The Department of Art History invites all members of the Ithaca Community to join us Tuesday, May 1st and Wednesday, May 2nd, for the “Primitivism Before / Beyond Modernism Symposium.”
Europeans have used the term primitive since the 18th century to grapple with cultures that are different in fundamental ways from the norms of their time. Thus the term is protean and pliable rather than consistent. It is not a fixed or easily identifiable concept embodied by any one particular style, set of concerns or tendencies. Instead, it is a cipher, produced by prevailing manners of thinking and looking. The “primitive” results from juxtaposition and comparison, of placing incongruous objects together to create what we want it to be. This symposium explores transhistorical manifestations of primitivism, understood as a strategy of manufacturing hierarchies between a valued exemplar and the “lesser” items cast in the role of having preceded or paved the way for it, was established before, and reverberates beyond Modernism.
TUESDAY, MAY 1st @ 6:30 pm
in the Handwerker Gallery (G148 Gannett Center)
"On Origins: Picasso, Africa, and the Question of Precedence"
Keynote Talk by Suzanne Preston Blier
Allen Whitehill Clowes Chair
of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
WEDNESDAY, MAY 2nd
from 9:30 am to 1:30 pm
in the Handwerker Gallery (G148 Gannett Center)
9:30 am – Refreshments
10:00 am – Welcome and Opening Remarks
by Jennifer Jolly / Art History Department Chair and Risham Majeed / Art History Assistant Professor
10:15 am – Past Forward in 12th Century France: Defining Oneself Through Another's Art"
Linda Seidel
Hanna Holborn Gray Professor Emerita, University of Chicago
11:00 am – "The Figure of the Artisan in Ananda Coomaraswamy's Mediaeval Sinhalese Art"
Iftikhar Dadi
Associate Professor, Department of Art History, Cornell University
11:45 am – "The savage, the primitive, and 'that ultra-primitive directness of vision'"
Ivan Gaskell
Professor of Cultural History and Museum Studies, Bard Graduate Center
12:30 pm to 1:15 pm – Discussion with
* Joshua Cohen / Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, City College of New York
* Risham Majeed / Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Ithaca College
* Ithaca College Students Yarra Berger ‘19, Anna Gardner ‘18, and Michael Ruff ‘18
This symposium is made possible by the generous support
from the School of Humanities & Sciences
and the Center for Faculty Excellence at Ithaca College.
We kindly request that individuals requesting accessibility accommodations please contact Julia Yang at jyang@ithaca.edu or 607-274-1331 as soon as possible.
