2017 2017: Dr. Rebecca Uchill joins CVPA

Art History Full-Time Lecturer, Dr. Uchill joins us from MIT

Rebecca Uchill joins us from MIT, where she spent the last two years as Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Art, Science & Technology.  She has extensive experience in publishing, museum work, event production, and academia. Uchill is editor of Art Journal Open, a publication of the College Art Association, and has held positions at Mass MoCA and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, among others. Recently, she was guest curator for the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, where she organized the exhibition Futurefarmers: Errata—Brief Interruptions (2017). She has produced interdisciplinary art programs in venues ranging from lecture halls to school buses to Bulgarian rooftops, particularly as co-founder of the interdisciplinary curatorial group Experience Economies. A dedicated teacher, she has served as a visiting professor at Tufts/SMFA and MIT, where she was awarded a grant to lead a graduate-level research-based excursion in the American Southwest to view potent and contested sites of land art, land use, and landscape.

Uchill has presented her scholarship internationally and across the disciplines of arts, sciences, and the humanities, most recently at the annual conferences for the Society for Social Sciences of Science and the College Art Association, and as a keynote speaker for the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. She is co-editor, with Caroline A. Jones and David Mather, of Experience: Culture, Cognition and the Common Sense, published by MIT Press in 2016; she has also authored exhibition catalogues and contributions to Antonis Pittas: Road to Victory (Mousse Publishing), Future Anterior, Journal of Curatorial Studies, Art Papers, Art New England, and other scholarly journals and art periodicals. Her dissertation research on curator Alexander Dorner will appear next year in an MIT Press publication organized by the RISD Museum. Her current research imperatives include the matters of landscapes and urbanisms, technologies and materialisms of contemporary art, and histories that confront the apparatuses of power that produce the canon. Uchill received her PhD from MIT, her MA from Williams College, and her BA from NYU.

ARH 390 – PROCESSING PLACE
Guest Speaker Series

This series examines the concept of “place” in art and cultural production. From public art to environmental art to discourses of “placemaking,” the speakers in this series will consider a variety of artistic media, asking: how are places understood through the interconnected framings of publics, legislatures, and aesthetics? All events are free and open to the public. Contact Dr. Rebecca Uchill ruchill@umassd.edu for further details.

SEPT 19, 3:30pm: DAN BORELLI AND GAVIN KROEBER (CVPA 156)

Dan Borelli is an artist, designer, and Director of Exhibitions at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. In 2010, Dan started an art-based research inquiry into the Nyanza Superfund Site in Ashland Massachusetts, which is his hometown. With the support of an ArtPlace America and NEA Our Town grants, Dan created a series of public interventions as well as the permanent ‘Ashland Memorial Healing Garden”. Gavin Kroeber is an artist, writer, and head of the interdisciplinary Studio for Art & Urbanism. His projects and writings are concerned broadly with cultural dynamics of power and in particular with their expression in the poetics of place. His current work is focused on the extreme urbanism of America's Western Sun Belt and redirective approaches to landscape.

SEPT 26, 3:30pm: JULIA YEZBICK (VIRTUAL VISIT) AND SPECIAL SCREENING OF “HOW TO RUST” (CVPA 153)

Julia Yezbick is a filmmaker, artist, and anthropologist based in Detroit. She received her PhD in Media Anthropology and Critical Media Practice from Harvard University. Her audio and video works have screened widely, including at the Berlinale–Forum Expanded, MOMA PS1’s print shop, New York Library for Performing Arts, Montreal Ethnographic Film Festival, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit. She is the founding Editor of Sensate, an online journal for experiments in critical media, and runs Mothlight Microcinema in Detroit. She is currently a postdoctoral Humanities Fellow in Egalitarianism and the Metropolis at the Taubman College for Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan.

NOV 2, 3:30pm: DR. NICHOLAS HARTIGAN (CVPA 156)

Nicholas Hartigan completed his doctorate at the University of Michigan, where he studied 20th century art with a focus on public sculpture.  His work examines the shifting aspirations and rationale for American public sculpture from its boom in the late 1960s until the current day. That work has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where he was a predoctoral Fellow from 2014-2016, and the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum, which named him their Inaugural Fellow for 2016. In 2017, Hartigan expanded his work on public art audiences by designing and conducting two large-scale studies, first for Americans for the Arts, and currently for the Federation of State Humanities Councils.