MYERS GRADUATE SYMPOSIUM
MAKING SPACE
The 2022 Myers Graduate Student Symposium in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University will explore the interrelation of art and space, asking how art emerges from, collaborates in, and shapes the making of space.
​
Space has been a central concern of art historians from the origins of the discipline in the sixteenth century until today, manifesting in Vasarian stories about artists’ studios and social circles, suppositions of national character, and accounts of transcultural movement. In our globalized world, space-making continues to serve as a material and political constraint in ways that have come into sharper focus during an ongoing pandemic, refugee crises, and ecological disaster. Space has long both manifested and contested socio-political hegemonies at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and other facets of identity, and our present moment has only made just, equitable, and daring responses more pressing. As such, this symposium intends for “making space” to denote a practice of foregrounding marginalized perspectives and platforming calls for justice.
Joseph Albers. Untitled (1942). Lithograph. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art.
Northwestern University, 1985.140
SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM
9:00-9:30 Opening remarks
9:30-11:00 Panel 1: Rethinking site specificity
Danya Epstein (Ph.D. Art History, Southern Methodist University)
"Neo-Anasazi: Dennis Numkena and the Politics of Space in Phoenix"
​
Patricia Ekpo (Ph.D. American Studies, Yale University)
"Antiblackness and Site Specificity: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi's Freeway Sculptures"
​
Colton Klein (M.A. Art History, Columbia University)
"The Turpentine State: An Ecology of Painting in Minnie Evans' Airlie Oak"
​
​
​
11:15-12:45 Panel 2: Superposition
Brenna McWhorter (M.A. Art History, Syracuse University)
"'Accedimus Astris': Giulio Romano's Camera dei Venti at the Palazzo Te and the Tradition of Astral
Magic at the Gonzaga Court"
​
Usha Rahn (M.A. Art History, University of Illinois Chicago)
"E-Darshan: Livestreaming as a Medium fro Remote Hindu Religious Practice"
​
Stephanie Dvareckas (Ph.D. Art History, Rutgers University)
"Reclaiming the Void: Internationalism and the Nomad"
​
​
​
2:15-3:45 Panel 3: Crossing and creating borders
Alexis Slater (Ph.D. Art History, John Hopkins University)
"Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: The Cartographic Imaginary of the Habsburg/Ottoman Border, 1529-1683"
​
Emma J. Oslé (Ph.D. Art History, Rutgers University)
"Bridging Borders, Ghosting Race: Examining 'Nepantla' in Latinx and Diasporic Indigenous Art"
​
Hande Sever (Ph.D. Art History, University of California San Diego)
"New Spatial Visions: Hadi Bara's Critique of Architecture Formes Couleur"
​
​
​
4:00-5:30 Keynotes: Yasmine Espert and Emmanuel Ortega
(University of Illinois Chicago)
​
​