In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

In this episode, guest interviewer Paul B. Jaskot (Duke University) speaks with Jacqueline Francis, a scholar of contemporary art and chair of the Graduate Visual and Critical Studies Program at the California College of the Arts, and Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, a specialist of the arts of Africa and associate professor of art history at Emory University, on the topic of collaboration and interdisciplinary in art history and digital humanities. They articulate a shared experience of “falling into” collaborative, digital practices out of necessity, led by the kinds of questions they wanted to answer. Throughout the discussion, all three speakers return to the idea of shifting away from paradigms of hierarchy and authority, whether through partnering with students and colleagues outside the academy, rethinking what is recognized as “scholarly” within the humanities and academic publishing, making visible the intellectual exchanges and collaborative labor that makes research projects, artworks, and museum exhibitions possible, and how these attitudes might fundamentally change how we approach the canon of art history.

This fourth season of In the Foreground is a special series of five roundtable conversations dedicated to “the Grand Challenges” – a phrase frequently adopted in the sciences to refer to the great unanswered questions that represent promising frontiers – of bringing together digital and computational methods and the social history of art. This series grows out of a colloquium on this topic convened by Anne Helmreich (Associate Director of the Getty Foundation) and Paul B. Jaskot (Professor of Art History at Duke University) at the Clark’s Research and Academic Program in April 2019. Anne and Paul serve as the guest interviewers for this podcast series, for which they have invited back colloquium participants to reflect further on how digital art history might help us explore social history of art’s future, and which digital methods might be effective at analyzing large scale structural issues and modes of visual expression.

In this episode, which continues the miniseries focused on sound, media, and visual art, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Kaira M. Cabañas, professor of art history at the University of Florida, where she is also affiliate faculty in the Center for Latin American Studies and Center for Gender, Sexualities and Women’s Studies Research. Kaira describes how her early studies helped her think about the relations and discontinuities between cultural contexts, and reflects on artists who practice film “otherwise.” She shares her most recent project focused on transatlantic exchanges in art and psychiatry, and critiques what is often perceived as the current “crisis” in the discipline, asking: a crisis for whom?

In this episode in the mini-series focused on sound, art, and media, Caitlin Woolsey (Manton Postdoctoral Fellow in the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Robin James, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. Robin explores the intersections of pop music, sound studies, feminism, race, and contemporary continental philosophy, and discusses how her work often sits uneasily within institutional disciplines. She shares how she sees popular music as a kind of archive and critiques theoretical approaches that idealize sound as neutral or reparative.

In this episode of In the Foreground, Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Michael Ann Holly, the founding director of the Research and Academic Program. Michael describes what initially drew her art history, what interested her in historiography, and the importance of critical theory to her work. Caro and Michael discuss her contributions to the founding of RAP as well as the department of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, the first department of its kind in the United States. Additionally, Michael speaks to the influence and solace of the landscape of the Berkshires on her thinking and 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.
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.