"A Critique of What Art Can Do”: Jennifer Nelson on Undoing Mastery

In this final episode of the season focused on the craft of writing, Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator in the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Cammy Brothers, a scholar of art and architecture at Northeastern University. In this episode, Brothers examines Michaelangelo’s drawing practice and that of his contemporary, Giuliano da Sangallo, and the ways in which da Sangallo’s architectural drawings aim to assemble fragmentary images of Rome on the page. Brothers also reflects on her career and writing practice: on publishing a first book that was not an adaptation of her doctoral dissertation; on the ways in which recitation is integral to clear and compelling scholarship; and on composing endings that open new lines of thought rather than summarizing or foreclosing meaning. She also discusses her role as a critic for the Wall Street Journal and the craft of writing for a public readership.   

In this episode, Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator in the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Jennifer Nelson, a poet and scholar of early modern art at the University of Delaware. Through the lens of their first book on Holbein, and a second, forthcoming, on Cranach, Nelson describes how comparative studies of elite cultural production can allow us to the see the category of art as capacious, and capable of dismantling our concept of mastery. They offer concrete advice on writing—from tone, to endings, clarity, and decisive punctuation—and speak about their own writerly process, in which ideas often manifest first in poetry and later in prose.

In this continuation of a season focused on the craft of writing in art history, Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator in the Research and Academic Program) speaks to Shira Brisman, a historian of early modern art and assistant professor of the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania. Through the lens of her two books, the first on Albrecht Dürer, and the second, forthcoming, on the goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer (1563–1618), Brisman explores how art can shape communities, and can either draw people together or divide them. She discusses the idea of a “craft” of writing, the impact of poetry on her own prose, and how an “off stage bibliography” can provide a generative set of thematic, linguistic, and structural alternatives that amplify one’s understanding of their own scholarly writing projects.  

This is the first episode of a new season focused on the craft of writing in art history. Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator for the Research and Academic Program and a fiction writer) speaks with Alexander Nemerov, professor of art history at Stanford University, about his most recent book, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s. He discusses his writing process, how his craft has changed over time, and this current book’s varied sources of inspiration—from painting and poetry to time spent in nature and pilgrimages to historical sites. 

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with artist and curator Tsedaye Makonnen about her multidisciplinary studio, curatorial, and research-based practice. They discuss how Tsedaye’s sculptural installations and performances thread together her identity as a daughter of Ethiopian immigrants and a Black American woman to explore the transhistorical forced migration of Black communities across the globe. 

In this week episode Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Sarah Hamill, a scholar of modern and contemporary art and professor at Sarah Lawrence College, about the role of description in art history, and how description is always a form of interpretation. Sarah describes how the embodied experience of sculpture captured her imagination and how she came to understand the role of photography in mediating our encounters with art objects. She also discusses her current research into feminist politics, media, and sculpture in the 1970s, focused on the artist Mary Miss, and reflects on how art historical practices like slow looking may help us grapple with urgent issues like the climate crisis.  

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Sergei Tcherepnin, an artist who works in the intersections of sound, music, sculpture, theater, and photography. We discuss how his work is made to be interacted with, creating new intimacies—listening by hearing, but also listening by touching, by walking, by pressing, by feeling. Sergei describes how he seeks to create multiple focal points within each work, activating a kind of queer sound or queer listening.

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Donette Francis, an Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami, Coral Gables. A founding member of the Hemispheric Caribbean Studies Collective, her research and writing investigate place, aesthetics, and cultural politics in the African Diaspora. They discuss the politics of making visible what Donette calls “minor histories.” Across her work on the novel as well as in the realm of contemporary art, Donette invites us to ask: what does attending to these histories allow us to see?

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark) speaks with Mary Lum, a visual artist based in North Adams, Massachusetts, about how her intricate collages, paintings, and photographs explore the margins of city life, constructed geographies, and her use of text as image. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship for Advanced Study, and several MacDowell Fellowships, Lum taught at Bennington College from 2005 to 2022.  Her work has been exhibited in and commissioned by MASS MoCA,  The Drawing Center, and Oxford University, among numerous other venues.

In this episode, guest interviewer Anne Helmreich (The Getty Foundation) speaks with Koenraad Brosens, professor of art history at the University of Leuven in Belgium, and Blake Stimson, professor of art history at the University of Illinois Chicago, about the future of universities in a digital age. They discuss the benefits and challenges of teaching at public institutions, the concept of “the third generation university,” and potential pitfalls to the vogue for interdisciplinarity. Reflecting particularly on the past two years of the pandemic, Koenraad and Blake share how they are navigating the newly digital and remote world of teaching and mentoring, and muse about the possibilities of the new trend towards building virtual education infrastructure rather than investing principally in physical campuses. This fourth season of In the Foreground is a special series of five roundtable conversations dedicated to “the Grand Challenges” – a phrase frequently adopted in the sciences to refer to the great unanswered questions that represent promising frontiers – of bringing together digital and computational methods and the social history of art. This series grows out of a colloquium on this topic convened by Anne Helmreich (Associate Director of the Getty Foundation) and Paul B. Jaskot (Professor of Art History at Duke University) at the Clark’s Research and Academic Program in April 2019. Anne and Paul serve as the guest interviewers for this podcast series, for which they have invited back colloquium participants to reflect further on how digital art history might help us explore social history of art’s future, and which digital methods might be effective at analyzing large scale structural issues and modes of visual expression.