NEWSEVENTS

Faculty News and Events

Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation
ARTS WRITERS GRANT PROGRAM
Announces 2007 Grants to Liz Kotz

The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program is pleased to announce its second round of grants. Designed to encourage and reward writing about contemporary art that is both intellectually rigorous and broadly accessible, the program aims to strengthen the field as a whole and to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging the visual arts. Representing a broad range of genres from scholarly studies to investigative journalism, the sixteen selected projects are united by their dual commitment to the craft of writing and the advancement of critical discourse on contemporary visual art.

Liz Kotz: In a Large Open Space (Article)
Liz Kotz's essay considers the July 2006 performance of composer James Tenney's 1994 composition In a large open space, which was held in a cold storage warehouse on the semi-industrial outskirts of downtown Los Angeles. Tenney, who died a year ago at the age of 72, was perhaps the last of the "American maverick" composers of the post-World-War-II era. Arguing for the need to recover the rich legacy of experimental sound-based practices such as Tenney's for contemporary art and culture, Kotz's text will look back at his groundbreaking works of the 1960s and the larger impact of experimental music on the visual arts and forward to the fragile position and crucial value of such difficult and resolutely non-commercial work in today's market-driven art world.
Liz Kotz is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art at the University of California, Riverside. Her most recent book is Words to be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (MIT Press, 2007). She was co-editor with Eileen Myles of the book The New Fuck You (Semiotexte, 1994). Her article "Sound in Space" is forthcoming in Max Neuhaus, edited by Lynne Cooke (Dia Art Foundation, 2008).

The Department of the History of Art is pleased to announce the appointments of three new faculty members:

Malcolm Baker, Ph.D. (University of Edinburgh) was appointed as Eminent Scholar and Distinguished Professor of the History of Art. Baker joins UCR from University of Southern California, where he was chair of the Department of Art History and director of the USC-Getty Program in the History of Collecting & Display. He has written widely on the history of sculpture, the decorative arts and the history of collecting. Among his books are Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument: Sculpture as Theatre, co-authored with David Bindman and awarded the 1996 Mitchell Prize for the History of Art, and Figured in Marble: The Making and Viewing of the Eighteenth-Century Sculpture. In 2007-08, he will be a Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library where he will write his new book, The Marble Index: Roubiliac and Sculptural Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Britain.
Assistant Professor Liz Kotz, formerly of the University of Minnesota, will be our specialist in Contemporary Art. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University in 2002. Dr. Kotz has an impressive record of publications investigating cross-disciplinary visual art practices and theories after 1945, skillfully historicizing contemporary practice in modernism and earlier contexts. Her work interweaves diverse disciplines, methodologies and media, incorporating film, photography, video, and gender studies. Dr. Kotz is an accomplished teacher and speaker as well as a gifted art critic.
Assistant Professor Kristoffer Neville comes to us from Princeton University as our specialist in 17th & 18th century Art & Architecture. In 2007, he received his Ph.D. in Art History from Princeton University where he specialized in the history of Northern European architecture and art, focusing on the multiple centers of Germanic culture after the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). Dr. Neville has received an impressive array of awards and fellowships including the Samuel Kress Foundation Institutional Fellowship in Munich, Germany.

Professor Françoise Forster-Hahn has been awarded the highly prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for three months of research abroad. She will spend September 2007 in Paris, affiliated with the Centre Allemand d'Histoire de l'Art; in October and November, she will be in Berlin at the Department of History of Art and Cultural Studies, Humboldt University. Her project is entitled Inventing the History of Modern Art in Text and Display: Julius Meier-Graefe's "Modern Art" (1904) and the Centennial Exhibition in Berlin (1906).

Professor Conrad Rudolph spoke on "The Arts and the Word in the Middle Ages" at the School of Interdisciplinary Arts of Ohio University, Athens in April. In May, he will present a lecture entitled "The Requirements for Salvation: Hugh of Saint Victor, Abelard, and The Mystic Ark" at an international conference on Art as Historical Text at Ben-Gurion University, Israel.

Professor Stella Nair will publish three articles on Latin American architecture this year: "Witnessing the (In) Visibility of Inca Architecture in Colonial Perú Buildings and Landscape [forthcoming]
"Localizing Sacredness, Difference, and Yachacuscamcani in a Colonial Andean Painting" Art Bulletin, LXXXIX (2):209-237 (2007). [in press]
"The Brazilianization of Brasilia" Journal of the International Institute Winter 10-11 (2007) (with Fernando Lara). [in press]

Professor Patricia Morton has published an essay in an important new book on architectural historiography, "The Afterlife of Buildings: Architecture and Walter Benjamin's Theory of History" in Rethinking Architectural Historiography, Dana Arnold, Elvan Altan Ergut, and Belgin Turan Ozkaya, eds. (Routledge, 2006).

Ginger Hsü will present a paper "Travel in the New Qing Empire" at the conference "Returning to the Shore: Symposium in Honor of James Cahill's 81st Year," University of California, Berkeley, April 27-28, 2007. She will also give a paper entitled "Coining the 'Yangzhou Baguai' at the Turn of the 20th Century " in the International Conference of "Turmoil, Representation and Trends: Modern Chinese Painting, 1796-1949", Kaohsiung Museum of Art, May 25-27, 2007.