed at a future event, please reach out.
