Annual Symposium: “Mnemonic Aesthetics: Memory and Trauma in Art”

11th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium
Organized by the Rutgers University Art History Graduate Student Organization (AHGSO)
April 22nd & April 23rd, 2021
via Zoom

Registration: https://rutgers.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAqceusrTgoHdF9A44e_pvBbfbPoUnbIcFG

Keynote Speakers: 

April 22, 2021: Dr. Cheryl Finley, Cornell University
April 23, 2021: Dr. Deborah Willis, New York University

“Memory is always transitory, notoriously unreliable, and haunted by forgetting —in short, human and social…If the sense of lived time is being renegotiated in our contemporary cultures of memory, we should not forget that time is not only the past, its preservation and transmission.”
— Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia, 2000

Memory has been central to the vocabularies of artists and art theorists since its translation from ancient rhetoric to visual arts scholarship in the early modern period. Recently, scholars have addressed the relationship between memory and the history of art, employing diverse methods from memory theory to decolonialism, postcolonialism, and eco-art history. Mnemonic aesthetics – a concept stressed by Cheryl Finley in her book, Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon – emphasizes a practice of ritualized remembering which sustains cultural possession and collective memory of shared traumas, especially in regards to slavery. Through acts of repetition, visual communication and performance allow memories that would otherwise succumb to cultural amnesia to be preserved. These acts attempt to revitalize and reinvigorate history by strengthening present ties to the past. This symposium will explore how memory, in particular traumatic memory, has informed the visual arts across chronologies.

Thursday, April 22, 2021

8:45 – 9:00 | Welcome

9:00 – 10:45 | COLLECTIVE MEMORY

• Dareen Hussein, Ohio State University: Reversing the Gaze: Image, Archive, and Sounds of Resistance in Assia Djebar’s The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting
• Michelle Donnelly, Yale University: Kiowas Moving Camp: The Negotiation of Memory in Stephen Mopope’s Anadarko Post Office Mural
• Rachel Weiher, University of St. Thomas: 16th Century Epidemic Representations in Hybrid Documents and Their Modern Traumatic Impact in Mexico
• Soyoon Ryu, University of Michigan: Traveling soil, plants reborn: on (re)materializing homeland in contemporary art of Tibetan diaspora

10:45 – 11:00 | Coffee break

 11:00 – 12:45 | MATERIAL MEMORY

• Mathilde Sauquet, Princeton University: Remembering the lost city of Thérouanne (1553): the role of re-used sculpture in the shaping of collective memories
• Marina Avia Estrada, Columbia University: Ana Mendieta’s homecoming: recovering the Taíno pre-Columbian culture and fighting deculturation processes
• Kearstin Jacobson, the University of Texas at Austin: “Ancient temples collapsed”: Combating the Traumatic Memory of Plague through Creative Remembrance in the Medieval Era
• Emily Beaulieu, Tufts University: The Ancient City of Ani: Ruins of the Past for the Present

12:45 – 1:00 | Coffee break

1:00 – 2:45 | ENVIRONMENTAL MEMORY

• Han Lu, Cornell University: Framing and Haunting: Sitio Eriazos in the Works of Voluspa Jarpa in the 1990s
• Genevieve Westerby, University of Maryland: A Devastating Invasion: Trauma and Memory, Violence and Loss in Alfred Sisley’s Views of a Flooded Port-Marly
• Isaiah Bertagnolli, University of Pittsburgh: No More Hiroshimas: Jacob Lawrence’s Hiroshima Series and the Anti-Nuclear Movement of the early 1980s
• Liam Machado, Temple University: The Elegy in the Expanse: Water as Medium of Memory in Afterlives of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

2:45 – 3:00 | Coffee Break

3:00 – 4:30 | CHERYL FINLEY, SPELMAN COLLEGE

Friday, April 23, 2021

8:45 – 9:00 | Welcome

9:00 – 10:45 | PORTRAITURE

• Chen Jiang, Columbia University: Portraits, History, and Memory: Zenken kojitsu by Kikuchi Yōsai (1788-1878)
• Qiuyang (Lynette) Shen, School of the Art Institute of Chicago: A Body in Places: The Haunting Memory of the Nuclear in Eiko Otake’s Spectral Performance
• Jennie Waldow, Stanford University: Preserving the Ephemeral: Depictions of the AIDS Crisis in Allen Ruppersberg’s Study for Bookmark
• Ricardo Chavez, University of Arizona: Portraits, Power, and the Digital Collective Consciousness: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Nivel de Confianza/Level of Confidence and the Ayotzinapa 43

10:45 – 11:00 | Coffee break

11:00 – 12:45 | PERSONAL TRAUMA

• Deborah Feller, Rutgers University: The Transubstantiation of Trauma into Art: The Lamentation as Embodiment of Personal Grief
• Chloë Courtney, New York University: Stitching Worlds: Teresa Margolles’s Embroidered Memorials
• Tony Yanzhang Cui, University of Maryland: Assalito: Narratives of Pedagogic Violence in Denys Calvaert’s Bolognese Studio
• Martha Wilde, School of the Art Institute of Chicago: Memory and (Dis)location in Mona Hatoum’s Present Tense

12:45 – 1:00 | Coffee break

1:00 – 2:45| MEMORIES OF VIOLENCE

• Jordan Wade Rhodes, University of Missouri: Katharina Sieverding Reflects on the State
• Robert Geilfuss, New York University: Sam Gilliam After April 4, 1968
• Torey Akers, Hunter College: Pedestal Work
• Kevin Hong, Yale University: The Silences of “The Scourged Back”: The Emergence of an Icon and its Photographic Shadows

2:45 – 3:00 | Coffee Break

3:00 – 4:30 | DEBORAH WILLIS, NYU