The Open University is hosting the 38th AAH Annual Conference. In line with the founding mission of The Open University—“to be open to people, places, methods and ideas”—the 2012 Annual Conference looks forward to welcoming all those interested in the History of Art. To complement the sessions, plenary lectures and special interest sessions will celebrate the strengths and reflect on the challenges that face art history today while receptions, book fair and visits will provide opportunities for delegates to relax and network.
The conference will include sessions on art and artifacts, issues and debates that reflect the diversity and richness of the discipline as it is practiced today. We would welcome sessions convened by members of all the constituencies represented by the AAH – students, museum and gallery curators, school teachers, independent art historians and university and college professionals.
Conference Convenor: Dr Carol M. Richardson c.m.richardson@open.ac.uk (please include AAH 2012 in your
subject line).
Administrator: Dr Piers Baker-Bates p.baker-bates@open.ac.uk.
Futher details are available from the conference website.
What is art and how has it changed through history? What is visual culture? This 32-week course will explore these and many other issues through case studies focused on artworks, buildings and other visual artefacts. Topics addressed range from Gothic churches to modern design, Renaissance altarpieces to Dutch seventeenth-century painting, eighteenth-century landscape parks to recent installations and videos. In the course of your study you will also gain an understanding of the art-historical debates that have shaped approaches to this exciting subject. A226 is taught using lavishly illustrated course books, alongside extensive audio, video and interactive material. It starts for the first time in October 2012. Find out more ...
Curated by Prof Gill Perry, The First Actresses presents a vivid spectacle of femininity, fashion and theatricality in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Britain.
Taking centre stage are the intriguing and notorious female performers of the period whose lives outside of the theatre ranged from royal mistresses to admired writers and businesswomen. The exhibition reveals the many ways in which these early celebrities used portraiture to enhance their reputations, deflect scandal and create their professional identities.
Featuring famous masterpieces alongside works that are on show for the first time, the fascinating stories of actresses such as Nell Gwyn, Kitty Clive, Hester Booth, Lavinia Fenton, Elizabeth Linley, Sarah Siddons, Mary Robinson and Dorothy Jordan will be explored through portraits by the leading artists of the period including Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, John Hoppner and James Gillray.
See the National Portrait Gallery's website for more information about this exhibition.
The exhibition is receiving widespread coverage in the media, with pieces in the Guardian Review, the daily Guardian, the Express, the London Evening Standard, Sunday Express and Times Higher Education. Radio 4′s Front Rowreviewed the exhibition on 19 October, with Mark Lawson in discussion with actress Romola Garai – who is an OU graduate with BA (Hons) English Literature. The podcast is available to download, and to listen again via the BBC iPlayer (from timecode 12.06).
This specialist academic conference will develop themes raised in the exhibition The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons. Speakers, including Professors Felicity Nussbaum (UCLA) and Joseph Roach (Yale), will explore and problematise ideas of 'celebrity' culture and the symbolic, allegorical and discursive functions of portraits of women players. Focusing on visual representation, the conference will bring together the research skills of international specialists in the different disciplines of theatre and performance studies, literature, music history and art history, deploying innovative interdisciplinary approaches in the understanding of portraiture and its historical meanings.
Includes tea and coffee, entrance to the exhibition and wine reception. Delegates will also have the opportunity to purchase the exhibition catalogue, by Gill Perry with essays by Joseph Roach and Shearer West, at the special conference price of £20 (RRP £30).
£35 / £30 Concessions / £20 Students
To find out more visit the National Portrait Gallery's website.
In partnership with The Open University.
Art History wins major Leverhulme International Network GrantThis month sees the start of a three-year Leverhulme Trust International Network project in the Art History department titled Damned in Hell in the Frescoes of Venetian-dominated Crete (13th-17th centuries). The award is the largest ever made by the Trust for this type of project and was granted to Dr Angeliki Lymberopoulou, of the Open University, and Prof. Dr. Vasiliki Tsamakda, of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universitaet Mainz, working with a group of academics from Germany, Greece, the UK and USA. Follow this link to find out more.
Former OU MA student, Frank Ferrie, was shortlisted and highly commended in the Association of Art Historians dissertation prize for his dissertation ‘To what extent did Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection of Christ represent a civic symbol of mid-quattrocentro San Sepolcro’. Frank also gave a paper on his research at last year's OU MA students’ conference in London. Given that OU students won the AAH prize for an MA dissertation in the two previous years, and another OU student was highly commended in one of those years, this is a great tribute to the strength of graduate art history at the OU. It is splendid to see the achievements of OU art history MA students being acknowledged by the wider art-historical community.
Follow this link to find out more about AAH student funding and awards.
The OU's MA in Art History is a successful 3-year part-time programme. Follow this link if you would like to find out more about it.
The Open Arts Archive is a major new archive and website linking The Open University with a range of collaborating museums, galleries and art institutions. It will provide open access to a wealth of artistic, cultural and educational resources, featuring work from the ancient to the modern period. These resources include seminars, study days, artist interviews, research projects and archives. The website will be available from the end of March at www.openartsarchive.org and will continue to expand as more new material is added regularly.
Webcasts:
Tate Modern and OU Study Days online These study days take place at Tate Modern approximately twice a year. There is a fee for attending the live events, but all on-line materials are free. You can view the events as webcasts and there are links to technical help on each study day page.
You can view the following Tate/OU study days from the archive:
Tate Channel allows you to view a wider range of live and archived webcasts. Featured items include artists' talks, lectures and symposia.