Mary L. Cornille (GRS’87)
Boston University Graduate Symposium in the History of Art & Architecture

The 2024 symposium will be held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on
Friday, April 19, and Saturday, April 20, 2024.

INHERITANCE

On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, the Mary L. Cornille (GRS’87) Annual Boston University Graduate Symposium in the History of Art & Architecture—the first of its kind in the United States—will take place Friday, April 19, and Saturday, April 20, 2024 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A full schedule of events can be found below.

It is a truism that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. And yet, in art and architectural history, as well as the humanities broadly construed, practitioners are reevaluating and, in some cases, dismantling the legacies of their origins. Many are returning to received narratives to ask: Whose stories have been left out? What roots have been overlooked in favor of those artists, scholars, or donors who were whiter, wealthier, and located in power centers of the art world? Meanwhile, artists are turning to tradition as inspiration over solely pursuing the new. Recognition of the iterative nature of art and art history has encouraged revisiting the past as a means to forge the future.

Presentations will be 15 minutes in length, followed by a question-and-answer session and keynote lecture by Kathryn M. Floyd, Associate Professor of Art History, Auburn University.

Dr. Floyd ‘s keynote presentation, “Five Ways to Revisit an Exhibition: Remediation, Reconstruction, and Revision at Other Primary Structures (2014)” will consider the unstable constellation of sources, copies, miniatures, enlargements, and objects through which curator Jens Hoffman “remade” the influential 1966 exhibition of minimalist art Primary Structures at the same venue.

Schedule of Presentations

Trustees Room, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Free and Open to All

Friday, April 19 – 3:00 PM
Preserving and Interpreting the Past

“Church as Museum, Spolia as Artifact: Reuse in Roman Churches ca. 300–1200”
Robyn Epstein, PhD Student, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Collecting Karuta, Reminiscing the Past: Antiquarianism that Initiated Karuta Japanese Playing Card Studies”
Mew Jiang, PhD Candidate, University of Oregon

“Between Gaps and Repetitions: Antropofagia and the Archive”
Janaína Nagata Otoch, PhD Candidate, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil

“Vuth Lyno’s House-Spirit (2018 and 2020): Urban Changes in Cambodia, Slow Protest, and Remembering the White Building”
Anneliese Hardman, PhD Student, University of Illinois Chicago

Friday, April 19 – 5:30 PM
KEYNOTE ADDRESS

“Five Ways to Revisit an Exhibition: Remediation, Reconstruction, and Revision at Other Primary Structures (2014)” Kathryn M. Floyd, PhD, Associate Professor of Art History, Auburn University

Saturday, April 20 – 10:00 AM
Working In- and Outside Historical Legacies

“An Alternative Inheritance: Local Identity and Civic Allegiance in Giovanni di Paolo’s Staggia Polyptych”
Scarlett H. Strauss, PhD Candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

“Archipelagic Temporalities: Botong Francisco, Mexican Modernism, and Narrating Historical Progress in 1960s Philippine Muralism”
Piper Prolago, MA Candidate, University of Massachusetts Amherst

“Contemporary Medieval Continuity in the Work of Jerome Caja”
Angie Lopez, PhD Student, Yale University

“Layering Histories in the Sonic Art of Jennie C. Jones”
Andrew Hansung Park, PhD Candidate, University of California, Los Angeles

For more information, please email artsymp@bu.edu.

This event is generously sponsored by Mary L. Cornille (GRS’87).