In this final episode of the season focused on the craft of writing, Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator in the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Cammy Brothers, a scholar of art and architecture at Northeastern University. In this episode, Brothers examines Michaelangelo’s drawing practice and that of his contemporary, Giuliano da Sangallo, and the ways in which da Sangallo’s architectural drawings aim to assemble fragmentary images of Rome on the page. Brothers also...

In this episode, Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator in the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Jennifer Nelson, a poet and scholar of early modern art at the University of Delaware. Through the lens of their first book on Holbein, and a second, forthcoming, on Cranach, Nelson describes how comparative studies of elite cultural production can allow us to the see the category of art as capacious, and capable of dismantling our concept of mastery. They offer concrete advice on...

In this continuation of a season focused on the craft of writing in art history, Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator in the Research and Academic Program) speaks to Shira Brisman, a historian of early modern art and assistant professor of the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania. Through the lens of her two books, the first on Albrecht Dürer, and the second, forthcoming, on the goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer (1563–1618), Brisman explores how art can shape communities,...

This is the first episode of a new season focused on the craft of writing in art history. Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator for the Research and Academic Program and a fiction writer) speaks with Alexander Nemerov, professor of art history at Stanford University, about his most recent book, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s. He discusses his writing process, how his craft has changed over time, and this current book’s varied sources of inspiration—from painting and...

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with artist and curator Tsedaye Makonnen about her multidisciplinary studio, curatorial, and research-based practice. They discuss how Tsedaye’s sculptural installations and performances thread together her identity as a daughter of Ethiopian immigrants and a Black American woman to explore the transhistorical forced migration of Black communities across the globe. 

In this week episode Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Sarah Hamill, a scholar of modern and contemporary art and professor at Sarah Lawrence College, about the role of description in art history, and how description is always a form of interpretation. Sarah describes how the embodied experience of sculpture captured her imagination and how she came to understand the role of photography in mediating our encounters with art objects. She also...

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Sergei Tcherepnin, an artist who works in the intersections of sound, music, sculpture, theater, and photography. We discuss how his work is made to be interacted with, creating new intimacies—listening by hearing, but also listening by touching, by walking, by pressing, by feeling. Sergei describes how he seeks to create multiple focal points within each work, activating a kind of queer...

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Donette Francis, an Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami, Coral Gables. A founding member of the Hemispheric Caribbean Studies Collective, her research and writing investigate place, aesthetics, and cultural politics in the African Diaspora. They discuss the politics of making visible what Donette calls “minor histories.” Across her work on the novel as well as in the...

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark) speaks with Mary Lum, a visual artist based in North Adams, Massachusetts, about how her intricate collages, paintings, and photographs explore the margins of city life, constructed geographies, and her use of text as image. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship for Advanced Study, and several MacDowell Fellowships, Lum taught at Bennington College from 2005 to...

In this episode, guest interviewer Anne Helmreich (The Getty Foundation) speaks with Koenraad Brosens, professor of art history at the University of Leuven in Belgium, and Blake Stimson, professor of art history at the University of Illinois Chicago, about the future of universities in a digital age. They discuss the benefits and challenges of teaching at public institutions, the concept of “the third generation university,” and potential pitfalls to the vogue for interdisciplinarity....

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...

In this episode, guest interviewer Anne Helmreich (Getty Foundation) speaks with Niall Atkinson, associate professor of art history at the University of Chicago, and Min Kyung Lee, assistant professor of Growth and Structure of Cities at Bryn Mawr College, to reflect on the canon of art history. They discuss how the canon as a narrative offers a shared framework for discussion, analysis, and exchange, but problems arise when the canon becomes fixed or an imposition. Niall and Min describe how...

Paul B. Jaskot (Duke University) speaks with Hubertus Kohle (professor of art history at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany) and Emily Pugh (an art historian and the Digital Humanities Specialist for The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles) on the relation between the digital humanities and the potential for art history. They reflect on how we work as scholars in terms of accessing and documenting archives and data, and the difference in scale between transferable...

 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...

Puerto Rican multidisciplinary artist nibia pastrana santiago’s video NO MORE EFFORTS (2020) uses humor, dance, and site-specificity to critique contemporary labor conditions and challenge histories of colonialism, dispossession, and marginalization.

A still life, like a poem, may be charged with private meaning, and yet it is offered like a gift that the viewer may open for themselves, not unlike the delicate unfurling of a flower. Charles Demuth’s watercolor Red Poppies of 1929 exemplifies this exchange in the way it pictures how vulnerability may still be resilient, as expressed in a contemporaneous poem by Williams Carlos Williams that meditates on loss.   

The Jiu-Cheng Palace Stele inscription, created in China in 632, during the early Tang dynasty, is an influential work of Chinese calligraphy that embodies a skillful balance between liminality and tranquil harmony.

Georges Seurat’s masterpiece A Sunday on La Grande Jatte–1884, is the kind of painting that has become so ubiquitous it almost disappears into itself, but within this busy scene of curiously automata-like human interaction lie many clues to the transformations of the period. For one, this picture manifests a shift in thinking from imitation to civilization, mimesis to evolution, insofar as it encapsulates Darwin’s theories of natural selection and their ramifications for the understanding of...

Gabriel Metsu's painting View into a Hall with a Jester, a Boy, and his Dog from c. 1667 subtly upends expectations of Dutch genre painting from this period. Rather than depicting a placid scene of everyday life, Metsu reflexively calls attention to the constructed nature of this illusionistic scene and implicates the viewer within the cast of characters. 

 Nadine Robinson’s installation Coronation Theme: Organon of 2008 uses its monumental sculptural presence and an immersive soundscape to weave complex layers referencing aspects of Black life in America over the past century,  from dance halls to sacred and secular oration, to the Civil Rights movement and police brutality.  

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Asma Naeem, the Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Asma shares her circuitous path into the discipline, from her sensitivity to the visual landscape of her childhood within an Indo-Pakistani immigrant family, to the formative challenges of practicing law in a district attorney’s office in Manhattan,  and how her tenacious...

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...

In this episode Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Nancy Um, professor of art history at Binghamton University in New York State, whose research explores the Islamic world from the perspective of the coast, with a focus on material, visual, and built culture on the Arabian Peninsula and around the rims of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Nancy describes her experience of conducting fieldwork in Yemen, particularly as a young...

In this episode Caro Fowler (Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) speaks with Joseph Leo Koerner, professor of art history at Harvard University, who teaches and writes about the history of art from the late Middle Ages to the present day, with an emphasis on Northern Renaissance art. Joseph discusses his early focus on literary studies, psychoanalysis, and romanticism, and how his curiosity about the traumatic core of history has informed his work....