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"
11:45-12:45 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)
SPEAKERS BIOGRAPHIES
DANYA EPSTEIN
Danya Epstein is a PhD candidate in art history at Southern Methodist University where her research focuses on modern and contemporary Native American art and architecture in the Southwestern United States. Her pre-doctoral dissertation research received the 2021-2022 Carter Manny Award from the Graham Foundation, and she is the recipient of the 2022 Alessandra Comini International Fellowship for Art History Studies from Southern Methodist University. Her interests include art and architectural history of the American Southwest, the Native American curio trade, and theories of the archive.
PATRICIA EKPO
Patricia Ekpo is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale University. Her dissertation uses sculpture and installation art to examine how space is produced through antiblackness, focusing on the work of black female sculptors Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi.
COLTON KLEIN
Colton Klein is a second-year MA student in Art History at Columbia University focusing on American visual culture from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries with interest in materiality, ecocriticism, and affect theory. He is currently Curatorial Research Assistant in Prewar Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Project Manager of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné The Marsden Hartley Legacy Project: The Complete Paintings and Works on Paper sponsored by the Bates College Museum of Art. He previously served as Curatorial Intern in Prewar Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Havner Curatorial Intern in American Art (Pre-1960) at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Cataloguer in American Art at Sotheby's.
BRENNA MCWHORTER
Brenna McWhorter is a master’s student in art history at Syracuse University. She previously attended Colorado State University, where she received her BA in Art History and minors in Italian Interdisciplinary Studies and Business Administration. She has spent part of her master’s degree in Florence where she was able to participate in Syracuse University's Graduate Program in Italian Renaissance Art. Her research was supported by Syracuse University's Florence Fellowship. Her areas of interest include: early modern astrology, astral magic, Renaissance vault decoration, Savonarola and art at the end of the quattrocento, humanism and the visual arts, and early modern court patronage.
USHA RAHN
Usha Rahn is an MA student studying art history at the University of Illinois Chicago. She studies the architecture and ritual practices in South Asia with a special interest in the role of landscape in organization of sacred spaces. Her MA thesis explores the darshan livestream developed by the Shree Mahalaxmi temple in Kolhapur as both an aesthetic experience and a tool for connection to Kolhapur’s diaspora. As such, her work thus far occupies a space between new media studies, art history, and anthropology.
STEPHANIE R. DVARECKAS
Stephanie R. Dvareckas is a Ph.D. student in Art History at Rutgers University where she is a Dodge Avenir Fellow at the Zimmerli Art Museum in the Department of Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art. There, she works with the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. She received a Foreign Languages and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship from Harvard University’s Davis Center in 2019, and a Graduate Dean Professional Development Award in 2018. Stephanie holds an MA in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she wrote her master’s thesis, Dialectics of the Soviet Avant-Garde in the First Exhibition of Ukrainian Nonconformist Art. Stephanie holds a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design where she studied in the Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) department.
ALEXIS SLATER
Alexis Slater is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University where she studies the art of Germany and the Netherlands between 1400-1600. Originally from Los Angeles, Alexis has lived in a number of other cities throughout the United States, including Winston-Salem, NC where she was an undergraduate at Wake Forest University. She received a Master’s degree in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin where she wrote a thesis entitled “Mayken Verhulst: A Professional Woman Painter and Print Publisher in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries.” She recently completed her qualifying exams in the fields of “Early Modern Art in Northern Europe” and “The Islamic Arts of the Book and East-West Interactions.” She is still in the process of determining her thesis project but is interested in issues of ethnicity and its intersections with gender and sexuality in the festive, elite milieux of early modern northern Europe.
EMMA J. OSLÉ
Emma Oslé is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her dissertation research centers contemporary U.S. Latinx and indigenous visual production, with special interests in motherhood/mothering, intersectional decolonial feminisms, the US-Mexico border, race, and the environmental humanities. She is currently an Adjunct Lecturer at Rutgers University for the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies, and has accumulated curatorial experience in several museums including MoMA (NYC), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), and multiple smaller institutions and private collections. In addition to her academic and curatorial work, Emma earned BFA’s in Sculpture and Printmaking from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania and has exhibited her own work throughout the greater Philadelphia region.
HANDE SEVER
Hande Sever is a transdisciplinary artist and scholar from Istanbul, Turkey; currently residing in Los Angeles, CA. Her scholarship and artistic research draws from the fields of critical technology studies, museology and archival studies as these converge on the politics of metadata creation, decoloniality, memory studies, and new historiographies. Her scholarship focusing on decolonial debates regarding heritage conservation led to many independent research articles published with leading museums’ peer-reviewed journals, such as the Stedelijk
Museum’s Stedelijk Studies, The Art Institute of Chicago’s Art Institute Review, and the Getty Museum’s Getty Research Journal, among others. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Art History, Theory, and Criticism program at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), and prior to joining UCSD she was a visiting faculty member of the California Institute of the Arts’ (CalArts) Photography and Media program. Her works have been supported with grants from the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, California Arts Council, Getty Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation and Russell Foundation.
YASMINE ESPERT
Dr. Yasmine Espert received a doctorate in art history from Columbia University. Her writings on photography, film and the African diaspora are published by Public Books, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem and Oxford University Press, among others. Dr. Espert’s research is supported by the University of Michigan, Fulbright, and multiple grants and fellowships through Columbia University. Her first book project is under contract at Duke University Press. She was an advisor for Student Voices, a collaboration with Smarthistory and the AUC Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective. With the support of Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism, she curated made vulnerable – an online exhibition for sx visualities. Dr. Espert contributed to the MoMA’s Museum Research Consortium, and was a research associate at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. She is visiting assistant professor for the AUC Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective, the Department of Art & Visual Culture, Spelman College. In Spring 2021, she was visiting professor at École normale supérieure. Her courses consider art in the African diaspora through topics such as ability, gender, race, sexuality, decoloniality, religion, archives, popular culture, and material culture.
EMMANUEL ORTEGA
Emmanuel Ortega (PhD, Art History, University of New Mexico) is the Marilynn Thoma Scholar and Assistant Professor in Art of the Spanish Americas at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Scholar in Residence at the Newberry Library for 2022-2023. As a scholar and curator, Ortega has lectured nationally and internationally on images of autos-de-fe, nineteenth-century Mexican landscape painting, and visual representations of the New Mexico Pueblo peoples in Novohispanic Franciscan martyr paintings. Springing from his research interests, Ortega has curated in Mexico and the United States; his latest endeavor is the upcoming exhibition titled Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium, opening at the New Mexico State University Art Museum in September of this year. An essay titled, "The Mexican Picturesque and the Sentimental Nation: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Landscape," was published by The Art Bulletin in the Summer of 2021. His book project, Visualizing Franciscan Anxiety and the Distortion of Native Resistance: The Domesticating Mission is under contract with Routledge. He is a recurrent lecturer for Arquetopia Foundation for Development, the largest artist residency in México.