Monday April 9, 2012

Exhibiting Community:
A Conversation with Ellen Hartwell Alderman and Jennifer Garcia Peacock
Monday April 9, 2012
3512 Haven Hall
4-5:30 pm

Please join us for a conversation with two curators/scholars/activists who use exhibition as a way to envision, explore, and expand their own communities.

Currently a PhD candidate in American Culture here at UM, Jennifer Garcia Peacock’s scholarship is intimately bound with her involvement in the creation of El Museo del Norte in Southwest Detroit, a grassroots museum and cultural center celebrating Latina/os historical presence in Michigan.

Ellen Hartwell Alderman is a Chicago-based curator and creative programmer for the Graham Foundation, a major arts nonprofit in Chicago committed to fostering new ways of thinking about the role of architecture in society. When not at the Graham, she is busy running an independent gallery space, Alderman Exhibitions, in Chicago’s West Loop.

The VCW is bringing together two individuals who operate both inside and outside major arts and academic organizations in order to have a frank and lively discussion about the role of community within contemporary exhibition practices. Each curator/scholar will provide insight into the ways that different kinds of institutions support and produce cultural knowledge, and the generative potential of locating a scholarly or creative practice between several of these sites.  Please bring any questions you may have about the process of founding or developing an alternative exhibition space, or the challenges of running an arts organization.

Light Refreshments will be served.
Please RSVP to klennard@umich.edu

“Flix Remix: From Compilation Doc to Culture-Jam,” a presentation by Craig Baldwin

The Visual Culture Workshop

invites you to attend

“Flix Remix: From Compilation Doc to Culture-Jam”

a presentation by

 

Craig Baldwin

Tuesday, March 27

at 1pm 

in Angell Hall 3222

Refreshments will be served

Please RSVP to akivag@umich.edu or klennard@umich.edu

Craig Baldwin is a filmmaker, curator, publisher, and educator from San Francisco, California, who is visiting Ann Arbor for a series of screenings and to deliver the Penny W. Stamps Memorial Lecture. He is the director of seven 16mm ‘found-footage’ films–among them Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America and Sonic Outlaws–that are driven by an energized montage of found, archival, and original material. His own approach to the ‘collage-essay’ has been influenced by both the West Coast ‘Funk Assemblage’ aesthetic of Bruce Conner and also the Situationist practice of ‘detournement‘, and his technique has developed from a sort of long-form culture-jam to a more narratively driven political satire. He will lead a discussion about his personal artistic practice, his 25-year microcinema curatorial/exhibition project Other Cinema, his international DVD-publishing initiative OCD, and their positions within the larger experimental/underground film movement.

 

Baldwin is currently a professor at the University of California at Davis. His works have been screened at the New York Film Festival, the Musee du Louvre, and the Whitney Biennial.

Monday February 13: “Sights and Souls: Missionary Photography and Visual Perceptions of 20th Century China”

Please join us to workshop a paper in progress by Joseph Ho

Monday, February 13
4:30- 6pm
3512 Haven Hall

Dinner will be served

Please RSVP to Klennard@umich.edu to receive a copy of the paper

My talk, “Sights and Souls: Missionary Photography and Visual Perceptions in 20th Century China,” looks at photographic production, ways of seeing, and identity formation in American Protestant evangelism and medical missionary projects in China between 1920 and 1950. Reading missionary photographs and films in concert with oral histories and texts detailing the experience of American Protestants in China allows me to ask questions about the role of photography in mediating cultural encounters, framing realities and identities, and structuring transnational relationships. In terms of methodology, I will be discussing still photographs and 16mm motion pictures taken by missionaries in China as documents and artifacts in their own right rather than one-dimensional “illustrations.”

—–

Joseph Ho is a second year PhD student in the Department of History. His primary interests focus on the history and culture of photography in the context of 20th century US history, Sino-American encounters, and transnationality.

 

The Lens in High Places: Photography and Mountaineering

The Mountaineering Culture Studies Group and The Visual Culture Workshop invites you to join us for:

The Lens in High Places: Photography and Mountaineering

 Amrita Dhar

4211 Angell Hall, 4 p.m., 12 January 2012

Jack Longland pole-jumping at Tengkye Dzong using a bamboo pole, by Frank Smythe.

My chief question here will have to do with the matter and manner of representation of an extreme pursuit. Why has photography been so deeply intermeshed with mountaineering since its youngest days, particularly in the highest ranges? Its curious ‘enabling’ power notwithstanding, does it continue to be used in the same way as it was about a hundred years back, or can we trace a substantive difference in its present-day affordances? To start with an example that many will be familiar with (although many more and often highly interesting instances of camerawork were afoot in the day!), my point of departure will be the early twentieth-century attempts on Everest. I shall work my way through those first concatenations of climbing and camerawork to the climactic moment in 1953 when the summit of Everest was reached, and to the present day when photographs of comparable ventures appear not so much in the periodicals of the Royal Geographical Society as on the North Face blog. I should explore issues not only of commerce and journalism, but also the subject positions betrayed by the photographer and climber (two roles until very recently most intimately conflated). At the risk of seeming selective (although they will by no means be the sole subjects of my focus), I shall anchor my exploration around Eric Shipton, Frank Smythe, Conrad Anker, and Jimmy Chin.

All are welcome. Refreshments will be provided.

This workshop meet is hosted by the Mountaineering Culture Studies Group, in conjunction with the Visual Culture Workshop at the University of Michigan.

Please join the Visual Culture Workshop for the presentation and discussion of a work-in-progress:

Grounds of Abstraction:

Maps, Grids, and the Spatialization of Thought

Valerie Traub

Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of English and Women’s Studies
University of Michigan

3222 Angell Hall
Wednesday December 7, 12:30-2pm
Lunch will be served
Please rsvp to: klennard@umich.edu

“My presentation analyzes the styles of reasoning enabled by early modern Western European maps, as well as the styles of reasoning that we use to understand them. Since the influential work of Michel de Certeau, the “habits of mind” associated with cartography have been represented through provocative distillations that take as axiomatic the correspondence of maps to disciplinary power. As useful as this scholarship has been, its ubiquitous dissemination has not been without costs. In appropriating the indexical qualities of maps to emblematize disciplinary power, we have retrospectively reified precisely the intellectual and social processes that require explanation. It is not, as Certeau would have it, that all early modern maps forget their means of production, but that in assuming maps to be emblems of totalization, we have forgotten their histories of inscription as well as their productive futurity.”

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 10— HOW WE LOOK AT FILM

The Visual Culture Workshop

hosts an informal panel discussion

How We Look at Film

Sergie Eisenstein editing the film October, 1928, KINO archive

 

Thursday, November 10, 4pm sharp

3222 Angell Hall

Panelists Richard Abel (Screen Arts & Cultures), Jonathan Freedman (English/American Culture), Zeynep Gürsel (Anthropology), Johannes von Moltke (German/Screen Arts & Cultures), and renee c. hoogland (English, Wayne State University) will discuss their interests in film, film history, and filmmaking in service of a broad range of interdisciplinary research and teaching projects.

Please join us for lively conversation, Q&A,  and refreshments.

For additional information about this event or the VCW please contact Katie Lennard, klennard@umich.edu or Akiva Gottlieb, akivag@umich.edu

 

Friday, October 28, 2011—Mary Louise Kete Paper Workshop!