Art & Art History
Mark Jarzombek, Victor Margolin, and Terry Smith
Gallery 400 Lecture Room
400 South Peoria Street
How might an art historical education prepare students for a global future? How is the introductory survey to be taught, if at all? How cosmopolitan are the current text-books? Is it possible to circumnavigate the globe in one course or to put the world in a book, and why would that be necessarily global? Can art history s segregated sub-fields speak to the planet s intertwined histories? Given that one of the unresolved questions often raised about possible forms of global art history is how it should be taught, Mark Jarzombek, Victor Margolin, and Terry Smith will discuss these and other issues in a conversation loosely structured around the theme of pedagogy. “Conversation: On Pedagogy” brings together three established scholars of architecture, art, and design who have authored books in the name of a more inclusive discipline, in order to share their thoughts on “the global” in art history and education.
Mark Jarzombek is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at MIT. He has worked on a range of historical topics from the Renaissance to the modern, as well as nineteenth and twentieth century aesthetics. His books include On Leon Battista Alberti: His Literary and Aesthetic Theories (1989), The Psychologizing of Modernity: Art, Architecture and History (2000). He is the co-author of the textbook A Global History of Architecture (with Vikram Prakash, and illustrator Francis D.K. Ching, 2006).
Victor Margolin is Professor Emeritus of Design History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as a founding editor and now co-editor of Design Issues. His research has been fundamental to the development of the discipline of design history and explores design within larger social, political, and economic frameworks. His books include Design Discourse: History Theory Criticism (ed., 1989), The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1946 (1997), and The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies (2002). He is currently writing a world history of design.
Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh. He has worked on international contemporary art, the histories of multiple modernities, the historiography of art history and art criticism, and Australian art since settlement, including Aboriginal art. His books include Transformations in Australian Art, vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century Landscape, Colony and Nation, vol. 2, The Twentieth Century Modernism and Aboriginality (2002), Contemporary Art: World Currents (2011), and Thinking Contemporary Curating (2012).