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Art Through Time: A Global View

The Body

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Roselee Goldberg: The body is the starting point for just about every kind of art form. You start with the body, you start with this physical being, what we know. It’s absolutely the beginning.

Zainab Bahrani: From the first moments in which human beings began to think about representing the world around them, the human form became something of interest.

Pepe Karmel: As some people have suggested, art may have actually started with the body, not in terms of people making pictures of bodies, but of decorating the body, and then moved outwards from there.

Andrew Bolton: The body is constantly in vogue and it’s constantly in vogue in art.

Anne D’Alleva: And that’s because in many ways art is about the human experience. And it is about the experience of being here. And what better way to express that, or to begin to express that, or to think about that, or to shape that than by representing the body.

Segment Title: Identity

Zainab Bahrani: It seems to me that people often negotiate all sorts of ideas about identity about self and other through the representation of the body.

Susan Sidlauskas : The body in art can give us a seemingly endless supply of information and can be molded to give a seemingly infinite number of messages. The body can connote class. A body can also convey age, gender and sexuality, obviously.

Rosemary Joyce: Sex, of course, we take for granted as being something natural, but when you begin to actually look at whether you’re looking at an image of a man or a woman, you’re essentially making decisions about how people represent bodies. And that means you’re making decisions about how we think of bodies as related to our social roles.

Christa Clarke: There are two Bamana twin figures that we have in the collection at the Newark Museum. One’s male and one’s female. They are very clearly differentiated as male and female, but they are also at the same time very similar in form. And so it’s a very powerful expression of male and female differences, but at the same time the ultimate need for men and women to work together to achieve ultimate harmony.

Zainab Bahrani: So I think one thing that we can say is that gender is not reflected in representation, that gender is constructed in and through representation.

Vidya Dehejia : That’s what’s so fascinating about studying the body of any particular cultural tradition. I think it reveals so much about the thinking and the thought processes of that culture itself.

Segment Title: Real vs. Ideal

Deborah Vischak: The reason that Egyptian art in many periods looks quite carefully similar to what came before or that changes tend to be rather gradual or subtle is very intentional. It’s not the result of not knowing what else to do.

They’re purposefully trying to maintain a cultural tradition that argues in the bigger picture for stability and the rightness of the world and, of course, their place in it.

So you come to ruler like Akhenaten, who is less interested in tradition and more interested in change and is quite radical. It would be quite surprising if the art did not shift.

Akhenaten was a pharaoh in the Eighteenth Dynasty in the New Kingdom in Egypt. The sort of traditional image, for example, of the king is broad-shouldered, sort of narrow waist, very muscular body, typically very strong legs and muscular arms as well. So, the image of Akhenaten is sort of drained of that musculature in many ways and is a lot softer and rounder.

The dramatic visual nature of the art from Akhenaten’s period has encouraged a number of people to consider the possibility that the transformation in the image of the body is related to or was related to the specific nature of Akhenaten’s body, meaning there was something wrong, he had some kind of disease or some sort of genetic disorder of some type that caused him to appear quite different and as a result the images were adjusted to perhaps reflect that reality or communicate that reality as acceptable.

But what’s important to remember is that Egyptian images were never created to reflect reality in this way. They’re communicating concepts. Most important about the image of the king is not to recreate what he looked like in life exactly. It’s to create an image of the ideal.

Zainab Bahrani: Of course, it’s always a difficult thing to equate works of art to real life, to say that because we have a series of works of art that they reflect the reality, the lived experience of people. Think about something really simple like the way female beauty is represented in magazine advertisements—you might get an impression that all women on the street look a particular way. But clearly they don’t.

Rosemary Joyce: Advertising gives you these images of people who, to a certain extent, you’re supposed to want to be like and at the same time, you know that you’re not really like them. So, you’re always falling short of some sort of an ideal. In the same way, looking at ancient images of embodiment, you can get a sense of what the ideal was that people might be measuring themselves by and trying to live up to.

Andrew Stewart: The Spear-Bearer, or Doryphoros, was made about 440 BC. He is intended to be the best of all best types, namely the best warrior. We know that Polykleitos aimed at the mean, the median between fat and thin, tall and short, and so forth. So, he’s making a statement here that the best-trained body is that which falls in between the extremes.

This is a work in bronze, and the tense reflectivity of burnished bronze speaks to the kind of hard-bodied, iron-clad musculature that this warrior has and that can only come through massive, intensive training.

There are statements from fourth-century authors that say nobody can make his body look like paintings or statues. So the Greeks were very well aware that their art transcended mere reality.

Greek nakedness is a very strange thing. It is unique in the ancient world. Two centuries of research have failed to find any previous ancient culture that stripped to exercise as the Greeks came to do by the fifth century BC and that privileged the male body to quite that extent and was willing to take all its clothes off both in art and in life. In fact, the opposite is true of, let us say, ancient Egypt where nakedness is reserved essentially for prisoners of war, for those undergoing punishment, or corpses, or anybody you’d want to degrade— you take their clothes off.

By the fifth and fourth centuries, at least some thinking Greeks were very aware that this differentiated them from other peoples around them. It was special and it was a marker of Greek civilization, which they then turned into a marker of advanced civilization as against the barbarian world around them.

Segment Title: Nudity

Rosemary Joyce: Nudity is one of the topics that anybody who looks at ancient bodies has to confront at some point. It’s one of the things that modern European society has given us a full understanding of and especially Judeo-Christian society.

So when we do actually find that a large part of the visual representation that we’re looking at shows completely unclothed or partially unclothed bodies, we’re already approaching this thinking we know what nudity means. And that’s a huge problem.

Zainab Bahrani: When representations of nude females first began to emerge in places like Iraq, Turkey, and Syria, the ancient Near East, the earliest archaeologists who found these figurines, began to describe them as mother goddesses. But, in fact, it’s actually much more complicated than that. They’re clearly not all goddesses. They’re not even all images that represent fertility or motherhood. We have a large number of images in which what we seem to have represented is of the erotic aspects of the female form.

What we have in Mesopotamian art is the representation of the nude in all its complete details—for example, the emphasis on the breasts or the emphasis on the pubic triangle. We have these images where the female nude actually lifts her breasts with her hands and seems to offer them to the viewer.

The later Western tradition, in my opinion, has many more taboos on the representation of the nude or the naked body, whether male or female, than anything we can see in antiquity, whether it’s ancient Near Eastern, Greek or Roman, or Egyptian. Clearly many, many more taboos emerged in the Christian era.

Stephen Campbell: Over several centuries of Christian art there are only two subjects in which you saw nude human figures. One was the expulsion of Adam and Eve and the other was the Last Judgment. And that, basically, reflects a sort of general way of thinking about the body. The body represents the flesh and the materiality of earthly existence and its fallen nature.

With Michelangelo, there are so many other ways in which the body is allowed to move and to appear, and it seems no longer informed by that thinking. When you walk into the Sistine Chapel you look up, you look around, you see all kinds of things. You have this curious other series of youthful naked men. Who are they?

As you go up the chapel towards the altar wall towards the holier part of the chapel, you’ll find that the animation, the excitement of these figures increases. The postures become deeply impossible, acrobatic, dance-like, and they are asymmetric.

Michelangelo’s frescos are very much about the affirmation of the right of the Christian artist to represent the body and the body full on, full frontal, naked, beautiful. Because what that art is about is the dignity of the human body.

Zainab Bahrani: I think most of the time, when people speak about the body, they’re assuming nudity, they’re assuming that we’re speaking about nudity. But, of course, the body is not just about nudity.

Segment Title: Adornment

Vidya Dehejia: There is no such thing as a nude in the art of India. It is always the body adorned. Very often you look at some of the images and they seem as if they don’t have clothing, but if you look closely you will see the lines along the ankles, around the neck, around the wrists, bits of floating, translucent fabric. The artist has taken a great deal of liberty, but it is not a naked body, it is the body clothed.

Adornment is exceedingly important in the context of the culture of India. In fact, the best way I could put it is to say that the only people who are not adorned are those who are in mourning. It brings fortune. It brings wealth. It brings good living. Everything good surrounds adornment.

Andrew Bolton: I think there is just a natural impulse to ornament, to decorate one’s body, whether it’s to do with exaggerated forms of clothing like neck braces or neck collars, corsets or panniers, or bound feet in China, there is always a way of pushing your body to the extreme.

Susan Sidlauskas: This is John Singer Sargent’s Madame X, painted in 1884. Madame X, Virginie Gautreau, was an American expatriate who came to Paris, to France, with her mother, who was French, to find her fortune.

Gautreau was involved with a group of people who believed that the figure should be as decorated as its environment. And she styled herself as a kind of living art object. She presented herself as someone who had an extraordinary body, wanted it to be called attention to, and did everything she could to shape it with corsetry, with her dress, with the jewelry, very simple jewelry.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about her was that she painted her body with a pale, lavender powder, unmistakably lavender. She was known to have a kind of blue tint.

Now one of the challenges that Sargent encountered when he started to paint her is that she posed for him in the full sunlight, in the natural light of her husband’s home in northern France in Burgundy. And he realized that the blue was off. The blue was very different than the blue he had remembered in the low gas light of the lobbies, of the society rooms where she circulated.

And he was very disturbed by this. He wrote many letters to friends saying, “I can’t fix, I can’t get the color blue. It looks terrible. What am I gonna do?”

This is a painter painting a woman who has painted herself

Anne D’Alleva: In a Western context we tend not to value body art terribly highly. We think about painting and sculpture and architecture as our high art forms.

In our current American context, getting a tattoo is often an act of rebellion. So you turn eighteen and, okay, you can’t have a drink. But what you can do is go out and get a tattoo and your parents can’t stop you. And so it is, it can be an act of rebellion.

Now it is different in the Pacific, where you often find cultures where body arts are very highly valued.

One of the things I think is important to understand about tattoo in New Zealand or in Tahiti, in Polynesian cultures, is that it is considered as a sacred art form, one that is a gift from the gods, one that wraps a person in images that are full of sanctity, that are full of spiritual power.

In Tahiti, evangelical missionaries arrived in 1797, which was very early in the Pacific. These missionaries helped to draft the first written laws of Tahiti. And one of the original laws was no tattooing, outlawing tattoo. And this is because of the prohibition in Leviticus against marking the body. And this is something that they as Christians took very seriously.

So the body becomes a site, a contested site where people are trying to force a certain concept of the individual and of society literally onto local people.

Segment Title: Power

Shigeyuki Kihara: Photography arrived in Samoa together with colonial expansion throughout the South Pacific region and a lot of the photos that are taken towards the end of the nineteenth century, early twentieth century, had a strong ethnographic slant to them.

When the missionaries arrived, Samoan people were strongly encouraged to wear clothes in order to appear civilized. The interesting thing about when it came to these photographs is that while the missionaries and the colonizers were strongly encouraging us to wear cloth, to cover our bodies, as soon as Samoan people went into the photographic studio, we were asked by the photographers to take off our clothes.

Anne D’Alleva: Yuki, of course, plays with the irony in her work of the photographer saying, “Oh, but we also, by the way, want to make erotic photographs of you. So now you have to completely strip down and pretend that this is your natural state, as if you always walk around stripped down and with bare breasts.”

Shigeyuki Kihara: So here it is, my ancestors being in the photographic studio going, “What the hell is going on?”

The works in the Black Sunday series talks about this very idea of putting on clothes and taking off clothes and how these actions have been dictated by forces that are outside of Samoa. And a lot of the images that are used and referenced in my Black Sundayseries are formerly half-nude images. So what I’ve done is I’ve put clothes back onto the models.

Anne D’Alleva: Yuki is a very interesting artist because she is working from the position and the experience, the identity of the fa’a fafine.

Shigeyuki Kihara: There’s a certain history that comes with the usage of the term fa’a fafine in Samoan culture, but today it’s broadly understood as people who are loosely fitting into a broad category of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender, and inter-sex people. The fa’a fafine community in Samoa is generally an accepted group of people in Samoa society.

Anne D’Alleva: One of the things that I think is so interesting about fa’a fafine is that you can understand from just the word itself some of the performative dimensions and artistic dimensions of the role. Because “fa,” the first part of the word, means “to do” and “fafine” is “woman.” So “to do as a woman” is the literal translation. So it is about the performance.

Shigeyuki Kihara: The Fa’a fafine: In the Manner of a Woman series was a body of work that was made in 2005. The body of work involves myself masquerading in a variety of different gender identities in Samoa.

One of the reasons I made these works is because much of the Pacific has been personified by exotic Polynesian femininity. When you think of the South Pacific region you immediately think of a hula girl, the “Belle Sauvage,” the exotic, primitive woman.

But for me, the idea of beauty and harmony in the Pacific, and specifically to Samoa, is embedded in the combination between male and female energy. So I’m sort of turning the idea, the whole idea of romanticism on its head.

Anne D’Alleva: She is absolutely challenging the Western fantasy and saying, what do you think this is based on? In a local context fa’a fafine can be absolutely as alluring and appealing in feminine terms as any fafine.

Shigeyuki Kihara: In my research into Samoan colonial photography I was struck by a photograph of this one Samoan woman who was wearing what I would perceive as this Victorian mourning dress.

So I started to build a narrative around this photograph, which eventually became Taualuga, the Last Dance. It’s about story telling through non-verbal bodily movements. I am referencing traditional Samoan dance, but at the same time I’m trying to actually take it somewhere else. I like the whole idea of being restricted in this dress but at the same time finding fluidity through this restricted body.

For me, when I go into a photographic studio space or to the theater space, in the process, I’m reclaiming the body that was once taken away from me.

Zainab Bahrani: The body becomes the site for the assertion of power in many periods in history.

Susan Sidlauskas: Almost every generation will have at least a handful of women artists who are struggling to control their own representations.

Roselee Goldberg: In the sixties and seventies, for example, a lot of artists were working with the body. It was very helpful in terms of Feminism for women to get attention back on the body.

They were taking charge and taking back their bodies in a way and finding ways to be the ones who articulated what they wanted to say about their bodies.

Cindy Sherman really starting with the body, dressing herself up, using her own body as her material, really changed the entire late twentieth-century art, and it has nothing to do with the history of photography and everything to do with the body as this place to put all these different ideas.

Segment Title: Experimentation

Roselee Goldberg: I look at the entire history of twentieth-century art, and not just our sort of current version, as a story about where we put the body in that history. It’s been all about experimentation and philosophy and exploration.

Pepe Karmel: The body enters into Pollock’s work in a radically new way. Earlier painters essentially worked with their hands and their wrists.

Pollock did not work with little movements of the wrist, he worked with his whole body, at least when he was working on the great big pictures. You can see him in the photographs and films leaning out over them, sweeping his arm around, pulling it back, so that the body is present in the pictures. It seems pretty clear that there is a direct line from what Pollock was doing to performance art.

Roselee Goldberg: I think the live is where so many radical ideas really begin. It’s somehow the most experimental place that one can start an idea. The visual artist uses the live to explore areas that they just can’t go to using objects. The body becomes this way of representing stories.

Susan Sidlauskas: The power of the body to communicate has never ebbed. And I think that we continue to try to figure out ways to shape it so to communicate what we want.

Pepe Karmel: It’s basically impossible to know what the future of art is going to be. At the risk of reciting a cliché, the only thing we know for sure is that we don’t know what the future will hold. But it seems almost equally certain that the body will play an important role in it.

Susan Sidlauskas: The body is our form, that’s who we are. And I think that it certainly, it comes and goes in art, or it seems to come and go, but I don’t think it’s ever gone.

From painting to sculpture, body art to performance art, the body has figured prominently in the creative expression of nearly all cultures from the beginning of civilization. Through art, the body becomes a site for defining individual identity, constructing sex and gender ideals, negotiating power, and experimenting with the nature of representation itself.

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Expert Biographies

Zainab Bahrani, Ph.D., is the Edith Porada Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art History and Archaeology and the director of graduate studies in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, New York. A native of Baghdad, Iraq, her research focuses on the art and archaeology of Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean, philosophies of aesthetics and representation, gender and feminist theories. Prior to her position at Columbia, Bahrani taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the University of Vienna, Austria. She has also worked as a curator in the Near Eastern Antiquities Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has been most recently elected to the Slade Professorship in the Fine Arts at the University of Oxford. Bahrani has authored, co-authored, and edited a number of books, including Rituals of War: the Body and Violence in MesopotamiaThe Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria, and Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia. She received her M.A. and Ph.D from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Marla C. Berns, Ph.D, is the director of the Fowler Museum at UCLA and is adjunct professor of art history. Berns was formerly director of the University Art Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Goldstein, a museum of design at the University of Minnesota. Her research and writing have concentrated on women’s arts in Northeastern Nigeria—which include ceramics, decorated gourds and programs of body scarification—and on the historical and ritual importance of figurative ceramic vessels. Exhibitions she has curated feature topics on twentieth-century art and design, including solo projects on the artists Magdalene Odundo and Renee Stout. She is currently organizing a major exhibition on the arts of the Benue River Valley, Central Nigeria. Berns received her Ph.D. in art history from UCLA.

Andrew Bolton is a curator at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has curated several exhibitions including, “Bravehearts: Men in Skirts,” “Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century,” “AngloMania: Tradition,” and “Transgression in British Fashion,” and “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy.” Bolton is a regular contributor to newspapers and journals and has written many books to accompany his exhibitions. Prior to joining the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bolton held positions in contemporary fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the London College of Fashion.

Stephen J. Campbell, Ph.D., is a professor of the history of art at Johns Hopkins University, where he specializes in Italian art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Prior to joining the Johns Hopkins faculty, Campbell taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and Case Western University. He has also held post-doctoral fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Campbell has authored many articles and books, including Cosmè Tura of Ferrara and The Cabinet of Eros. Campbell received his B.A. from Trinity College, Dublin, his M.A. from the University of North Carolina, and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins.

Christa Clarke, Ph.D., a specialist in historic and contemporary arts of Africa, is senior curator of arts of Africa and the Americas and curator of arts of Africa at the Newark Museum. Prior to this appointment, she served as the first curator of African art at the Neuberger Museum of Art and was a curatorial advisor for the Barnes Foundation, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Kreeger Museum, and the World Bank. She has held teaching appointments at George Washington University, the Corcoran School of Art, Rutgers University, and Purchase College, SUNY, and fellowships at the National Museum of African Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Clarke is the author of several exhibition catalogues and articles, including an essay on exhibiting African art in Art and Its Publics: Museum Studies for the New Millenium and The Art of Africa: A Resource for Educators. A forthcoming book co-edited with Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Representing Africa in American Art Museums: A Century of Collecting and Display, examines the impact that museum practice has on the formation of meaning and the public perception of African art. Clarke received her B.A. from the University of Virginia and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Maryland.

Anne D’Alleva, Ph.D., is an associate professor of art history and women’s studies at the University of Connecticut. D’Alleva is the author of Art of the Pacific IslandsSacred Maidens and Masculine Women: Art, Gender, and Power in Post-Contact Tahiti. She has also written several books on the discipline of art history. These include Look! The Fundamentals of Art HistoryLook Again! Art History and Critical TheoryHow to Write Art History, and Methods and Theories of Art History. D’Alleva’s work has earned her grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She received her B.A. from Harvard University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Vidya Dehejia, Ph.D., is the Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Columbia University. Prior to her position at Columbia, Dehejia was the deputy director and chief curator of the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. She also previously taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Chicago, the University of Hong Kong, and the Delhi School of Planning and Architecture. Over the course of her career, Dehejia has focused her research on Indian and South Asian art, specifically Indian sculpture and architecture. Her interests range from Buddhist and colonial India to issues of gender and visual narrative. She has conducted extensive field research in South and Southeast Asia and possesses a background in classical Sanskrit and Tamil. Dehejia is a prolific writer who, in addition to numerous articles, has authored over twenty books. Her works include Indian Art, The Sensuous and the Sacred: Chola Bronzes from South IndiaRepresenting the Body: Gender Issues in Indian Art, and most recently, The Body Adorned: Sacred and Profane in Indian Art. She has been honored with Columbia University’s Hettleman Award for teaching and service, a Guggenheim and an NEH Fellowship. Dehejia received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Cambridge University. She also holds a B.A. from St. Xavier’s College, Bombay University.

RoseLee Goldberg is the founding director and curator of PERFORMA, a non-profit, multi-disciplinary arts organization. Prior to founding PERFORMA, Goldberg held positions as the director of the Royal College of Art Gallery and curator at The Kitchen in New York. She is the author of Performance Art from Futurism to the Present. Goldberg teaches at New York University and has lectured at Princeton University, the Architectural Association, and Yale University. She commissioned and produced “Logic of Birds,” a touring multi-media performance by artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat, and organized the performance series, “Six Evenings of Performance,” which was part of the Museum of Modern Art’s “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture” exhibition. A native of South Africa, Goldberg studied at Wits University in Johannesburg and graduated from the Courtland Institute of Art in London.

Rosemary Joyce, Ph.D., is an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches courses on the archaeology of the Maya and Central America, archaeological method and theory, and museum studies, among other topics. She has also conducted field research and curated exhibitions in both North America and Honduras. Joyce joined the Berkeley faculty as director of the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology, after serving as director and curator at the Peabody Museum of Harvard University where she was on the faculty in Anthropology. Joyce has published a number of works, including Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives: Sex, Gender, and Archaeology and Mesoamerican Archaeology: Theory and Practice, Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica. She earned her A.B. from Cornell University and her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Pepe Karmel, Ph.D., is associate professor of art history and chair of the Department of Art History at New York University. His research interests include Picasso, Pollock, Cubism, Abstraction, Minimalism, and contemporary art. He has curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including “New York Cool: Painting and Sculpture from the NYU Art Collection,” “The Age of Picasso: Gifts to American Museums,” and “Jackson Pollock” for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Author of the book Picasso and the Invention of Cubism, Karmel is also a frequent contributor to exhibition catalogues and has written for Art in America and the New York Times. He received his B.A. from Harvard College and his Ph.D. from New York University.

Shigeyuki Kihara is a visual and performance artist based in Auckland, New Zealand. A native of Samoa, her work explores themes of representation, authenticity, consumerism, collective memory, gender roles and spirituality. Kihara represented New Zealand at the 4th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2002). Recipient of both the Emerging Pacific Artist Award (2003) and Pacific Innovation & Excellence Award (2009) from Creative New Zealand Arts Council, Kihara has held solo exhibitions worldwide, including Shigeyuki Kihara; Living Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Kihara has also contributed to group exhibitions at the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art, China; Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; Centro Ricerca Arte Attuale, Italy; and National Museum of Poznan, Poland. Kihara has undertaken residencies at Physics Room Contemporary Art Space, New Zealand, and Campbelltown Arts Centre, Australia. Her work is represented in the private collection of Giorgio Armani and is part of the public collections of Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand; Sherman Contemporary Arts Foundation, Australia; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Kihara was recently profiled in Rolling Stone magazine (Italy) and was selected as one of five “path-breaking artists” by ArtAsiaPacific Almanac magazine NYC for 2009.

Carolee Schneemann is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores gender, sexuality, and the body. Her painting, photography, performance art, and installation works have been shown at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Centre Georges Pompidou, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. She has taught at New York University, California Institute of the Arts, Bard College, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Schneemann is the author of numerous books, including Cezanne, She Was A Great Painter, Early and Recent WorkMore Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings, and Imaging Her Erotics. Her many honors include the Art Pace International Artist Residency, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Gottlieb Foundation Grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Schneemann received a B.A. from Bard College and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois. She holds honorary doctor of fine arts degrees from the California Institute of the Arts and the Maine College of Art.

Susan Sidlauskas, Ph.D., is an associate professor of art history and graduate program director at Rutgers University. Sidlauskas specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art and theory, gender studies, interiority in representation, and contemporary art. Prior to her work at Rutgers, Sidlauskas held positions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Committee on the Visual Arts at MIT. She has taught at both Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, where she was on the faculty for eleven years. Sidlauskas has written two books, Cezanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense and Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Painting. She has also contributed to Skin and Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture, edited by Brooke Hodge for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. She served on the Committee on Nomination to Phi Beta Kappa and is a recipient of the University of Pennsylvania’s Ira Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching. Sidlauskas holds a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Andrew Stewart, Ph.D., is Nicholas C. Petris Professor of Greek Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the UC Berkeley excavation team at Tel Dor, Israel. Stewart’s research focuses on ancient Greek art and culture and the later reception of Greek sculpture. Stewart has earned grants and fellowships from the Getty Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Guggenheim Foundation. A recipient of Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award, Stewart has also taught at Cambridge University, Columbia University, and the University of Otago in New Zealand. Some of his published works include Greek Sculpture: An Exploration (winner of the Wittenborn Memorial Book Award and the Award for Excellence in Professional and Scholarly Publishing); Art, Desire, and the Body in Ancient Greece; and most recently, Classical Greece and the Birth of Western Art. Stewart earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Cambridge University.

Deborah Vischak, Ph.D., is a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Vischak specializes in the areas of ancient Egyptian art, archaeology, and history. She has also served as a lecturer at Columbia University. She holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

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Art Through Time: A Global View

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Produced by THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG. 2009.
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  • ISBN: 1-57680-888-2