stanford university department of art & art history · 2015-2016 newsletter stanford university...

Letter from the ChairNews From Our NeighborOur New HomeInaugural Year EventsOur FacultySpotlight on New FacultyMichael Marrinan RetiresOur StaffContact Information

2015-2016Newsletter

Stanford University Department of Art & Art History

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(Photo: Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service)McMurtry South Entry

2015-2016NewsletterLetter from the ChairNews From Our NeighborOur New Home

Inaugural Year EventsOur FacultySpotlight on New Faculty

Michael Marrinan RetiresOur StaffContact Information

Letter from the Chair

ear Alums and Colleagues:

I write to you on the second day of classes in Stanford’s fall quarter 2015—otherwise known as the inaugural days of the new McMurtry Building. To say we are all awed and thrilled with the building is an understatement. Everyone I have talked to—people inside and outside of Stanford; art historians, curi-ous tourists—shares the same feeling: the building is remark-able.

My first day teaching in the Oshman space—a large class-room that can be converted for the display of art—suggests the feeling in the new building. The undergraduates are keen

to be here in the university’s Arts District. An excitement is in the air beyond just the excitement that starts every school year. For my part, the slides on the screen look the same. My own voice to my own ears sounds the same. And the laser pointer and clicker thankfully remain operational. But some-how everything is different. Maybe it is the proximity to the Cantor and the Anderson Collection. Walking over to the Cantor with my t.a.s after class, I appreciated the quick journey to the galleries and the intrinsic rela-

tionship between the department and the museums. Through-out the quarter, my students will take the same walk to their sections in the museums. It all connects, from the last Rodin sculpture to the first powerpoint, and vice versa. My col-leagues, I am sure, have had similar experiences.

With McMurtry come new responsibilities and challenges. The way I put it to myself is that we must live up to our new building. Perhaps that is putting it too strongly, but I don’t mind the pressure. We should expect great things from our-selves. And who knows but that the build-ing will be the inspiration for turns and transformations in our work that would not have happened otherwise.

A word, though, about the dear departed Cummings Art Building. The worthy and humble spaces of room 2 and room 4 are now quiet. Annenberg, one of the great auditoriums on campus, is done. I’ll miss that place especially. Not to mention room 103, scene of thousands of seminar meetings and faculty meetings over the years, or the studios thick with paint and charcoal. Safe to say that the accumulation of thought and exertion in that building belies the emptiness of it now.

During the last weeks prior to the move, the hallways filled with discarded and donated books. These were giveaways from faculty members, including myself, who had found themselves with too many volumes, too many papers, too many files, than they really needed. I came to feel the tyrannous weight of art books (so many, so heavy). I’m sure others did too. What we ended up leaving on the floor is, as they say, more than many a person might ever know, let alone forget. But we have brought the core of our learning, our essentials, to our new place, and with it a new dedication, and a new gratefulness, for what we have the chance to accomplish here.

-Alexander Nemerov

D

For my part, the slides on the screen look the same. My

own voice to my own ears sounds the same. And the laser

pointer and clicker thankfully remain operational. But some-

how everything is different.

Professor Alexander Nemerov

Letter from the Chair / News From Our Neighbor / Our New Home / Inaugural Year Events / Our Faculty / Spotlight on New Faculty / Michael Marrinan Retires / Our Staff / Contact Information




Cantor Arts Center Acquires Acclaimed Realist Artist Edward Hopper’s New York Corner

he Cantor Arts Center’s mission to educate, inspire, and connect with diverse audiences on campus and beyond

received a significant enhancement this year— the acquisition of Edward Hopper’s New York Corner (Corner Saloon), painted in 1913. An early Hopper work (created when he was just 31 years old), the painting, oil on canvas, is a highlight in the art-ist’s prolific career and a piece that established his signature style and reputation as a great American realist. Among other paintings that Hopper went on to make in a career that contin-ued until his death in 1967, New York Corner anticipates another corner scene, the artist’s most famous work, Nighthawks, painted in 1942.

According to Connie Wolf, the John and Jill Freidenrich Di-rector of the Cantor Arts Center (via Stanford News), New York Corner is a “transformational acquisition” reflecting the Cantor’s strategic approach to its collection, which now fea-tures over 44,000 works, and builds on last year’s gifted addi-tions by Andy Warhol, Richard Diebenkorn and Jacob Law-rence. The piece creates a beautiful counterpart to the works of American abstraction now at the Anderson Collection of American Art at Stanford, allowing campus visitors—and Stanford students—an extraordinary opportunity to see paint-ings by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Hopper all within a short distance.

New York Corner went on view in July. It is currently the center of an exhibition featuring other works by the artist—setting up a clear context for the Cantor’s new painting. The exhibi-

tion is paired in the same gallery with a show examining the recent gift to the Cantor of 29 of the painter Richard Diebenkorn’s sketchbooks. As a young artist at Stanford and in Palo Alto, Diebenkorn admired Hopper deeply, and one of his most Hopper-like early paintings, a beauti-ful view of the Palo Alto train station, is on view just a few feet from New York Corner.

The museum purchase was made possible by the Halperin Art Acquisition Fund, an anonymous estate, Roberta & Steve Denning, Susan & John Diekman, Jill & John Freidenrich, Deedee & Burton McMurtry, Cantor Membership Acquisi-tions Fund, an anonymous acquisitions fund, Pauline Brown Acquisitions Fund, C. Diane Christensen, an anonymous donor, Modern & Contemporary Art Acquisitions Fund, and Kazak Acquisitions Fund.

T

New York Corner (Corner Saloon), Edward Hopper, 1913. Oil on canvas.

New York Corner anticipates another corner scene, the artist’s most famous work, Nighthawks, painted in 1942.

Diebenkorn admired Hopper deeply, and one of his most Hopper-like early paintings, a beautiful view of the Palo

Alto train station, is on view just a few feet from New York Corner.





New McMurtry Building Marks A Transformative Move For Department of Art & Art History

he move this fall to the department’s new home in the beautiful and innovative McMurtry Building , a

96,000-square-foot, four-story facility designed by Diller Sco-fidio + Renfro, has gained lots of media attention, locally and nationally, in both print and online media outlets. But the lat-est addition to Stanford’s Arts District is still more inspiring for faculty and students, promising to be transformative over time, going beyond simply raising the profile of arts and culture on a campus better known for business and engineering.

“I’ve never thought that there should be bar-riers,” says Nemerov. “You might think that artists and art historians would get along but traditionally that’s not always been the case. I look forward to the chance to prove that divi-sion false. The building as whole encourages

interweaving of art, art history, and documentary film.”

That blend is the central theme of McMurtry. The parts of the building literally entwine around a central courtyard en-folded by diagonal bands,

one in sandstone-colored stucco (a nod to Stanford’s tradition) and the other in pati-nated zinc (representing experimentation). At the building’s dedication in October, Charles Renfro said, “The two strands wrap around one another like DNA chromosomes ... gritty space on one side, finished art on the other.”

The overlap is already creating new interac-tions amongst professors and students, which should in turn impact study and the process of making art itself.

“I’m excited to be able to do more with digital photography here at Stanford and to be able to develop better curriculum and courses,” says photography professor Jonathan Calm. “We now have the space and facilities to think about doing new things here for the students.”

“I think it’s really going to change how we teach,” adds head of art practice Gail Wight. In the old building we were so separate. Now it’s possible to have a real exchange. It’s a total game changer.”

This exchange is exemplified in a few of the building’s new highlight spaces. The in-augural exhibition in the Coulter Art Gal-lery, located off of the building’s expansive

Though the general public is intrigued and attracted by the department’s new home, some of its spaces will present chal-lenges. “Our film program has always been very community-based and we draw a lot of people to our events,” says Krawitz. “The Oshman room isn’t as big as the Annenberg Auditorium so we will probably have to do events at mul-tiple venues.”

The new Oshman Hall may be smaller than Annenberg, but it is more adaptable in many ways. Nemerov calls Oshman a “show piece” in fact. “It’s quite theatrical and we’ve only just begun to explore how to use it,” he says. “Yes, we gave up Annenberg, but Oshman is an upgrade in terms of beauty and charisma.”

For documentary film, being a part of the department after be-ing separate for so long, is, as Krawitz says, “a big deal” for the program no matter where they hold screenings. New facilities within McMurtry will provide documentarians an art-immer-sive atmosphere and new spaces in which to experiment.

McMurtry is itself a grand work of art. Lead architect Charles Renfro is known for creating spaces that challenge ideas of

structure and function, such as New York’s High Line—an elevated park on an abandoned rail viaduct—and the otherworldly new Broad Museum in Los Angeles. McMurtry is another unique creation. Vast yet intimate—the interior courtyard and the third-floor Sky Court provide spaces of reflection—the building is neither shel-ter nor fortress, neither retreat nor bastion, but a hive patterned with studios, labs, classrooms, and beautifully appointed offices. The chair of the Art

& Art History Department, Alexander Nemerov, thinks of McMurtry as a monument to things that do not yet fully exist: a dream, in the present tense, about Stanford’s unique artistic culture and the force it can become.

Views and prospects abound in McMurtry. On the third floor, home of the faculty offices and the Sky Court, students and teachers look down at the Rodin sculpture garden and across to Hoover Tower and the hills beyond. Among the many com-mon areas in the building, the Sky Court offers the chance for faculty from different perspectives—art, art history, docu-mentary film—to get together for the casual and more serious discussion of ideas and projects. The truism that studio art and art history are two distinctly different disciplines—that makers and scholars have little to say to one another—is, well, simply not true at Stanford: never more so than now.

McMurtry is a monument to things that do not yet fully exist: a dream, in the pres-ent tense, about stanford’s

unique artistic culture and the force it can become.

the overlap is already creating new interactions

amongst professors and students, which should in

turn impact study and the process of making art itself.

ground-floor courtyard, includes 27 works by 20 students in 16 different majors across campus. Titled Comma And…, the show is meant to reflect on the self-identities of Stan-ford students. One of the most eye-catching works of the exhibition hangs in the nearby Gunn Foyer as a reminder of Stanford’s high standards for excellence. Kevin Rouff’s Green Standard, is a 15-by-24-foot installation of bright green synthetic grass imprinted with the number 5.05, the admission rate for this year’s freshman class.

Also part of the courtyard environment is Yulia Pinkusevich’s (MFA ’12) extremely popular sculptural seating piece, titled SIMA, designed in collaboration with Sam Cuttriss. Located in the atrium under the central ocu-lus, it provides a place to sit, climb, and study, inviting students to become one with the art, the ultimate interactive work.

Exhibits at the neighboring Cantor Center for the Arts also promise to highlight McMurtry’s significance. The opening of the new build-ing, for example, inspired Artists at Work, on view through mid-January, an exhibition that explores inspiration, process, and the effect of place on the making of art.

“I think the proximity to the museum and the interest the museum has shown to start en-gaging with our curricu-lum has a lot of potential,” says Jan Krawitz, professor of documentary film and video, a program that until McMurtry’s opening was separated from the rest of the department in another part of campus. “There’s been a lot of energy about using the space in productive ways and having guests and events, and making it really vital and dynamic.”

“Some of the assets of this new building are really going to be great for the students’ work,” says technical manager Mark Ur-banek. “We have an audio recording studio that we didn’t have before, which provides a sound-proof room to record and place to do audio mixes in house. We used to have to go to a differ-ent building to do that. Also our studio is designed to put in a stationary green screen.”

Wight echoes Urbanek’s enthusiasm for McMurtry’s state-of-the-art new equip-ment. “We can now offer digital print-making, which is the class of my dreams,” she said. “It will go between printing in the flat world and the 3D world. We wouldn’t have had the space or facilities to offer it before. We were very compressed before.”

The potential of the McMurtry building promises to have a major impact on the Art & Art History Department and the campus as a whole, putting the department right alongside the school’s other world-renowned study programs in significance. By virtue of its eye-catching design and locale next to Cantor and just minutes from the Anderson Collection and Bing Con-cert Hall, the department’s new home makes a statement too: the arts are important to the entire student body at Stanford.

“I think the proximity to the museum and the interest the museum has shown to start engaging with our curriculum has a lot of potential.”

Inside the McMurtry Building’s atrium looking toward the Coulter Gallery.

(Photo: Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service)

“Yes, we gave up Annen-berg, but Oshman Hall is an upgrade in terms of beauty and charisma.”

“we can now offer digital printmaking, which is the class of my dreams.”

“This building is part of a changing student model,” says Calm. “We have technology in the world and it’s changing our lives. But the importance of empathy in our students is im-portant too. Someone who engages in a dialog of art has that. The student who take classes here or just hangs out here will remember it. This building is for our students, to change them through art, and hopefully they will one day change us all.”

T

East façade of the McMurtry Building

(Photo: Lina Lecaro)

Coulter Art Gallery


Another view of the atrium


Views of the Sky Court

(Photos: Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service)

McMurtry shines at dusk

(Photo: Iwan Baan. Courtesy of DS+R, Boora, and Stanford. )





Lecture by Hilton Als Among the Highlights of This Year’s Lineup of Events

Please see our website for the complete schedule and additional details.


Special EventsSymposium: “Piranesi, Paestum, and Soane”

Fall and Winter Open Studios

Symposium: “Fragmentary Narratives”

Light and Sound Installation, Nighthouse Studios

LecturesAnthony McCall

Steven Ostrow

Hilton Als

Natalia Almada

Thomas Elsaesser

Casey Reas

Yael Bartana

Lawrence Weschler

Rebecca Solnit

ExhibitionsIn the McMurtry Building:

Anthony McCall, Leaving (With Two-Minute Silence)

Undergraduate Juried Show, Comma And…

MFA in Art Practice, Hi 5

MFA in Design Thesis Show

In the Stanford Art Gallery:

Group Show, Fragmentary Narratives

Sue McConnell, On the Shoulders of Giants

MFA in Art Practice Thesis Show

ScreeningsMFA in Documentary Film Quarterly Screenings

Winter and Spring FilmProd 114 Screenings

Joshua Oppenheimer, “The Look of Silence”

Lazar Stojanovic [title]

MFA in Documentary Film Thesis Screening

art.stanford.edu

http://events.stanford.edu/byCategory/0/




Fabio BarryAssistant Professor Art History

Fabio Barry began teaching architectural history in the department in January 2014. Courses explore Roman Baroque archi-tecture, houses designed by artists and phi-losophers for themselves, the history of the dome from antiquity to the present, and ar-chitectural theory from antiquity to moder-nity, and in AY14-15 were highlighted by seminars on pre-modern perceptions of ma-terials – “The Material Imagination” – and the life and works of Gianlorenzo Bernini, sculptor and architect to five popes. Barry’s research spans works of art and architecture from the archaic period to the Enlighten-ment. He has given invited lectures in Canada, the United States, and Europe, and at Stanford, he became a faculty workshop coordinator for the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

Terry BerlierAssociate Professor Art Practice

Terry Berlier is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily with sculpture and expanded media. Her work is often kinetic, interactive and/or sound based and focuses on everyday objects, the environment, ideas of nonplace/place and queer practice. She has taught at Stanford since 2007 and has served on the board of the Artist in Resi-dency Program at Recology since 2013.

Terry Berlier’s solo exhibition in spring 2015, Giving Up a Fantasy is Harder Than Giving Up a Reality, at Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland, CA, featured three new kinetic and sound sculptures. Berlier was also com-missioned to participate in After the Mo-ment: Reflections on Robert Mapplethorpe at the Contemporary Arts Center in the fall of 2015. This exhibition marks the 25th an-niversary of the landmark Mapplethorpe exhibition The Perfect Moment in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was in numerous group exhibi-tions this year including the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s Dorothy Saxe Invitational (with catalogue); the Hazel Wolf Gallery at the David Brower Center in Berkeley, CA; Security Question, at Locust Projects Sound-ing Room in Miami, FL; Flanders Gallery Artist/Inventor in Raleigh, NC; and Recol-ogy’s 25th anniversary exhibition Make Art Not Landfill (with catalogue) at the Tho-reau Center in San Francisco, CA. Berlier’s sculpture, This Side Up Handle With Care, is currently on exhibition at the Paradise Ridge Winery in Santa Rosa as part of a group exhibition, Conversations in Sculpture, accompanied with a catalogue. She is cur-rently working on a large-scale outdoor sculpture for the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA, and has an exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco from October 2015 to February 2016.

Scott BukatmanProfessor Film and Media Studies

Cultural theorist Scott Bukatman is the author of several books exploring how popular media such as film, comics, and animation mediate between new technolo-gies and human perceptual experience. He is awaiting the 2016 release of Hellboy’s World - Comics and Monsters on the Margins, a book intended to open up new ways of understanding the experience of reading comics using the work of Mike Mignola as its primary case study. The professor of Film and Media Studies’ past works in-clude Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, about cyber-culture; a monograph on the film Blade Runner commissioned by the British Film Institute; Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century, a collection of essays. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit, delves into the life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema.

Enrique ChagoyaProfessor Art Practice

Enrique Chagoya is a painter and print-maker who uses familiar pop icons to create deceptively friendly points of entry for the discussion of complex issues. In September 2014 he had a survey exhibition of his prints at Wayne State University at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery titled Re-Current Histo-ries: Enrique Chagoya’s Editioned Work, and was Keynote Speaker at the Mid-America Print Conference in Detroit . In June 2015, Enrique was the Keynote Commence-ment Speaker at Stanford’s Center for Latin American Studies. Also, he published one new lithographic codex with Shark’s Ink in Lyons, CO, and eight new etchings from his series Recurrent Goya at United Limited Art Editions in Long Island, NY.

More recently, Professor Chagoya gave a talk at The Battery in San Francisco in conjunction with the exhibition Art Exhibi-tion Volume VI, which included several of his drawings and prints. In August, a photo-graphic scroll/codex titled Canibales Daguer-rotipicos was published at Magnolia Editions in Oakland. In September 2015, a print survey titled Palimpsesto Caníbal opened at IAGO (Instituto de Artes Graficas de Oax-aca) in Oaxaca City, Mexico. In October 2015 he gave a talk at the Spitzer Collection Museum.

Paul DeMarinisProfessor Art Practice

An electronic media artist since 1971, Paul DeMarinis has created numerous perfor-mance works, sound and computer installa-tions and interactive electronic inventions. One of the first artists to use computers in performance, he has performed internation-ally at The Kitchen, Festival d’Automne a Paris, Het Apollohuis in Holland and at Ars Electronica in Linz. His interactive audio artworks have been exhibited at the I.C.C. in Tokyo, Bravin Post Lee Gallery in New York, The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and the 2006 Shanghai Biennale. He has received major awards and fellow-ships in both Visual Arts and Music from The National Endowment for the Arts, N.Y.F.A., N.Y.S.C.A., the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and was awarded the Golden Nica for Interactive Art at Ars Electronica in 2006. Much of his recent work deals with how human communication and technology overlap and connect.

Professor DeMarinis’ latest exhibitions include a new video, Turing’s (Screen) Test (2015) shown at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham WA, Helmholtz(DUO) (2015) an installation exhibited at the Miller Gal-lery at Carnegie Mellon University in Pitts-burgh, PA, and a recently completed perma-nent commission from Western Washington University, Lunar Drift (2014). DeMarinis’s article, “Die beharrliche Vergangenheit” ex-amining the role of nostalgia in technology was published in the journal Positionen.

Jan KrawitzSadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities Documentary Film and Video

Jan Krawitz’s feature-length documentary, Perfect Strangers, about an altruistic kidney donor, received the award for Best Docu-mentary at the 2014 Atlanta International Documentary Film Festival. The film was broadcast nationally on the PBS World channel in April. During her autumn quar-ter sabbatical, Krawitz presented Perfect Strangers at a number of conferences and universities including the Radcliffe Insti-tute for Advanced Study, Dartmouth, Reed College, and Lesley University.

Jan Krawitz’s film Mirror Mirror is featured as a case study in Focal Press’s “Producing and Directing the Short Film and Video,” which includes an updated interview in the book’s fifth edition, published this year. Krawitz was also invited to present a lecture about post-production at “DocuDay,” a special section of the annual national conference of the University Film and Video Association.

Pamela LeeJeanette and William Hayden Jones Professor in American Art and Culture Art History

Pamela Lee’s teaching highlights last year included leading a group of undergraduates to visit Robert Smithson’s iconic Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake in Utah; as well as a graduate seminar on Abstract Expression-ism, in which she organized a day of student presentations at the Anderson Collection. Lee continues work on a book-length proj-ect entitled Think Tank Aesthetics: Mid-century Modernism, the Cold War and the Rise of Visual Culture in addition to art criticism. For Artforum, she wrote the cover article on Joan Jonas, the American representative to the Venice Biennale; as well as essays for UC San Diego; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; The Long Mu-seum, Shanghai; and the Belkin Gallery at the University of British Columbia in Van-couver. She is also at work on a short mono-graph on the “Monopoly” paintings of the artist Öyvind Fahlström, for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

In academic year 2014-2015, Professor Lee gave keynote lectures and presentations at institutions ranging from Umea University, Sweden; University College, London; UC Santa Cruz; and the Ullens Center for Con-temporary Art, Beijing.

Pavle LeviAssociate Professor Film and Media Studies

In addition to Levi’s role in the department’s Film and Media Studies Program, he is also Faculty Director of Stanford’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Stud-ies (CREEES). Professor Levi’s primary areas of research and teaching include: Eu-ropean cinema (emphasis on Eastern Eu-rope) and ideology, film and media theory, experimental cinema, intersections of theory and practice. He is the recipient of the 2011 Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Professor Levi taught a range of courses in film studies and East European cultural histories in 2014-15, including an overseas summer class based in Dubrovnik, Croatia. He produced a draft of his latest manuscript, “Jolted Images,” and published a number of essays focused on the intersections of film theory and practice. Under Pavle’s director-ship, CREEES organized an international conference on the topic of “Yugoslav Space Twenty Years after Srebrenica.”

Jean MaAssociate Professor Film and Media Studies

Jean Ma teaches in the Film and Media Studies Program. She has recently taught courses on Chinese cinema, film sound, histories and theories of technological me-dia, visual culture, and horror films. She is the author of Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema (Hong Kong University Press, 2010), and coeditor of Still Mov-ing: Between Cinema and Photography (Duke University Press, 2008). Her newest book, Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema, was published by Duke Press this past Summer.

Recently, Professor Ma published essays on the Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Hong Kong film star Grace Chang. She also wrote a web essay on the transition to sound filmmaking in China for thecine-files.com.

Jody MaxminAssociate Professor Art History

An Associate Professor with a joint appoint-ment in Art & Art History and Classics, Jody worked (with colleagues at the Cantor Center, along with the Stanford Synchro-tron Radiation Light Source at SLAC and the Getty Research Institute) on a project that uses new technology to understand the ancient techniques of Athenian black-figure vase-painters. She also collaborated with Ali Gass, Associate Director for Collec-tions, Exhibitions and Curatorial Affairs at the Cantor Center, on Mining the Ancient, an exhibition that opened in autumn 2015. Her freshman seminar on the Artist in An-cient Greek Society enjoyed a trip to the Stanford Ceramics Studio where Ryan Mc-Carty (graduate student in geology and Co-President of the Stanford Ceramics Club) provided instruction in the art of throwing vases on wheels.

Jamie Meltzer Associate Professor Documentary Film and Video

Jamie Meltzer’s feature documentary films have been broadcast nationally on PBS and have screened at numerous film festivals worldwide. His films include: Informant (2012), about a revolutionary activist turned FBI informant, was released in theaters in the US and Canada in Fall 2013 by Music Box Films and KinoSmith; Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story (Independent Lens, 2003), about the shadowy world of song-poems; Welcome to Nollywood (PBS Broad-cast, 2007), an investigation into the Nigeri-an movie industry; and La Caminata (2009), a short film about a small town in Mexico that runs a simulated border crossing as a tourist attraction. He is currently in the final months of post-production on his latest documentary film, True Conviction, following a group of exonerated men in Dallas who have started a grassroots detective agency to look into possible wrongful convictions. It is slated to broadcast on PBS in Fall 2016. The film has received grants from the MacAr-thur Foundation, the Tribeca Film Institute, and the Sundance Institute.

In academic year 2014-15, Professor Melt-zer participated in the “Sundance Edit and Story Lab,” where documentary projects are paired with creative mentors and spend an intensive week editing and receiving feed-back.

Richard MeyerRobert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History Art History

Richard Meyer teaches courses in twen-tieth-century American art, the history of photography, arts censorship and the first amendment, curatorial practice, and gender and sexuality studies. He is serving as Direc-tor of Graduate Studies in the department and continues in his role as faculty chair of the Stanford in Washington (Arts) program. At the invitation of museum curators in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Los Angeles, and Oslo, Richard Meyer wrote catalogue essays on the “Pop Art Nun” Sister Corita Kent, the pornographic imagination of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and the American culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. He also launched a new book project titled The Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield and “Modern Primitive” Art in the 1940s, parts of which have been delivered as papers at Tulane University, U.C. Berkeley, and as the 28th annual Hilla Rebay Lecture at the Solomon R. Guggen-heim Museum in New York.

In fall 2015, Professor Meyer, along with Cantor Arts Center Director Connie Wolf, co-taught a two-quarter graduate seminar on curatorial practice funded by the Mel-lon Foundation. The seminar culminates in a student-curated exhibition titled Miss-ing Persons, which opened at the Cantor in November 2015. A publication authored by the graduate students in the seminar accom-panies the exhibition. Meyer has developed a new undergraduate course titled “Queer America: Art, Politics, Photography,” which will be offered in Winter 2016.

Alexander NemerovDepartment Chair Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities Art History

The Art Department chairperson at Stan-ford has had a busy year, with one book published by Fraenkel Gallery in March (Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov) and another just completed- a manuscript for his latest about the pho-tographer Lewis Hine (1874-1940). The latter book, called Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine will appear in spring 2016, in conjunction with an exhibition of Hine’s work at the Cantor Arts Center opening in May. The exhibition, which will feature a selection of Hine’s haunting photographs of child laborers, will also include photographs taken at the same sites in the last year by Stanford M.F.A. graduate Jason Francisco. He also published essays on Winslow Hom-er, Jacob Lawrence, Thomas Cole, and Joe Rosenthal this year. In addition to Nem-erov’s work for the department, he con-tinues his membership on the board of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

Bissera PentchevaAssociate Professor Art History

Bissera Pentcheva joined the faculty at Stan-ford in 2003 after teaching as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 2001 with a dis-sertation on the cult of the Virgin in Byzan-tium. She has held a number of prestigious fellowships: Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fel-lowship, Onassis Foundation postdoctoral fellowship, and Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship. She also taught a graduate semi-nar on Phenomenology of the Byzantine Icon at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, summer 2007. Her research inter-ests include: phenomenology and aesthetics, architectural psychoacoustics, performance and ritual, medieval image theory, Icono-clasm, and cult of the Mother of God. She is completing a book project on Hagia So-phia, its acoustics and liturgy. Her Geballe Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Cen-ter “Material Imagination: Sound Space, and Human Consciousness” is now entering its third season.

In academic year 2014-15, Professor Pentcheva presented her research at Agui-lar de Campóo in Spain, Koç University in Turkey, the Academy of Fine Arts in Bul-garia, and organized and co-chaired a ses-sion at CAA, New York. She also curated the exhibition Sensual Splendor: Medieval Art from the Cantor Collection.

Adam TobinSenior Lecturer Film and Media Studies

Over the past year, Adam Tobin insti-tuted story development and film pitching workshops at DreamWorks Animation and hosted visiting screenwriters in his courses, including Victoria Strouse (Finding Dory), Dana Fox (Ben and Kate), and Janet and Da-vid Peoples (12 Monkeys). Tobin oversees the Film and Media Studies summer internship program, and is the director of the depart-ment’s Honors Program. The Stanford Daily named Tobin to their “Top 10 Profes-sors List for 2014.”

Nancy TroyVictoria and Roger Sant Professor in Art Art History

During the past year, Nancy J. Troy pre-sented new work on Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Annual Meeting of the College Art Association. She also began conceptual-izing a project on the phenomenon that she has called the Mondrian Brand. Nancy’s 5-year tenure as department chair culmi-nated in the move to McMurtry this past summer. She is on leave during the current academic year.

Camille Utterback Assistant Professor Art Practice, Design

Camille is Academic Director of the Gradu-ate Design Program. This summer Camille was an artist in residence at the Pilchuck Glass School where she was partnered with expert glass blowers to explore new direc-tions using glass with her projection work. This fall, Camille will exhibit a new dual projection interactive installation Entangled as part of the New Experiments in Art & Tech-nology exhibit curated by Renny Pritikin at the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum. On campus this year Camille cu-rated the Graduate Design show Lima Oscar Foxtrot Tango and a concurrent show in the SubGallery featuring work by the first year Graduate Design students. She also served as a juror for student projects at the ACM Tangible Embedded Interaction conference. Camille is excited this next academic year to be serving as the department’s point person for the new Art Practice + Computer Sci-ence double major, and continues to work on art & technology initiatives across cam-pus. She is also an ingoing board member of ZER01 Art & Technology Network.

In academic year 2014-15, Professor Ut-terback’s Text Rain installation from 1999 was collected by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The piece is the first interac-tive installation to enter the Smithsonian’s collection, and will be on exhibit through late September in the Watch This! Revelations in Media Art exhibition, curated by Film and Media curator Michael Mansfield. Her work is also part of Momentum: Women/Art/Technology at the Rutgers University New Brunswick campus along with ten other notable women artists. Camille was awarded a 2015 Creative Work Fund Grant to be-gin a yearlong collaboration with the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. Other talks and lectures include an invited lecture at Coach in NYC, and an invited lecture at the MacArthur Fellows gathering in Chi-cago.

Richard Vinograd Christensen Professor in Asian Art Art History

Richard Vinograd has taught in the depart-ment since 1989. Dr. Vinograd’s research interests include Chinese portraiture, land-scape painting and cultural geography, ur-ban cultural spaces, painting aesthetics and theory, art historiography, and inter-media studies. He is the author of Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits, 1600-1900 (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); co-editor of “New Understandings of Ming and Qing Painting” (Shanghai: Shanghai Calligraphy Painting Publishing House, 1994); and co-author of Chinese Art & Cul-ture (New York: Prentice Hall and Harry N. Abrams, 2001). He has published more than thirty journal articles, anthology chapters, conference papers, and catalogue essays on topics ranging from tenth-century landscape painting to contemporary transnational arts.

Gail WightAssociate Professor Art Practice

Gail Wight continued to work on The Hexa-podarium and Land of the Flies, two print se-ries that envision an imaginary convergence of insects and plants. The work was includ-ed in both solo and group exhibits, was the focus of an interview with Dewitt T. Cheng and other reviews, and is being shaped into a book. Homage to the Wind, a video included in the international triennial thingworld at the National Art Museum of China, re-ceived “Beijing Top Show Pick of 2014” by Nicole Condon at Beijing’s Central Acad-emy of Fine Arts. Wight also spent time experimenting with the department’s new dye sublimation printer and high-resolution cameras. Combining these tools with pro-cesses she learned during a residency at Kala in 2012, she’s developing new curriculum focused on hybrid printing technologies.

In 2015, Professor Wight’s Benzedrine, a so-lar drawing from 2011, was acquired by the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, a collection of works of art on paper at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.

Xiaoze XiePaul L. and Phyllis Wattis Professor in Art Art Practice

Xiaoze Xie received his Master of Fine Art degrees from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and the University of North Texas. He has had solo exhibitions around the globe and participated in numerous group exhibitions including Shu: Reinvent-ing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art at the China Institute Gallery in New York and Seattle Asian Art Museum, and the traveling exhibition Regeneration: Contemporary Chi-nese Art from China and the US. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Scottsdale Mu-seum of Contemporary Art and the San Jose Museum of Art. Xie received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2003) and artist awards from Phoenix Art Museum (1999) and Dallas Museum of Art (1996).

Our Faculty

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The Department of Art & Art History welcomes two new faculty members this year, one in photography and the other in documentary film and video. Both bring an academic perspective that’s culturally driven and international in scope, and both focus on art and social change.

Jonathan CalmAssistant Professor Photography

native New Yorker, Jonathan Calm is a visual artist in the media of pho-

tography and video whose work combines as well as challenges the aesthetic and ideo-logical tenets of architecture, documentary journalism, and sculpture. A central theme of his work is the relationship between photography and urban architecture, and the powerful role of images in the way architectural constructs shape the lives of individuals and communities.

In recent years, Calm has explored the socio-cultural, histori-cal and geopolitical imprint of public housing on both sides of the Atlantic, tracing the onslaught of the American ‘project’ back to its European Modernist roots across a palimpsest of visionary theoretical predicates and harsh urban realities, with an eye toward ever more critical reinvention of communal city life.

Calm’s art has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2005); Role Play at the Tate Britain (2006); Black Is, Black Ain’t at the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Soci-ety (2008); Streetwise at the Reina Sophia Museum in Madrid (2008) and the Chelsea Art Museum (2011); deCordova Bien-nial at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (2013); and Rooted Movements at LMAKprojects in New York City (2014). Numerous publications including The New York Times, Art in America, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Artforum and The Washington Post have given significant mention to his work.

Srđan KečaAssistant Professor Documentary Film and Video

native of the former Yugoslavia, Srđan Keča has made documen-

taries, essay films and video installations there, in the UK, and the Middle East. After studying physics at the University of Belgrade, he moved on to documen-tary filmmaking at the Paris-based Ateliers Varan. He received his M.A. from the UK National Film and Television School (NFTS) in 2011.

His projects include Mirage, an experimental documentary exploring the marks of displacement and longing in the city of Dubai; A Letter to Dad, an essay-film about family, war and forgetting; and Museum of the Revolution, a multi-channel video installation on one of the most prominent architectural projects of socialist Yugoslavia, which was never built.

Keča’s documentary films have consistently screened at leading festivals including IDFA, DOK Leipzig, Full Frame, Jihlava IDFF, among others, winning multiple awards and critical acclaim. More recently, his installation Museum of the Revolu-tion was on display at the 2014 Venice Biennale of Architecture and has been touring venues including Whitechapel Gallery in London and Project 88 in Mumbai. Flotel Europa, a found-footage essay film he edited and co-produced, premiered at the 2015 Berlinale, winning the Tagesspiegel Jury Award.

Spotlight on New Faculty

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Michael Marrinan Retires

ichael Marrinan retired effective September 2015, and will teach half time for the next two years. He plans to

spend the rest of his time reading and writing in his adopted city of Paris.

Marrinan has taught at Stanford since 1989. His principal area of research is the art and culture of France from the 18th to the

20th century. He has written books on the political meaning of history painting (Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe, 1988), and on the visual culture of nineteenth-century Paris (Romantic Paris, 2009). He has just completed a new book on the French painter Gustave Caillebotte, which will be published soon by the Getty Research Institute, with the assis-tance of grants from the Department of Art & Art History and the Ruth Halperin Fund. Earlier this year, Marrinan wrote the lead essay for Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye,

an exhibition of Caillebotte’s pictures at the National Gallery in Washington that opened in June 2015.

Marrinan’s interests go beyond painter and places. He has studied how knowledge is presented in visual form, expressing his ideas in The Culture of Dia-gram, written with John Bender and published in 2010. In 2007 he co-directed a year-long seminar at Stanford sponsored by the Mel-lon Foundation called “Visual-izing Knowledge : From Alberti’s Window to Visual Arrays.” He has also co-edited volumes on description in the 18th century (Regimes of Description, 2005) and the digital legacy of Walter Benjamin’s Kunstwerk essay (Mapping Benjamin, 2003). He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1989 and a Senior Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in 2011.

Marrinan continues to be busy. He traveled to the Kimbell Museum at Fort Worth in November. He lectured on in-tersections between the paintings and letters of Vincent Van Gogh at San José State University. He also finished an essay on diagrams in the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce for a volume called Thinking with Diagrams to be published in 2016. And he taught a Stanford Introductory Seminar on the theme of “distraction” from nineteenth century flâneurs to Facebook users today. The entire class traveled to New York City for four days to explore the historical dimensions and urban reali-ties of our increasingly divided attention provoked by digital technologies.

“Michael Marrinan has brought so many wonderful things to our department for the past 25 years,” said Alexander Nem-erov, the chair. “He has been a passionate teacher and a pas-sionate scholar. He always thinks on a high plane, with great erudition, and the utmost seriousness. And he is a good per-son, a good friend.”

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“He has been a passionate teacher and a passionate schol-ar. He always thinks on a high plane, with great erudition, and the utmost seriousness. And he is a good person, a good friend.”





Staff Bios

Kelly BattcherAssistant Manager

Kelly has been with the department since June 2006. She manages the administration of faculty research and grant funding, bud-get reconciliation, and adjunct faculty ap-pointments. In May 2015, she received the Dean’s Award of Merit.

Christopher J. BennettFinance Associate

Christopher holds a BA in music, with an emphasis on early music performance. Be-fore working at Stanford, he worked as an Administrator for The Choral Project, a re-gional music non-profit, where he still sings as a member of the choir. When not track-ing department finances he enjoys camping, gaming, and singing the national anthem at Sharks games. He is honored to be joining the Art & Art History Department as Fi-nance Associate.

Rory BrownFacilities Manager

Rory has been with the department since August 2006. His roles include: building operations, project management, health and safety, property and space management, IT support and general administration. He is currently working toward a BA in Phi-losophy and Religion at San Francisco State and lives with his wife and three children in Santa Clara.

Lauren DouglasExperimental Media Studio Manager

Lauren Douglas joined the Art & Art Histo-ry Department in 2014 and oversees the op-erations of the Experimental Media, Sound, and Design Labs. She spent the majority of her first year preparing for the move into the department’s new home at McMurtry, including researching and making purchases for the new Print Lab that will help expand the department’s programming in the new space. Her studio practice focuses on pho-tography and she has an MFA from Mills College.

Linda EsquivelUndergraduate Coordinator

Working closely with the Student Services Officer, faculty, and staff, Linda advises de-partment majors and minors, monitoring their progress and ensuring they’re on track for graduation, and coordinates art-focused events and workshops exploring gradu-ate schools, internships, career development within the arts, networking and commu-nity-building. She also assists with prepa-ration of the annual course schedule and Bulletin entries. In her role overseeing the Peer Mentoring program, Linda works with students to become leaders and role models for current and prospective majors/minors.

Matthew FishelArt Media Technologist

As Art Media Technologist, Matthew Fishel researches, implements and facilitates the use of art production and presentation tech-nology for the entire department. His du-ties include classroom AV support, training and maintenance for advanced digital tools, and consulting for special projects. Matthew came to Stanford from Baltimore, where he helped found ICA Baltimore in 2012. He is a practicing artist and digital filmmaker, and earned his MFA in Interdisciplinary Art at Maryland Institute College of Art in 2010.

Christian GainsleyFilm & Media Studies Technical Assistant

Christian has been a technician with the Documentary Film Program since 2008. Managing new equipment to purchase, teach, and check out to students of the pro-gram, his job will be busier than ever this year, with the expanded facilities of the new McMurtry Building. He’s looking forward to discovering all the nooks and crannies in which to do so.

Elis ImbodenDepartment Manager

Elis arrived at Stanford in 2005 after serv-ing as administrative director for non-profits working on arts and the environment. As department manager, she is responsible for all administrative and operational functions of the department and oversees our team of staff. Her role includes direct oversight of the department’s budget and finances, and management of faculty appointments and promotions processes. Elis also enjoys vol-unteering at her son’s elementary school.

Regina MillerStudent Services Manager

Regina joined the department in August 2014; she came to us from the Department of Statistics where she had served as Student Services Officer for over three years. Prior to Statistics, she worked in the Department of Anthropology as Student Services Spe-cialist. As our Student Services Manager, she oversees all aspects of student services in the department, with special focus on the graduate programs. She works closely with graduate students and faculty, and supports the four graduate programs including advis-ing students, degree progress, curriculum planning, student funding, and admissions.

Meredith NoeEvents & Public Relations Manager

Meredith, an East Coast transplant who pre-viously worked for WGBH Public Broad-casting in Boston and Sotheby’s in New York City, joined the team in April 2013 to oversee planning and production of the de-partment’s approximately 80 annual events. She manages publicity and communications, handles donor media relations, and liaises with various Stanford departments and organizations to facilitate arts programming on campus.

Jeff StevensPreparator and Production Assistant

Jeff joined the Art & Art History team in July 2015 as a preparator and production assistant to help with exhibitions and events at the McMurtry Building and the Stanford Art Gallery. Jeff assists students, faculty, and visiting artists to install and de-install artwork in various exhibition spaces on the Stanford campus. Prior to Stanford, Jeff served for fifteen years as a museum prepara-tor and production supervisor at the San Francisco International Airport Museum. In this role he was responsible for the instal-lation and de-installation of exhibitions as well as matting and framing of photography shows. Jeff graduated from San Francisco State University in 2012 with a dual bach-elors degree in Art History and Studio Arts.

Dan TiffanyStudio & Sculpture Lab Manager

Based in the sculpture shop, Dan, a member of the team since 2007, also oversees opera-tions in the painting, drawing, printmaking, and design studios. He provides safety and skills training for students using all of the department shop tools, and advises a wide range of classes on material safety matters. Ever up for a challenge, Dan has the most fun helping students find a way to give form to their ideas.

Mark UrbanekFilm & Media Studies Technical Manager

Mark is about to start his 26th year at Stan-ford with the Documentary Film and Video Program. He oversees all technical and facilities requirements of the Documentary Program, and manages the program’s op-erational budget. He is responsible for the quarterly student film screenings as well as the annual thesis screening and serves as a liaison to program alumni. He is excited about the move to the McMurtry building and is looking forward to the new facilities.

Craig WeissPhotography Lab Manager

Since the spring of 2002, Craig has served as Photography Lab Manager in the depart-ment. He oversees the digital darkroom facilities, computer workstations, scanners and printers plus the traditional black/white darkroom facilities, including 35mm, 2 1/4, 4x5 & 8x10 film camera equipment. He works with undergraduate and graduate stu-dents on photography-related projects and also supervises 6-10 student lab attendants each quarter. His personal black and white photography project, documenting Route 20 – the longest US road, will be exhibited during the summer of 2017.

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Contact Us

Stanford University Department of Art & Art History

Telephone: 650.723.3404 Email: [email protected] Website: art.stanford.edu Facebook: facebook.com/StanfordART

Donations to the Department of Art & Art History can be made online at giving.stanford.edu/goto/artdepartmentgift or via our website.

McMurtry Building 355 Roth Way Stanford, CA 94305


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stanford university department of art & art history · 2015-2016 newsletter stanford university...

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