ElusiveMuse Posted March 7, 2009 Share Posted March 7, 2009 Come and chat! I think we need a thread for general art history chatter. What is your specialization in the field? What are your interests in research? Favorite artists, museums? What papers are you working on for your current schoolwork? Personally, amidst all the grad school worry I'm having a hard time with my work and focusing on being a baby art historian. Then the other day I was working more on my senior thesis and opened a book to a page of Sargent sketches, studies for his El Jaleo. It just made me so happy again and I was like "This is why I am putting myself through this." It was a good moment. I need more of them. So yeah, I am totally a John Singer Sargent fangirl. When I went to the Gardner Museum this past summer for the first time, I saw El Jaleo in person. I just started crying it was so awesome (in the traditional sense of the word). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blancdexin Posted March 9, 2009 Share Posted March 9, 2009 Hey I love El Jaleo as well! I'm graduating from college this may so I'm not sure what I will eventually specialize in. my forte is definitely Asian art, both classical and Contemporary, specially Contemporary Chinese Art....yet I'm trying to build a solid knowledge system for all arts across cultures and throughout time. What comes after is probably Architecture, as I'm a double major in Art History and Mathematics, the rhythmic beauty of architecture always gives me a double thrill: both that of aesthetic and of genius calculation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amleta Posted March 9, 2009 Share Posted March 9, 2009 I'm into medieval art and interdisciplinary interpretations of art history- my MA is in Medieval Studies, so I'm actually more likely to call myself a medievalist than an art historian ^__~ Current research is the representation of scholastic ideas/debates in art, and I did my MA dissertation on representations of the Liberal Arts on the cathedrals at Laon and Sens (early Gothic France). I hope to pursue more ideas like this in a PhD programme... still waiting for an acceptance, though. *gulp* Favorite museum..... hm. I'm awfully partial to London's V&A, mostly because of the incredible plaster casts there. Then again, the Met was my first real museum, and always has a special place in my heart- never mind the Cloisters! And favorite artist? In my own work, I really ignore my aesthetic sensibilities (since they're so out of sync with medieval sensibilities). Outside medieval art, however, I absolutely adore Caravaggio and his use of light. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kid_grape Posted March 9, 2009 Share Posted March 9, 2009 elusive muse - yes i definitely agree! the anxiety has overtaken my life. i definitely need the referesher to pull myself through this emotional chaos. im interested in the image and the ontology of different mediums of image (namely paintings, photographs, and the moving image). id like to focus on doing some type of comparative studies between contemporary east asian cinema/art and colonial ethnographic imagery. i guess thats a little fuzzy. but what the heck, that's what im going to school for lol. blacdexin - where are you hoping to study contemporary chinese work? good to hear others' interests. takes my mind off the firefox's blue circular arrow for at least a sec. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ElusiveMuse Posted March 9, 2009 Author Share Posted March 9, 2009 I love Chinese painting of the Song and Yuan Dynasties. I wish I had discovered it in time for adequate language preparation, I may have given it a go! I've actually been to Beijing and Hong Kong and feel a real affinity for the art and culture there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kid_grape Posted March 9, 2009 Share Posted March 9, 2009 lol i empathize about the languages. so many language requirements so little time. well so many if i get into a school this year that is. augh! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
blancdexin Posted March 9, 2009 Share Posted March 9, 2009 kid_grape: It's a field I sort of take on as a personal mission. Compared to the ever-accelerating dynamics in the Chinese art scene, the lack of Art History training in China is absurd, and even in the few programs that offered Art History studies--some undeniably very good, the approaches were different and language was certainly an issue for many critics and researchers in China (translation is such a problem for academia...once read a Chinese version for an Arthur Danto book and I couldn't make sense of it in my native language. I guess that's why we Art history folks have to be multi-lingual) . I felt I could and should make a difference with my backgrounds both in the Chinese aesthetics and languages as well as Western critical approaches. I know a professor at Columbia who once offered a course on Xu Bing, one of China's most prominent contemporary artists--but indeed most institutions don't offer graduate level courses on this subject. Strangely enough, my college actually had a course on Modern and Contemporary Chinese art, but only two ppl took it (including me) and the professor wasn't plan to teach it again in the foreseeable future. Also learned a great deal from working at Sotheby's Contemporary Chinese Art Department--it's such an exciting field because I have to constantly keep up with it. As for masters, I still would like to learn in greater depth of everything while keeping an eye on Contemporary Chinese Art. Elusivemuse--I'm actually an international student from China studying in a US liberal arts college. Glad that you felt such affinity for Beijing cuz most ppl think Shanghai and Hong Kong are more foreigner-friendly. lol. Did you check out the 798 Art Village in Beijing? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lunalee Posted March 10, 2009 Share Posted March 10, 2009 Though I'm no longer awaiting responses (applied to Northwestern, Princeton and Yale/Accepted by Northwestern and Yale, Rejected by Princeton), the anxiety is still there. Now, I'm worried about making the wrong choice or looking like an idiot in front of my future professors and cohort...oh well. I am leaning toward Yale. I will be entering grad school directly from undergrad and my focus is Contemporary American and African-American art. I'm very interested in visual humor and I want to look at contemporary permutations of the blackface minstrel figure in the works of African-American artists. I love Ellen Gallagher's work; she is probably my favorite at the moment. I am also moved by Carrie Mae Weems, Chakaia Booker, Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ElusiveMuse Posted March 10, 2009 Author Share Posted March 10, 2009 Lunalee, you might want to look into those schools' dance history faculty interests. There is a lot of that sort of thing in dance and theatre, so you could put together a good interdisciplinary support system if you look around. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lunalee Posted March 10, 2009 Share Posted March 10, 2009 Lunalee, you might want to look into those schools' dance history faculty interests. There is a lot of that sort of thing in dance and theatre, so you could put together a good interdisciplinary support system if you look around. Fantastic idea! Turns out Yale has a professor dedicated to looking at the performance of race and freedom during the antebellum period. They also have Thomas deFrantz who is AMAZING! On the other hand, Northwestern has a Performance Studies department with several faculty members that tangle with questions of race. This is definitely food for thought... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ElusiveMuse Posted March 10, 2009 Author Share Posted March 10, 2009 Race is all the rage in dance history right now. I am positive you'll find good support if you ask for it in those departments. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kid_grape Posted March 10, 2009 Share Posted March 10, 2009 blancdexin - yes, i was quite curious to see where you were planning to study because i havent see anyone do that that i've noticed. its definitely an exciting field though. good luck with pursuing that one! lunalee - congrats on the yale acceptance! im still waiting and i feel like im going to hurl my insides out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lunalee Posted March 11, 2009 Share Posted March 11, 2009 blancdexin - lunalee - congrats on the yale acceptance! im still waiting and i feel like im going to hurl my insides out. Thanks, kid_grape...I really hope you get your acceptance soon! I know that sick feeling all too well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
void Posted March 11, 2009 Share Posted March 11, 2009 Though I'm no longer awaiting responses (applied to Northwestern, Princeton and Yale/Accepted by Northwestern and Yale, Rejected by Princeton), the anxiety is still there. Now, I'm worried about making the wrong choice or looking like an idiot in front of my future professors and cohort... Lunalee, you have described my position perfectly. It's a good position to be in, but I am terrified of making the wrong choice or giving a bad impression. Amazingly, I think the anxiety has increased significantly since I received my first acceptance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
venusfueri Posted March 12, 2009 Share Posted March 12, 2009 Hey all, I am actually a "switcher" and maybe a newbie? I used to be in East Asian Languages & Civ/History, but applied to the Art History program at BU b/c of Alice Tseng who does modern Japanese art and architecture; I pretty much had an epiphany last semester here at Penn (where I'm getting my master's in EALC, specializing in Japanese architecture - anyone know Nancy Steinhardt? She is my thesis advisor) and discovered that I REALLY wanted to study Japanese architecture as opposed to Japanese history. I grew up in NYC so I always loved looking at buildings and whenever I travel, I always like to walk around the city as opposed to going to typical touristy spots. I always had this sinking regret about not majoring in art history in college (I did history instead) so applying to the art history program at BU (where they accept MA's in Asian Studies/EALC as an accepted requirement, woo! I pretty much took architecture and art history courses as part of my curriculum here) was a great relief but still waiting really really anxiously (in addition to PhD in EALC at Columbia). My secondary field would be contemporary Japanese art - as to what type I am not so sure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
starfish Posted March 24, 2009 Share Posted March 24, 2009 Hello everyone! I wanted to introduce myself to all the folks on this forum, since I'm sure I'll be posting with increasing frequency over the next year. I'm halfway through my M.A. in art history, and looking toward Ph.D. applications for the 2010/2011 school year. My area of interest is in pre-WWI modern art, specifically artists working with the breakdown of the visual form in terms of early abstraction, i.e. Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Leger, Matisse, Marc, etc. I'm still formulating the types of questions and inquiries I want to make, and a love of theory is not helping me to specialize per se, but I am right now drawn especially to questions on the interaction of social/political and queered gender constructions, as well as reception theory and a larger inquiry into visual culture. I'm sure that these interests will coalesce into something more definitive as I move forward. My academic background is a little bumpy... I failed college pretty abysmally on my first attempt, and joined the Navy as a linguist instead. I spent six years in the service and discovered my love for art history along the way. Through a lot of luck and perseverance, I was able to complete a B.A. in art history online through Mansfield University, a public school in Pennsylvania. I also grabbed an A.A. in Mandarin Chinese somewhere in there. Best wishes to everyone in all stages of the application process... hopefully I'll have something to celebrate around this time next year as well! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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