FSU Art Historians at the Southeastern College Art Conference
FSU was once again well represented by Art History graduate students and alumni at the Southeastern College Art Conference this year. The 2013 conference was held in Greensboro, NC, October 30 to November 2. In the session In Search of Justice, chaired by alumnus Elizabeth Heuer (PhD 2008), MA student Krystle Stricklin presented “Memorial Cranes Trapped in Barbwire: Untangling Language and Memories of the Japanese American Incarceration.” Stricklin considered the use of language in monuments to the Japanese American incarceration and how these memorial space draws from a conflict-ridden history of euphemistic stratagems and the politics of forgetting. In the same session, alumnus Jennifer Courts (PhD 2011) presented “The Crucifixion of the Parlement de Paris: National Justice in Fifteenth-Century France,” exploring the renovation of the justice system in fifteenth-century France in the wake of the Hundred Years’ War.
Doctoral students Deirdre Carter and Bryan Schaeffer both participated in the panel The Role of Interdisciplinary Scholarship in Pre-Columbian Art, which investigated how interdisciplinary scholarship helps in the study of art history for the Pre-contact Americas. Carter presented “Sustenance for the Gods: Turkeys in Mesoamerican Art, Ritual, and Daily Life.” Schaeffer’s paper, “Receiving Gods and Re-creating Origins: Travel and Movement in Mesoamerica,” examined how travel and movement are written about, visualized, and practiced in Mesoamerica, reconstituting and recapitulating various people’s origins and their ancillary connections to deities.
Alumnus Sam Ewing (MA 2012) also returned to SECAC this year with the paper “BREAKING NEWS: Paraphotographer Robert Heinecken Unmasks the Composition of the Reagan-era Media Landscape” in the session ParaFiction and ParaFact: The Space Between. Also on Friday, Keri Watson (PhD 2010) presented “Elizabeth McCausland: Critic, Curator, and Activist” in the session Confronting Challenges, Asserting Presence: Women in the American Art World 1900–1970. And on Saturday afternoon, November 2, alumnus Jennifer Feltman (PhD 2011) presented “Building Virtue at Amiens: Moral Theology and the Rhetoric of Construction in the West Facade Dado Sculptures” in the session The Twelfth Century in Art and Thought.