On Sunday, June 19, from 1 to 4 p.m., the Bruce Museum will host “The Arts and New Technologies” Graduate Student Symposium. Building on the theme of the Museum’s “Electric Paris” exhibition, which explores ways in which artists at the turn of the twentieth century depicted scenes lit by both older oil and gas lamps and the emerging electric lighting, the symposium will feature graduate student research on the relationship between the arts and the advent of new technologies. The event is open to the public and free with museum admission and for students with school ID. Reservations on Eventbrite.com are strongly recommended.
Dr. Gülru Çakmak, Assistant Professor of Nineteenth-Century European Art at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, will moderate a panel of four graduate students. Her research focuses on the influence of emerging technologies of light-based sequential vision, such as panorama, diorama, and the magic lantern, and the impact of this transformation on easel painting.
Kirsty Sinclair Dootsen, a doctoral candidate in Yale’s History of Art, Film and Media Studies Program, will present “The Foul Blotches of the Capitalist Dyer: Coal-Tar Colors and the Materials of Modernity.” Her dissertation traces an industrial history of color in Britain, from the invention of synthetic dyes in the 1850s to the television “color strikes” of the early 1970s.
Lauren A. Johnson, a PhD student in art history at Washington University in St. Louis and previously a curatorial assistant at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, will present “La fée de Lumière: Picturing Loïe Fuller and Modernity.” Lauren specializes in American art at the turn of the twentieth century.
Lauren Rosati, a PhD Candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, will discuss “The Howling Telephone and the Invisible Orchestra.” She is the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Samuel Adams completed his PhD in art history at the University of Southern California in spring 2016 and has held research positions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, and Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. His presentation is titled “Returns of the Avant-Garde in German Theater: From Film Montage to Television Art.”
