Art, Empire, and Cultural Identity Tuesday Evening Lecture Series October 7 - November 11, 2008, 6 - 7 pm    This six-week lecture series, presented by art historians Rebecca Albiani and Kolya Rice, provides a comprehensive understanding of the rise of Orientalist art and its proliferation in the nineteenth century. The series also examines how art has been used as an instrument in the service of nation-building and marginalizing cultures. Each one-hour lecture begins promptly at 6 pm in the Murray Family Event Space at Tacoma Art Museum. Registration Cost for the six-week series is $65; $45 for members. Individual lectures are $12; $8 for members. To register in advance, e-mail Education@TacomaArtMuseum.org or call 253.272.4258 x3030. Educators: Please note that clock hours are available for this series.

Lecture Topics 

Magi and Masquerade
Tuesday, October 7, with Rebecca Albiani
This lecture will introduce the concept of western artists looking east by examining Renaissance and Baroque precedents. Because the East was also the Holy Land, religious painters such as the Bellinis, Durer, and Rembrandt used turbans and camels to enliven their biblical scenes.

Egyptomania
Tuesday, October 14, with Rebecca Albiani
Napoleon’s ill-fated military campaign in Egypt (1798–1801) sparked an inexorable fascination with ancient Egyptian art. Obelisks, sphinxes, and winged goddesses appeared in paintings and became motifs in decorative arts and architecture.

Orientalism and the Grande Odalisque
Tuesday, October 21, with Rebecca Albiani
A taste for the exotic prevailed in nineteenth-century France even among painters who never set foot in North Africa. Delacroix and Renoir sketched Algerian women from life, while Ingres invented his odalisques. Why did harem scenes so intoxicate the painters and collectors of this time?

Academic Instruments
Tuesday, October 28, with Kolya Rice
Though sometimes forgotten, the art of European Academies resonated both aesthetically and politically with its contemporary audience. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists, such as Jacques-Louis David, who fueled the fires of the French Revolution and buttressed Napoleon’s campaign to forge an empire with his canvasses, will be discussed in this lecture.

National Identity: Us and Them Tuesday, November 4, with Kolya Rice More than rendering the beauty of the natural world, the genre of landscape painting depicts place: ours and theirs. This lecture reveals how this genre was instrumental in the construction of national identities in the nineteenth century, drawing upon the work of key artists such as Caspar David Friedrich and Albert Bierstadt.		This event is a part of
Postcolonialism and the Voices of "Others" Tuesday, November 11, with Kolya Rice Since the 1960s, with a strength like none other in history, the voices of the marginalized have obliged the world to listen. This lecture will trace a trajectory from art inspired by the civil rights movement, through feminism, to contemporary postcolonial critiques.		This event is a part of

About the Speakers

Rebecca Albiani received an M.A. from Stanford University and a B.A. from University of California, Berkeley, where she majored in art history. As a student, she was a graduate lecturing fellow at Washington’s National Gallery and a Fulbright Scholar in Venice. Since 1997 she has taught the annual Frye Art Museum Art History Lecture Series.

Kolya Rice is currently a Ph.D. candidate in modern and contemporary art history at the University of Washington in Seattle and received his M.A. from Rice University. He has taught courses on western art, theory, and criticism at the UW and Seattle University over the past decade and is an adjunct professor in the UW’s Art History and Museology programs.

Captions:
Jean Jules Antoine Lecomte du Nouÿ, Judith, 1875. Dahesh Museum of Art. © 2008 Dahesh Museum of Art, All Rights Reserved.