History of Art: Special Lectures and Research Seminars

Professor Charlene Villaseñor Black presents her paper “Sacred Art and Censorship in the Hispanic World: Mary’s Lactating Breast” as part of the History of Art Research Seminar Series. Hosted by the History of Art department and led by departmental DPhil students, the Research Seminar Series features recent work by researchers currently working in the History of Art department. For list of works referred to in this episode see: https://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/arthist/research/2022-03-24-arthist-research-sacred-art-villasenor-black-LIST_OF_WORKS.pdf Terra Visiting Professor of American Art at the University of Oxford 2021-2022, Professor Villaseñor Black is a leading expert on a range of topics related to contemporary Latinx art, the early modern Iberian world and Chicanx studies. She is currently Professor of Art History and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2016, she was awarded UCLA’s Gold Shield Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence for exceptional teaching, innovative research, and strong commitment to university services. Professor Villaseñor Black is also editor of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and founding editor-in-chief of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (UC Press). Her most recent books include Renaissance Futurities: Art, Science, Invention and Knowledge for Justice: An Ethnic Studies Reader (both from 2019), the new 2020 edition of The Chicano Studies Reader, and Autobiography without Apology: The Personal Essay in Latino Studies, which she co-edited.

In this talk Dr Saul Nelson analyses a single painting, Grace Hartigan’s 'The Persian Jacket' (1952), in order to draw a few conclusions about late modernism. In particular, Nelson interrogates the relationship between fashion and painting presupposed by a kind of art that looks backwards, across the history of modernism, rather than forwards towards some new mode of artmaking. Citational in title and form, submissive in production, The Persian Jacket embodies its simultaneous proximity to institutionalised narratives and the capacity for transformation and critique that might emerge from such proximity. It offers a mode of painterly practice in which myths of heroic individualism are overturned. Speakers: Dr Saul Nelson, Department of History of Art, University of Oxford - https://www.hoa.ox.ac.uk/people/saul-nelson Alexandra Solovyev, Faculty of History, University of Oxford - https://www.history.ox.ac.uk/people/alexandra-solovyev

This lecture was delivered at the University Of Oxford History Of Art Department's Research Seminar series by Dr Matthew Walker, History of Art Department, University of Oxford. The paper explores the architectural and antiquarian writings of Francis Vernon, a member of the Royal Society of London and a traveller in Greece and the Ottoman Empire in the 1670s. Vernon wrote the first account of the Athenian Acropolis in the English language and was amongst the very first English people to see the ruins of ancient Greece firsthand. The paper also brings to light the survival of Vernon's travel journal, a remarkable document that contains some of the very first Western descriptions and illustrations of temples such as the Parthenon and the Erechtheion.

International artist, Not Vital, gives a talk about his art and his work.

In this lecture recorded as a part of the University of Oxford History of Art Department's Research Seminar series, Professor Leonard Barkan (Princeton University) discusses the theme "Michelangelo: A Life on Paper". Recording date - 4th November 2010.

The inaugural lecture by Professor Craig Clunas.