Artists’ Writings on Materials and Techniques
Symposium
The Edith O'Donnell Institute of Art History
February 24-25, 2017
In writings ranging from journals and letters to workshop manuals, autobiographies, and poems, visual artists turn to text to describe the materials and techniques of their practice. Cennino Cennini instructed young painters in grinding pigments and preparing wooden panels in a vernacular manual that is also a nascent history and theory of Renaissance art. Jacopo Pontormo logged the day’s work along with his meals and his various physical complaints, and Benvenuto Cellini dramatized the casting of his bronze Perseus. Michelangelo’s Sonnet 5 is a wry lament about the torments of painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: “...the brush that is always above my face, by dribbling down, makes it an ornate pavement.” Eugène Delacroix kept dozens of journals over the course of forty years, many of them bringing together text and sketches. And in three published journals Anne Truitt wrote to understand her work as a sculptor and as amother.
This symposium brings together art historians, curators, and conservators to explore artists’ writings about materials and techniques. The aim of the symposium is twofold: first, to define and explore the range of artists’ texts that treat working practices, and by extension to understand the relationships between artists’ textual and visual practices; and second, to ask how these writings inform our work as scholars, curators, and conservators. Convened by the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History with the participation of the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center, the symposium will take place over the course of two days in February 2017.
Friday, February 24, at The University of Texas at Dallas
Open to the public.Directions to UT Dallas
Campus Map
For those driving to the UT Dallas campus, free parking will be available in Parking Structure 1 (or PS1 on the campus map; see the link above). A greeter will be on-site the morning of the symposium to indicate available parking and to direct you toward the symposium's locations.
McDermott Suite (McDermott Library, fourth floor)
“I will myself be ultramarine”: Identity and Materiality in Anne Truitt’s Writings
Conveying a Sense of Place: Nancy Holt’s Writings on Site-Specific Works
The Resourceful Paul Gauguin
Conversations with Courbet
The Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History (ATEC 2.800)
McDermott Suite (McDermott Library, fourth floor)
Lifelike: Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s Writings on Painting and Color
Airopaidia: The Balloonist as Viewer, Surveyor, and Artist
Piero: painter, writer
Michael Cole (Columbia University)
Techniques of Writing
The Wilcox Space, 824 Exposition Boulevard #9
By Invitation
Saturday, February 25, in the Arts District
The Dallas Museum of Art, Conservation Studio and Founders RoomBy invitation
Directions to DMA
Coffee/tea and pastries
Carol Mancusi-Ungaro (The Whitney)
Title TBA
Mareika Opeña (Contemporary Conservation Ltd.)
Caring for Anne Truitt's minimal sculptures. A collaboration of Contemporary Conservation Ltd and the Truitt Estate
The Nasher Sculpture Center
Lunch and roundtable by invitation; keynote lecture and reception open to the public
Directions to Nasher
The Process of Translation / The Translation of Process: Questions raised by the works of Jean Arp
James Meyer (National Gallery of Art)
The Sign Painter
The Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History
The University of Texas at Dallas
800 West Campbell Road, ATC 11
Richardson, Texas 75080
www.utdallas.edu/arthistory
Telephone (UT Dallas office): 972 883 2475
Fax: 972 883 2466
RSVP
RSVP by February 10, 2017.
Please direct any additional questions via e-mail to Sarah Kozlowski.