Moving Pictures: Images Across Media in American Visual and Material Culture to 1900

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CHAViC Conferences and Symposia

American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States

The 2015 CHAViC conference, Moving Pictures: Images Across Media in American Visual and Material Culture to 1900, will be held at AAS on November 20 and 21, 2015. The conference will explore the diversity of uses of the printed image in early America. Speakers will consider imagery found historically in more than one medium in both two- and three-dimensional formats. Papers will be presented from disparate disciplines, including art and architectural history, American studies, material culture studies, literature, history, graphic design, and childhood studies. Presenters will investigate printed scenes reproduced on objects such as transfer-printed ceramics, needlework, children’s toys, daguerreotype cases, and powder horns. They will address, among other issues, racial caricature, violence, making memory, and national identity. Panels will trace the movement of a single image through multiple media formats; examine the intersection between photography and portraiture; and consider the production and circulation of imagery, the transatlantic ovement of images, moving image culture for children, and images associated with place.

Wendy Bellion, associate professor of art history at the University of Delaware, will deliver the keynote address. Bellion is the author of Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (2011), which was awarded the 2014 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in American Art by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her current book project, What Statues Remember, explores issues of iconoclasm, reenactment, and historical memory in Manhattan from the eighteenth century to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

 

Schedule

Friday, November 20
Antiquarian Hall, AAS

1:00-3:00 p.m.
Session 1: Four Images and Their Travels

  • Ross Barrett, Assistant Professor, History of Art and Architecture, Boston University—“A Portrait in Paint, Packaging, and Print: The Cultural Life of Charles Bird King’s ‘Sequoyah’ (1828)”
  • Aston Gonzalez, Assistant Professor, History, Salisbury University—“Flesh Colored Stockings: The Elastic History of Edward Clay’s Racial Caricature”
  • Amy Torbert, Ph.D. Candidate, Art History, University of Delaware—“Making Memory: Translating ‘Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man, or Tarring & Feathering’ Across Media, 1830- 1900”
  • Clay Zuba, Ph.D. Candidate, English, University of Delaware—“Apess’ ‘Eulogy’ and the Moving Image: Painting, Engraving, and Native Visualcy in the Antebellum Transatlantic”

4:00-5:30 p.m.
Session 2: How to Make a Moving Picture

  • Christopher Allison, Ph.D. Candidate, History of American Civilization, Harvard University— “Cloud of Witnesses: Movement of Religious Bodies in the Goss Centenary ‘Founders and Pioneers of Methodism,’ 1866”
  • Maura Lyons, Professor, Art History, Drake University—“From Printed Page to Projection: Migrating Images in the 1860s”
  • Christina Michelon, Ph.D. Candidate, Art History, University of Minnesota—“Combating Loss with Commemorative Transfer-Printed Ceramics”

5:30 p.m.
Cocktail Reception at the Goddard-Daniel House

7:00 p.m.
Keynote address: Wendy Bellion, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Delaware— “Representing Iconoclasm: Paint, Print, Performance”

Saturday, November 21
Atwater Kent Labs, WPI Campus

9:00-10:30 a.m.
Session 3: The Visual Atlantic World

  • Catherine Holochwost, Assistant Professor, Art History, La Salle University— “Morse, Thorwaldsen, and the Subversive Imagination”
  • Christopher Lukasik, Associate Professor of English and American Studies, Purdue University—“Same Picture, Different Story: Textual Illustration, Transmediality, and R.W. Buss’s ‘Soliciting A Vote’”
  • Kristin Moriah, Ph.D. Candidate, English Program, The Graduate Center/CUNY— “Onkel Tom’s International Travels and Printed Matter”

11:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Session 4: Learning to Look

  • Meredith A. Bak, Assistant Professor, Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University—“Moving Picture Books: Multimedia for Children, 1850-1900”
  • Peter Fine, Assistant Professor, Art Department, Graphic Design, University of Wyoming—“Casting Race in Material Form: Stereotypes, Sequential Art and Moving Images”
  • Susan P. Schoelwer, Robert H. Smith Senior Curator, George Washington’s Mount Vernon—“George Washington Goes to School: Lessons in Silk for the New Republic”

12:30-1:45 p.m.
Lunch

1:45-3:15 p.m.
Session 5: Pen, Camera, Stage

  • Justin Clark, Lecturer, History, Pennsylvania State University—“Wandering Mediums: From Spirit Drawing to Photography and Back in the mid-19th Century”
  • Wendy Wick Reaves, Curator Emerita of Prints and Drawings, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian—“Translations: Lithographic Portraits in the Daguerreian Age”
  • Autumn Womack, Assistant Professor, English, University of Pittsburgh—“‘A Deplorable Spectacle’: Race, Performance, and Visuality in Lillian Jewett’s Anti-Lynching Lecture Tour”

3:30-5:00 p.m.
Session 6: When Moving Pictures Stand Still

  • Dana E. Byrd, Assistant Professor, History of Art, Bowdoin College—“Picturing the New South for Old New England via Intermediality”
  • William L. Coleman, Postdoctoral Fellow in American Art, Washington University in St. Louis—“An American Country House Abroad: Monte Video and its Afterlives”
  • Louise M. Hancox, Ph.D. Candidate, American History and Visual Culture, University of Arkansas— “‘Imbuing a National Feeling’: History Paintings, Currency and Identity in 19th-Century America”