Art History

Through a generous gift to the UNC Arts and Sciences Foundation, William G. Rand established this lecture series in memory of his late wife, Bettie Allison Rand. This funding allows the Department of Art to bring one or more eminent art historians to UNC-CH every other year for residencies of various lengths.

UNC’s Art Students Graduate Organization (ASGO) is excited to welcome you to the 9th annual ASGO symposium. This year’s symposium will center on questions of affect, agency, and emotion in the visual arts.

Julia Lum is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Scripps College. She is currently a 2023 Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art. Lum’s fellowship project, Landfalls: Art Between Britain and Polynesia, reexamines and re-centers art history in the Pacific region from the 18th century onward, with a particular focus on the role landscape painting played in British colonization in the aftermath of James Cook’s voyages from 1768­–79. 

In this talk, Stella Nair will investigate the elements of Inca design and construction and its settings and uses in order to highlight Inca architecture's complexity and creative expressions. As will become clear, it is by foregrounding Inca (Quechua) categories and early colonial narratives, that the dynamic world of the Inca built environment comes into focus, as do the diverse Indigenous actors who gave it meaning. 

This presentation juxtaposes Thirion’s theory of waged work as unhealthy with artworks by surrealist artists that associate modern work tools such as the sewing machine with sexual pleasure. For the interwar French surrealist group, the wage labor imperative could be subverted through the collective embrace of a different kind of compulsive drive, that of Eros.

By internationalizing the debate concerning Indigeneity and decolonial thought, as well as examining the basis of North American multiculturalism in the art world, Shanna Ketchum-Heap of Birds' research foregrounds a complex understanding of gender, sexualities, and race in line with moving away from a heteropatriarchal understanding imposed by colonialist and anthropological thinking. 

Dr. Rebecca VanDiver is an associate professor of African American art and a current Chancellor's Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University. In this lecture, Prof. VanDiver queries what role ephemerality, the transient or fugitive, plays in African American fine art during periods of intense racial unrest.

Amy is currently working on a visual history of the Ho-Chunk Nation. This research explores family history, tourism, settler colonialism, and Ho-Chunk survivance through an examination of two exceptional collections of studio portraits and tourist images of Ho-Chunk people taken between 1879-1960.