In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies: short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian.
Charles Keiffer (Williams College) recounts the heightened atmosphere of intoxicated conviviality on display in Thomas Patch’s oil painting British Gentlemen at Sir Horace Mann’s Home in Florence (1763–1765), in which caricature is deployed to subversive ends, challenging norms of masculinity and using formal idiosyncrasies to invoke the ephemeral nature of sociability.

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute presents In the Foreground: Object Studies: short meditations that introduce you to a single work of art seen through the eyes of an art historian.
Jordan Horton (Williams College) explores how Romare Bearden’s collage The Dove (1964) plays with fragmented forms to visually evoke the “broken time” of jazz while also embodying how Black people living in Harlem in the 1960s might have experienced the urban spaces they knew as home.

In this episode Caroline Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with two scholars of Renaissance art and architecture: Saundra Weddle, professor of architecture at Drury University and a Clark Fellow in fall 2020, and Lisa Pon, professor of art history at the University of Southern California. They discuss how they met one another by chance in a hostel while studying in Italy as graduate students, and how their thirty-year-friendship has shaped their professional work. Saundra and Lisa reflect on their experiences conducting archival research and share their perspectives on where the field of early modern art history is headed.

In this episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Kirsten Scheid, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the American University in Beirut. In 2019–2020, while the Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellow at the Clark Art Institute, Kirsten worked on an ethnography of aesthetic encounters in contemporary Palestine, building on her career-long research into and archival documentation of art-making in Palestine and Lebanon. In their conversation, Kirsten and Caro discuss issues of access and ethics around archives, and Kirsten shares her belief in the power of archives to “hail an art history yet to come.” They also talk about curatorial projects and consider imagination as an ethical practice.

In this episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler speaks with Lisa Lee, Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University and Florence Gould Foundation Fellow at the Clark in spring 2020. While a fellow, Lisa worked on a project tentatively titled “Thomas Hirschhorn’s Real Abstraction, 1984–94,” which focuses on a critical period in the life of the Swiss artist, who is known for his work in collage and monument-making, primarily with found materials. Through working with these materials, often in public spaces, his art grapples with the political, economic, and social conditions of contemporary life. Lisa also discusses her work on the German artist Isa Genzken. This conversation explores Lisa’s interest in the tension of what she describes as work that highlights the possibility of art and its everyday political power.