Organized by Dr. Deirdre Smith in conjunction with her graduate seminar "Other Animals: Ways of Knowing and Seeing Across Species", this symposium includes presentations by eight students on topics related to how artists and works of art mediate matters of species and animality.

The program will close with a keynote address by Sarah Cohen, Professor of Art History and Women’s Studies and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University at Albany, SUNY. Professor Cohen will share material from her recent book, Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art: Sensation, Matter, and Knowledge (Bloomsbury, 2021). In this book she takes a close look at representations of animals in works by specialists such as Desportes, Oudry, and Chardin, as well as a range of decorative arts and ceramics that feature animals, and considers them in conjunction with eighteenth-century philosophical theories of sensory perception and knowledge. She argues that the artistic animal characters actively demonstrate sensory based understanding as a means of knowing the world.

Register for this event →

Please note that in order to ensure the timeliness of confirmation emails with Zoom link information, this registration link expires at 5:00 pm central time on May 12, 2022. Those who have registered for the event during this timeframe will receive an email from the Department of Art and Art History with Zoom information the day before the event. Please contact Jill Velez at jill.velez@austin.utexas.edu for assistance.

Schedule

9:00
Opening Remarks

Session 1: When Species Meet

9:15
Maggie Mitts — Whose Gaze?: On Looking Between Human and Non-Human Animals in the Work of Peter Hujar

9:45
Jie Chen — Animals and the Failure of Artworks: On Huang Yong Ping’s Theater of the World

10:15
Minsu Kwon — Awkward Interaction: Nina Katchoudourian’s GIFT/GIFT

10:45
Break

Session 2: Agency, Materiality, Soul

11:00
Zoe Roden — On the Puppet Soul: Kleist, Surrealism, and the Animal Body

11:30
Phoebe Zipper — Shared Sensations: Darwin and Redon’s Les Origines

12:00
Victoria McCausland — Real Imaginary Creatures: On the Affective Agency of Alebrijes

12:30
Break

Session 3: Celluloid Creatures

1:15
Tristan Bass–Krueger — Animal Life (and Death) in the Silent Era through the Films of Edison Studios

1:45
Macaella Gray — Torn, Untorn: Parker Tyler’s The Granite Butterfly (1945)

2:15
Break

Keynote Address

2:30
Sarah R. CohenEnlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art: Sensation, Matter, and Knowledge
 



Sarah R. Cohen is a Professor of Art History and Women’s Studies and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her books include Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, 2000); Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art: Sensation, Matter and Knowledge (Bloomsbury, 2021); and Picturing Animals in Early Modern: Art and Soul (forthcoming, Harvey Miller/Brepols).

Event Status
Scheduled
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