If an artist uses declassified government documents in a protest work of art, is that artist intervening in governmental matters or using collaborating materials? Art history graduate students from all over the nation will convene at the Hammer Museum today to discuss these very types of questions.
UCLA is now home to the 42nd annual UCLA Art History Graduate Student Symposium, the longest running symposium of its kind in North America.
This year, the forum will discuss the positive and negative elements of collectivity and the role of social formations in the production of art. It will revolve around the topic “CO ““ Collaboration and Collectivity in Art.”
In an effort to include more graduate students, especially those working outside the modern and Western fields of art, this year’s symposium attempts to steer away from a topic too limited in scope. Works in the symposium will examine periods and regions ranging from ancient Rome to Meiji Era Japan.
“What became even clearer was the number of different ways in which one could interpret the meaning of community, collaboration or collectivity. We all felt that such a theme would garner a variety of different submissions,” said Cassie Wu, an art history graduate student and one of the organizers of the event.
“We wanted to represent the diverse interests of our faculty and graduate students here, many of whom work in non-Western fields.”
The symposium brings together emerging scholars to share their research on the role of community in relation to artistic creation. Ten student presenters will deliver conference papers this year. Professors and students hail from universities such as Berkeley, Northwestern, Stanford, Columbia and Yale.
“Symposiums allow me to share work with my peers, to meet students in other departments, to learn how other departments function … and to take critique and use it to strengthen my work,” said Natilee Harren, an art history graduate student.
Last year’s symposium contained fewer submissions than usual because its provocative and experimental theme, “Lessons on Love,” was a subject only beginning to surface in the art history discipline.
“This year the theme is one that has been percolating in art history for a while, so there was an abundance of submissions and therefore more (and) better papers to choose from,” Harren said.
Highlights of the program this year include keynote speaker Professor Robert Farris Thompson, scholar and expert of African and African American art. He will speak on “Kongo Havana, Kongo New Orleans: Creolized Gems of Music-Art-Dance.”
His research explores Africa’s impact on American sports, music and dance. His speech will examine African influences through the centuries, from the rumba to the twist to the Afro-Cuban impact on Hollywood dance scenes.
A joint presentation will be given by Harren, who will speak about how artist Jenny Holzer’s participation and intervention in government bureaucracy relates to her role as a conceptual artist.
The Art History Graduate Student Symposium, the longest running of its kind in the country, illustrates the value of collaboration not only among the artists and the communities they examine, but also among the students ““ through their discourse with their colleagues within and beyond the art history community.
“UCLA art history grads have the care and commitment to mount the event each year, and that they recognized at an early moment ““ that we as graduate students form a budding professional community that deserves to be recognized and supported in this way,” Harren said.