Context brings the brightest minds to your living room with perspective-shifting online lectures.
Contemporary Portraiture: From Warhol to Dawoud Bey with Dr. Jennie Hirsh
No events are scheduled at this time. Want to be notified when it’s back? Click the blue button to the right and we’ll notify you.
This seminar looks at a selection of contemporary artists who have created portraits and self-portraits from the 1960s to the present. We will examine both named and anonymous likeness as we interrogate this artistic genre.
Beginning with screen-printed images of celebrities by Andy Warhol and the postmodern film stills of Cindy Sherman, this seminar will look at the ways in which artists of the last sixty years have pushed the genre of portraiture in new and interesting ways to explore key aspects of identity politics and more. Artists to be studied include Janine Antoni, Dawoud Bey, Sophie Calle, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Marcus Harvey, Peter Hujar, Nikki Lee, Glenn Ligon, Zanele Muholi, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Ruff, Jenny Saville, Thomas Struth, and more. We will talk about certain stylistic tendencies and key historical crises documented by portraiture, as well as specific case studies, such as the recent portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, respectively.
Led by an expert on modern and contemporary art, this interactive seminar will provide an in-depth inquiry into contemporary portraitists as well as an introduction to a selection of art movements in which they participated. Designed to inform curiosity as well as future travels, participants will come away with increased knowledge as well as enthusiasm for viewing portraits in both and private collections in years to come.
Jennie Hirsh (Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College) is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton and Columbia Universities, as well as pre-doctoral fellowships from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the U.S. Fulbright Commission, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Wolfsonian FIU. Hirsh has authored essays on artists including Giorgio de Chirico, Giorgio Morandi, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Yinka Shonibare, and Regina Silveira, and is co-editor, with Isabelle Wallace, of Contemporary Art and Classical Myth (Ashgate 2011).
This conversation is suitable for all ages.
90 minutes, including a 30 minute Q&A.
I enjoyed this very much. I have registered for many of the presentations by Dr. Jennie Hirsh. Not one has been anything but excellent.
I learned so much exploring contemporary portraiture with the expertise of Jennie Hirsh. I now have a much greater understanding of the importance of these works of art and how they fit into the contemporary art world. Jennie's seminar was very insightful and well presented.
Jennie provided an expansive overview of portraiture. The various examples touched on all the ways portraiture can be explained and understood from the straightforward to the abstract, to the individual and to the group. It was very interesting.
This was my first seminar with Dr. Hirsh and I thoroughly enjoyed it and learned a great deal. She introduced me to many contemporary portrait photographers that I had never seen before and also expanded my knowledge of the various forms of portrait art.
Guest did not leave comment