Jeremy Kramer

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. The award was given in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the profession through leadership, creation, education, curatorial projects, service, and publication. 

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 Revolt, circa 1970”

Katherine Jackson, “Total Economy: The Artist Placement Group (1969–1976)”

Jeff O’Brien, “The Right to Be Seen: Archiving Absence in Post-Civil War Lebanon”

Marisa Sánchez, “The Beckett Effect: The Work of Stan Douglas, Paul Chan, and Tania Bruguera” 

Rajarshi Sengupta, “Making Kalamkari Textiles: Artisans and Agency in Coromandel, India”

Ivana Vranic, “Making and Remaking Renaissance Sculpture: The Terracotta Groups (1460–1560)” 

MA, Art History 

Ilaria Casini, “The Vanishing Point: A Black Feminist Paradigm on the Early Modern Canon in the National Galleries”

Suhyun Choi, “Dressing Difference: Gender, Ethnicity, and Subjectivity in Representations of Chima Chogori in Japan”

Annika Davis, “Between Individual Expression and Collectivism: Onchi Kōshirō’s Wartime Prints”

Adrian Deveau, “Art Crimes: Queering the Revolution through the Work of Pussy Riot and Petr Pavlensky”

Megan Jenkins, “Thinking Continuity in the Works and Milieus of Fahrelnissa Zeid”

Lucas Kling, “Impressions of the Grid: Veil, Velo, and the Printed Image in Early Modern Europe”

Schuyler Krogh, “Birthing the Modern: Modernity, Maternity, and Subjectivity in the Art of Berthe Morisot”

Lanna Lastiwka, “Visible Female Power Structures in Nineteenth Century Algeria”

Kristina Parzen, “The Space in-between Cultures: Site-Specific Meeting Places of Indigenous and European Knowledges”

Marcus Prasad, “Splitting Space: Destabilizing the Suburban Souse in Postwar Art and Contemporary Horror Film”

Anika Sterba, “The Magazine as Surrealist Object: VVV and the Reanimation of a Movement in New York during World War II”

Catherine Volmensky, “Replica Chains and the Portability of Jerusalem”

Alice Wang, “Collaboration as Camouflage: The Mobilization of Art during Cold War Scientific Exceptionalism” 

MFA, Visual Art 

Matthew Ballantyne

Alejandro A. Barbosa

Rosamunde Bordo

Angela Glanzmann

Cameron Kerr

Samantha Kinsley

Mandana Mansouri

Ramey Newell

Nazanin Oghanian

Jay Pahre

Weronika Stepien 

Learn more about the MFA students’ individual practices and see images of work from their graduating exhibitions Shores and one sentence too many, one word too few here: 

https://belkin.ubc.ca/exhibitions/shores-ubc-master-of-fine-arts-graduate-exhibition-2019/

https://belkin.ubc.ca/exhibitions/ubc-master-of-fine-arts-exhibition-2020/

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 monumental drawing by the writer and artist Pierre Klossowski on the theme. She has used the newly deposited manuscripts on Foucault at the Bibliothèque nationale and Klossowski’s theories on painting in a new interpretation of their understanding of madness.  

Professor Soussloff’s work on Viennese art history and Jewish identity continues with a forthcoming essay “Puppets in Diaspora,” which examines the work of the linguist Andreas Tietze on the Turkish shadow theatre in light of the themes of emigration, phantasy, and history sedimented in these folk art artefacts from the Ottoman Empire. 

Image: Ken Lum by Ryan Collerd

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.” The work of fellow winners in the category, including Anna Torma, Dana Claxton, Deanna Bowen, Jorge Lozano Lorza, Michael Fernandes, Ruth Cuthand, and Zainub Verjee, is currently on exhibition at the Art Gallery of Alberta (until February 2021). 

Lum also received the 2019 Gershon Iskowitz Prize, presented annually to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to the visual arts in Canada. Awarded by the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario, the $50,000 prize includes a solo exhibition at the AGO, scheduled for 2021. Previous recipients include Liz Magor, General Idea, Stan Douglas, Geoffrey Farmer, Brian Jungen, Michael Snow, and Rebecca Belmore. Congratulations, Ken! 

Ken Lum graduated with an MFA in Visual Art in 1985 and began his teaching career in the department in 1990. He would go on to become chair of our MFA program (2000–06), before accepting an appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is currently Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professor and chair of Fine Arts in the Weitzman School of Design. 

Known for his conceptual and representational art in a number of media, including painting, sculpture, and photography, Lum has an extensive exhibition history spanning thirty years, with work in major exhibitions such as Documenta 11, the Venice Biennale, São Paulo Biennial, Shanghai Biennale, Carnegie Triennial, Sydney Biennale, Busan Biennale, Liverpool Biennial, Gwangju Biennale, Moscow Biennial, and Whitney Biennial, among others. He has realized a number of public art projects for the cities of Vienna, Utrecht, Leiden, St. Moritz, St. Louis, Toronto, and Vancouver, where, for a commission for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, he produced the iconic Monument for East Vancouver illuminated cross, which transformed into a permanent landmark a decades-old graffiti symbol well-known throughout the city’s east side. 

A co-founder and founding editor of Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Lum has published extensively, including Everything Is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life, 1991–2018, published this year by Concordia University Press. This new book, edited by, Kitty Scott, chief curator at the National Gallery of Canada, includes diary entries, articles, catalogue essays, and curatorial statements.