Feb. 8, 7:00 PM- 8:30 PM: Key speaker event for the King Kong At 90: Visualization in the Art of Stop Motion Animation art exhibit with a panel of guest speakers: Greg Kulon (LA-based independent scholar and researcher of the history of Stop-motion animation), Connor Heaney (Collections Manager of The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation, Edinburgh, UK.), and Ben Harry (Curator of Audiovisual Materials and Media Arts History of the L. Tom Perry Special Collections of  Brigham Young University). Auditorium, Eastern Michigan University Student Center, 900 Oakwood St, Ypsilanti

Feb. 7, 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM:  Connor Heaney (Collections Manager of The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation),  “An Introduction to the Archive of The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation.” The collection holds over 50,000 items related to the film career and personal life of Ray Harryhausen (1920 – 2013), the master stop-motion special effects artist for such classic films as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), and Clash of the Titans (1981).  This speaker event is held in connection with the King Kong At 90: Visualization in the Art of Stop Motion Animation art exhibit. Auditorium, Eastern Michigan University Student Center, 900 Oakwood St, Ypsilanti. 

Feb.2, 5:00 PM - 8:45: King Kong (1933) and The Son of Kong (1933) Double Feature Movie Night with a gallery tour and light refreshments during the intermission. The first movie starts at 5:00 PM and the second at 7:30 PM. Co-Sponsored by EMU Campus Life and EMU Art Galleries.  This event is held in connection with the King Kong At 90: Visualization in the Art of Stop Motion Animation art exhibit. Auditorium, Eastern Michigan University Student Center, 900 Oakwood St, Ypsilanti. 

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Prof. Andrew Casper is a specialist of Renaissance and Baroque art of southern Europe, and particularly religious imagery in Italy in the late 1500s and 1600s. His recent research has examined the artistic conception of the Shroud of Turin, looking at how early-modern devotional manuals draw from contemporary art theory to portray the Shroud’s imprint of Christ’s body as a divine work of art. This has culminated in various published essays and a book titled An Artful Relic: The Shroud of Turin in Baroque Italy (Penn State University Press, 2021). He has previously researched the early career of Domenikos Theotokopoulos “El Greco” and religious art after the Counter Reformation in Italy. He is the author of numerous essays and articles on sixteenth-century icons and the religious paintings from El Greco’s Italian period. His book Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy (Penn State University Press, 2014) uses El Greco’s early paintings to advance new ideas concerning the conception of religious imagery after the Council of Trent.

Prof. Casper’s current research examines the artistic, sacred, and scientific portrayal of Christ’s body in Italian devotional painting of the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as the cult of the miraculous icon of Santa Maria della Consolata in Turin. At Miami he teaches courses in Renaissance and Baroque art in Europe and Latin America. He was a 2012 finalist for the E. Phillips Knox Teaching Award, the university’s highest recognition for innovative teaching, and is the winner of the 2014 Miami University Distinguished Teaching Award.

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Michael Perrone is an American artist who graduated from Muhlenberg College with a degree in Russian Studies and Political Science. He went on to study art and art education at The School of The Museum of Fine Arts - Tufts, and received an MFA in Painting from The University of Pennsylvania in 2004. From 2004 - 2010, Perrone was an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, Iowa. He has mounted two solo exhibitions with Michael Steinberg Fine Art in Chelsea, New York City, and has participated in numerous group exhibitions internationally. Perrone’s work has appeared in: The New Yorker, Elle Decor, O at home, and Time Out New York. Since 2012, he has been an Assistant Professor of Painting with Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts. He is currently a member of the Painting + Printmaking faculty at VCUarts Qatar. Perrone, with his wife – painter Mariah Dekkenga – recently founded an artist residency and gallery  v_e_s_t_i_b_u_l_e  in Randolph, Vermont, USA.

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EMU: Detroit’s Black Power murals as public art

Inspiring in their time but not well-enough known today, Detroit’s Black Power murals—painted a year after, and in response to the urban uprising of 1967-- were some of the first to move the artistic ideals of the Black Arts movement into public space. Created by Chicago artists with the cooperation of Detroit painters and poets, they combined portraits of contemporary African-American “he-roes and she-roes” with historical scenes and the images of leaders of African anti-colonial movements, juxtaposed with everyman figures that spoke to viewers in the present at street level. 

This talk explores the way the murals functioned amidst Detroit’s racial geography in two ways: as an effort to enlist the nationalist ideas of the Black Arts movement in fostering creative identity and pride through images of African-American achievement and to generate spatially a “Black counterpublic sphere.” Their iconography offered an alternative or counter- history that encouraged Black Detroiters to imagine their place in a new version of the city.

Rebecca Zurier is Associate Professor, History of Art at the University of Michigan. Her teaching and research focus on art of the United States with special interests in urban studies, political art, and questions of realism and representation. Her book Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School won the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Charles Eldredge Prize. For many years she has taught a seminar titled "Made in Detroit: A History of Art and Culture in the Motor City.”

Thursday, February 25th at 5:30pm via Zoom

Antje K. Gamble is an art historian of Italian modernist sculpture and trans-Atlantic exhibition practices at mid-century. She is currently an assistant professor of Art History in the Department of Art & Design at Murray State University. From Fascism to the Cold War, her work examines the exhibition, sale, and critical reception of Italian art and how it shaped and was shaped by national and international socio-political shifts. Dr. Gamble’s scholarship was

included in the recent volume Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘the

Knot’ (Bloomsbury Press, 2018), where her chapter titled “Buying Marino Marini: The American Market for Italian Art after WWII” looks at politicized collection practices during the early Cold War. She also has a number of forthcoming essays: two on the 1949 exhibition “Twentieth Century Italian Art” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), one in a book due this year (The

First Twenty Years at MoMA 1929-1949, Eds. Sandra Zalman and Austin Porter. London: Bloomsbury Press.) and another in a special issue on the exhibition in Italian Modern Art our February 2020; and a third essay on the 1947-48 ceramic Crocifisso by Lucio Fontana for an upcoming Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) exhibition catalogue Material Meanings: Selections from the Constance R. Caplan Collection. Dr. Gamble is currently working on two monographs, one

on the 1950-53 American exhibition Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today and another on the sculptor Marino Marini, for which she received the CIMA-Civitella Affiliated Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation for Spring 2020.