Professor Emeritus John O’Brian: New Publications
Professor Emeritus John O’Brian has published two books that stem from his ongoing research and curatorial work regarding the engagement of photography with the atomic era. The Bomb in the Wilderness: Photography and the Nuclear Era in Canada was released by UBC Press in October and Through Post-Atomic Eyes, co-edited with Claudette Lauzon, came out from McGill-Queen’s University Press in September. Professor O’Brian was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2020 Universities Art Association of Canada conference in Vancouver this October. […]
Music, Art, and Architecture Library
The Music, Art, and Architecture Library’s Canadian Art Exhibition Catalogue Collection has expanded to Levels 3 and 4 of the Ridington Room, and many new catalogues were acquired in 2019.* This collection brings together catalogues produced for exhibitions by Canadian artists and exhibitions held at Canadian art institutions and is a record of historical and current art practice in Canada. Materials […]
Recent Graduates Pursue Diverse Research and Creative Practices
We extend warm congratulations to thirty-one graduate students who completed their programs over the past year and we thank them for their many contributions to the intellectual and artistic conversations in the department. PhD, Art History Heiða Árnadóttir, “The Conceptual, the Romantic, and the Nonhuman: The SÚM Group and the Emergence of Contemporary Art in Iceland, 1965–1978” Kristen Carter, “Enraged and Confused: Art after Student […]
The Artist’s Self (and Selfies) at the Vancouver Art Gallery
This past spring, students in ARTH 381: Artist in Society (with Professor Catherine Soussloff) visited Cindy Sherman, an important retrospective of the artist’s work on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery. In the course, which investigates the figure of the visual artist from the early modern period to the present, students were asked to write an impressionistic account of the exhibition accompanied by a selfie taken against the backdrop of […]
Professor Catherine Soussloff: Continuation of Michel Foucault and Current Work
Professor Catherine Soussloff’s work on Michel Foucault continues following the publication of her book Foucault on Painting (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) with an article, “Painting for Fools,” which is forthcoming from the journal Theory, Culture and Society. The article explores Foucault’s work on the theme of the ship of fools in History of Madness, Bosch’s Ship of Fools painting in the Louvre, and a little-known […]
Professor Georgios Makris: Recent Talks and MTAP Research
In October 2019, Professor Georgios Makris gave a talk at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies, Simon Fraser University. His recent projects include a talk at an international workshop titled Textiles in the Greek World from Antiquity to the Modern Era, held at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in April 2020. This summer, Makris returned to the field to […]
Alumni Spotlight: Ken Lum Wins Governor General’s Award and Gershon Iskowitz Prize
AHVA alumnus Ken Lum (MFA’85) received two major prizes this year in recognition of his extraordinary artistic career. In February, he won the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. In the words of nominator Brian McBay, Lum’s work “manages to depict great tensions in the collective identity of people and cultures who face the difficulties of authenticity and social belonging.” […]
Koerner Artist in Residence
In 2019–20, the department hosted Stan Douglas as Koerner Artist in Residence. Douglas gave a public talk, conducted studio visits with MFA students, and led a seminar with a table reading of his latest play. Stan Douglas is a visual artist who lives and works in Vancouver and Los Angeles. Since 1990 his films, videos, and photographs have been seen in […]
Farewell
Professor Maureen Ryan (PhD, Chicago; MA, BA, UBC) has retired after thirty-two years with the department. Her lectures and seminars at the undergraduate and graduate levels took up the charged cultural politics associated with constructs of difference—gender, sexualities, religion, ethnicity, and class—within the frame of global networks, mobile populations, and the fraught and often aestheticized histories of migration and the […]
Welcome
We welcomed new faculty members to the department in 2019. Thanks for joining us! Professor Georgios (Yorgos) Makris (PhD, University of Birmingham) specializes in the arts of Byzantium, with particular emphasis on the material culture and archaeology of monasticism as well as the dissemination and use of portable objects across the eastern Mediterranean. Makris is currently at work on his first monograph that examines the sacred topography, […]