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TRANSNATIONAL SCHOLARSHIP: PERFORMANCE, RACE, AND ARCHIVES
Thu, Mar 2 2023, 5PM - 6:30PM (Zoom link here)
Part of event series: VISUAL & CRITICAL STUDIES FORUM | 2022/2023 SERIES
ORGANIZED BY
CCA Graduate Visual & Critical Studies
EVENT DESCRIPTION
Between 1988 to 1992, Benjamin Patterson lived between two nations–the United States and Germany–in anticipation of developing his international, globetrotting art career. In addition, these years demarcate Patterson’s gradual re-commitment to performance art and expressions of Fluxus at the turn of the century. His peripatetic, bi-continental lifestyle was as much a direct function of asserting hypervisibility in response to historical erasure as it was a refusal of the precarity facing most artists stateside. Patterson’s pursuit of international audiences and communities actively engenders multinational and spatiosocial relationships that require observers and scholars to deconstruct implicit and explicit nationalist biases. This talk will consider three cases in which the artist’s movement calls for a language and interpretive framework beyond the rhetoric of escape. I highlight how Patterson’s claim to multiple centers connects to an ideological act of self-possession. By emphasizing the usability of transnational scholarship to recover his history, I will also explore the necessity for addressing scholarly positionality to place and its impact on his work, identity, and the site specificity of archives.
Recent Scholarship in Contemporary Art History Online Reading Group
The Society of Contemporary Art Historians (website) is hosting the first of its sponsored reading group sessions, which aims to cultivate collegiality among its membership base through informal discussions about recent contributions to contemporary art history. This September 28, 3PM EST, Dr. julia elizabeth neal will host a session on responses in October journal, and please find the readings below.
This is a perfect opportunity to join SCAH, which is a great platform for nurturing the scholarship of its members. To become a member, visit scahweb.org.
Readings: George Baker, David Joselit; A Questionnaire on Global Methods. October, 2022; (180): 3–80. Responses by Iftikhar Dadi (18-21), Jaś Elsner (25-28), Gao Minglu (34-43), Jonathan Hay (50-56), Joan Kee (68-72), Anneka Lenssen (73-77). [Readings available upon registration]
Simone Leigh: Art & Theory (Fall 2021) Seminar at Spelman College
As 2021 comes to a close and we reflect on the throes of this formidable year, leading the fall '21 seminar "Simone Leigh: Art & Theory" is became an everlasting memory. What a generative class for impressive undergraduate students–it leads me to believe the productive and catalytic nature of dialogic learning (seminars) should be a space undergraduate students encounter before graduate school.
This yearlong seminar is in collaboration with the ICA Boston, organizers of the historic US Pavilion that will feature Leigh at the Venice Biennale next year: Read Announcement Here.
August 2021
"The Estate of Benjamin Patterson recently published Performance Works within the Estate of Benjamin Patterson: A Catalogue Raisonné, Volume One, written by julia elizabeth neal and translated into German by Dr. Barbro Patterson. It is the first medium-specific volume to date. Volume 1 inventories the breadth of items collected by the artist over time, including documentary materials from his practice and professional engagements. All material within this text is sourced directly from Patterson's personal archive and from posthumous donations by museums, curators, gallerists, writers, photographers, performances, and educators–each contribution aiding with the goal to comprehensively account for Patterson's legacy. Assistants and aids began to organize and systematize Patterson's personal archive in the twenty-first century for personal safekeeping and in anticipation for his landmark retrospective exhibition in 2010 in Houston, Texas. Subsequently, itemizing, organizing, locating and preserving archival materials continues via Dr. Barbro Patterson, administrator of the Estate of Benjamin Patterson, since 2016."
This book was supported with resources from the Stiftung Kunstfonds, Bonn, Germany, and is not for sale. For acquisition to a library, archive or database, please contact julia elizabeth neal or Barbro Patterson, the Estate of Benjamin Patterson.
CONTEMPORARY TALKS
April 3, 2021 / 12:00pm – 2:00pm
Discrit
Performance Study: Ben Patterson
Join us for an afternoon of edification, creative collaboration, and community that celebrates both the revolutionary work of Benjamin Patterson but also the creativity we have within us all.
In Performance Study: Ben Patterson, a performance art workshop centered on Fluxus co-founder Benjamin Patterson (1934-2016), art historian and Patterson scholar julia elizabeth neal introduces participants to the ideas and key works by this pioneering 20th_century artist. Between a series of short lectures from julia, participants will break into small groups to create and share impromptu interpretations of Patterson’s instruction-based work. Conducted entirely on Zoom, Performance Study is a dynamic event suitable for those new, old, and in-between to Patterson’s work and to performance art more generally. Join us for an afternoon of edification, creative collaboration, and community that celebrates both the revolutionary work of this artist but also the creativity we have within us all.
This virtual lecture will be streamed via Zoom. Register here and receive a reminder to join.
Watching via Zoom
Viewers can watch via Zoom. Zoom participants can join in via audio, video, and text chat during the open conversation portion of the lecture. Zoom participants are capped at 100 people.
Zoom Conversation guide
First-time users can watch this video on how to join a Zoom meeting.
- Zoom viewers will enter the conversation with audio and video muted. Please stay muted until the open conversation portion. We promise we want to talk to you!
- Start by introducing yourself with your name and pronouns.
- We are here to grow and learn! Be open to different styles and areas of knowledge.
- Share the floor – Be conscious of others joining in with questions and comments.
Panel: Serious Play: Radical Publications and Their Histories is March 11
Lincoln, Neb.—An art history panel discussion titled “Serious Play: Radical Publications and Their Histories” will take place virtually on Thursday, March 11 at 5:30 p.m. via Zoom. The panel is presented by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln School of Art, Art History & Design’s Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Lecture Series.
The panel discussion is free and open to the public. Access the panel at https://unl.zoom.us/j/91088525799.
The panel will feature Sampada Aranke, Assistant Professor of Art History, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Julia Neal, Lecturer in African American Art History, Georgia State University; Alexis Salas, Assistant Professor of Art History, New Mexico State University; and Kieran Jack Wilson, a Lincoln photographer and activist.
The panel focuses on the role of printed ‘zines, broadsheets and signage in activist histories, and considers those histories’ effect on art and design movements of today. Each speaker will deliver a short five-minute talk exploring the ways that print material plays a key role in mediating global crisis, followed by a conversation moderated by Wilson.
At the 109th Annual College Art Conference (digital):
neal is a co-facilitator of a two-part interview in celebration of twenty years of the Association for Critical Race Art History, and will present in brief "Learning from Teaching: Critical Race Art History and African American Art."
ArtWire: Advice from Members Who Are Work At Home Pros
"Community Engagement in A Virtual World
How have you managed to stay engaged with your community during quarantine? Any advice for members in doing so?
Healthfully. Screen burnout is real; consecutive meetings on so many different platforms is exhausting. Thanks to professionalizing tips I’ve internalized in graduate school, I limit how accessible I am to the never-ending unfolding of life on the internet. I check my emails within a specific timeframe. Of course I deviate occasionally..." read more here.
At the 108th Annual College Art Conference in Chicago, Illinois, neal and Dr. Melanee C. Harvey are co-paneling "Critical and Liberatory Pedagogies in African American Art," on February 13, 2019:
"On the thirtieth anniversary of bell hooks’s Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990), a significant text on cultural criticism and the visual arts, this panel explores the role of critical and liberatory pedagogy within ongoing interdisciplinary reassessments of Black artistic practices. According to hooks, critical and liberatory pedagogies concern “habits of being” for decolonizing knowledge and promoting “the insurrection of subjugated knowledge.” In light of vast intellectual and curatorial work since 1990, in what ways do pedagogies of African American art participate in, problematize, or reaffirm, the space for independent thought? Drawing upon the field’s heterogeneity, we seek papers that address this question by probing ways of teaching and learning African American Art.
The goal is to examine how critical and liberatory pedagogies perform important epistemological work for students and scholars. How do archives and the digital humanities enrich coursework and object study? How might deconstructive analysis produce additional modes of criticality in the wake of recent publications and museum surveys? Although Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey have described teaching as perfunctorily “performing the work of the university” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013), these scholarly investigations will illuminate pedagogical strategies for resistance, liberation, or even self-critique."
Thursday, February 13, 2020
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Hilton Chicago - Lobby Level - Continental C
Beginning this summer 2019, neal enters Georgia State University as a Visiting Lecturer in African American Art History.
April 5, 2019, julia elizabeth neal presents "Are You Listening? Ben Patterson and William Pearson in Duo for Voice and a String Instrument," at the 30th Annual James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora. Please see the program here.
October 2, 2018, Department of Art + Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, "Art History doctoral candidate Julia Neal featured in Texte Zur Kunst." Access the announcement here.
Stiftung Kunstfonds awards the Estate of Benjamin Patterson grant funds for catalogue raisonné development. Please read the announcement here, and neal joins as consultant.
"Presently Elsewhere: Benjamin Patterson's Flux" to be presented at 106th Annual College Art Association
Panel: A WAY/S FROM HOME: BLACKNESS ACROSS NATIONS
February 24, 2018
10:30AM to 12:00PM
Room 409A, LA Convention Center
julia elizabeth neal receives a Getty Research library grant (January, 2018)
julia elizabeth neal receives a Fulbright fellowship award (March 23, 2017)