Anthea Callen has joined the School of Art, College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU, as Professor of Art (Practice-led Research). Her expertise is in visual culture and the gender politics of visual representation spanning the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, notably in France and Britain. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century artists’ materials and techniques and she has written key texts such as Techniques of the Impressionists and The Art of Impressionism.
A fully online Graduate Diploma and a Masters in Art History and Curatorship have been introduced at the ANU. The online delivery has been coordinated by Dr Zoja Bojic and replicates the on campus program. Other innovations in the course offerings at ANU include a new Asian Art major which will be available from 2012. The major was developed by Dr Charlotte Galloway and draws together the offerings on Asian art from various Colleges at the ANU.
Many of the ACT art historians have been working overseas. Professor Sasha Grishin is on sabbatical for most of 2011 and as part of the ‘Australian Season’ at the British Museum he delivered a talk on contemporary Australian printmaking. Charlotte Galloway was on leave in 2010 and was living in London, where she was an academic visitor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and worked as a consultant for the British Museum. Elisabeth Findlay was an Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford during the Michaelmas term, where she researched the portraits of Joseph Banks.
A series of conferences will be held in Canberra over the following months, including:
Public Interactions: Dialogues on Art and Public Space
20-23 July 2011
School of Art, College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU
This international symposium will be held in Canberra and International and local artists, architects, designers and public intellectuals will converge to explore the role of art in the public spaces of the contemporary community. This symposium will engage with what it might mean to locate art within public spaces. It will address ephemeral projects and guerrilla activities in the interstices of inhabited spaces alongside commissioned public works and official commemorative precincts.
World and World-Making in Art: Connectivities and Differences
11-13 August 2011
Humanities Research Centre, College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU
This international conference coincides with the Humanities Research Centre’s theme for 2011 on ‘The World and World-Making in the Humanities and the Arts’. The conference will explore a number of key issues in art discourses today and also address a central concern of the HRC’s theme in invoking the idea of world-making beyond cultural divides and instead, speaking ‘to a domain of human connectivity’. It will explore the significance of connectivities and differences in the field of art: its practices, histories, institutions, inclusions and exclusions, ethical concerns and theoretical and methodological approaches under the overarching theme of ‘The World and World-Making’. Much of the focus of the conference will inevitably be on contemporary transformations resulting in part from globalization and geopolitical changes in our world, including migrations and transnational movements of people and art as well as new means of human connectivity and cultural exchange, and historical dimensions of the theme of ‘The World and World-Making in Art’.
The conference will complement an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery on contemporary Asian portraits (Beyond the Self: Contemporary Portraiture from Asia) and the panel on ‘art and conflict’ will be jointly hosted with the Australian War Memorial.
ACUADS Annual Conference 2011 – Creativity: brain-mind-body
21 – 23 September 2011
School of Art, College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU Research School of the Humanities and the Arts, College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU Faculty of Art and Design, University of Canberra
The Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) coordinates theme- based annual conferences (with rotating locations throughout Australia) as part of its professional development responsibility. The 2011 conference is a 3-day program built around the broader theme of creativity. The conference invites speakers to discuss creativity in practice-led research in Schools of Art and Design and academics and practitioners working with ideas involving visualisation, materiality, tradition, technology and hybridity.