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Conferences & lectures, Arts & culture

Jarislowsky Institute - Afternoons at the Institute, John O'Brian, UBC


Date & time
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
4 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Speaker(s)

John O'Brian, University of British Columbia and Johanne Sloan, Concordia University

Cost

Conversations are free and open to the public

Contact

Samuel Gaudreau-Lalande
(514) 848-2424 ext. 4713

Where

Engineering and Visual Arts Complex
1515 St. Catherine W.
Room EV-3.719

Wheel chair accessible

Yes

Teaching Vancouver

In the present-day context of the global circulation of artworks and ideas, how is it possible to account for the art of a single city?  Can a city-based art history  escape the discourse of a national art history? This event will examine the specific case of Vancouver, while asking: How do we teach a city’s art?

This conversation will involve John O’Brian, professor of art history at the University of British Columbia, and Johanne Sloan, professor of art history at Concordia University. The session will be moderated by Dorothy June Fraser, doctoral student in the Department of Art History at Concordia University.
 

John O’Brian completed his Ph.D. in art history at Harvard under the supervision of T.J. Clark and joined University of British Columbia in 1987, where he is Professor and Faculty Associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. He has published on modern art history and on theory and criticism, particularly on the institutionalization of modernism in North America, producing more than a dozen books and seventy articles. From 2008-2011, he was the Brenda & David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies. During his tenure, he explored the engagement of photography with the atomic era in Canada. The research formed part of a larger project on nuclear photography in North America and Japan, called “Camera Atomica,” which is being supported by a research grant from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada. “Camera Atomica” is also the name of an exhibition he is preparing for the Art Gallery of Ontario. A related book, Atomic Postcards: Radioactive Messages from the Cold War (Intellect Books), co-authored with Jeremy Borsos, was published in 2011.

Johanne Sloan is a professor in the Department of Art History, Concordia University, and Deputy-Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute. She has published extensively on the artist/filmmaker Joyce Wieland, including Joyce Wieland’s The Far Shore (University of Toronto, 2010, Canadian Cinema series.)  She wrote about the expanded-cinema experiment in the Kaleidoscope pavilion for Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67, ed. M. Gagnon & J. Marchessault (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). Her writing about contemporary art includes essays for the 2011 Quebec Triennial, and the 2012 Musée national des Beaux Arts du Québec exhibition À Ciel ouvert: Le nouveau pleinairisme.  She is the co-editor, with Rhona Richman Kenneally, of the book Expo 67: Not just a souvenir (University of Toronto Press, 2010).  She is the presently the principal investigator for the SSHRC-funded collaborative research project Networked Art Histories: Assembling Contemporary Art in Canada, on-going until 2016.

Dorothy June Fraser, is a PhD student in art history at Concordia University as well as a writer and poet. Following her MA research into feminist archives, she investigates the intersection of anti-oppressive scholarship and grassroots archives and the invigoration of liminal queer sensibilities and marginalized voices therein.
 

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