In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

Caro Fowler
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In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing Podcast

What does it mean to make art history? In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing considers the role of art in society, how knowledge is shared (or obscured), and the way histories are made and unmade—while also considering the personal stakes of scholarship. Each episode offers a lively, in-depth look into the life and mind of a scholar or artist working with art historical or visual material. Discussions touch on guests’ current research projects, career paths, and significant texts, mentors, and experiences that have shaped their thinking. We invite you to join us and listen in on these conversations about the stakes of doing art history today.

  1. 26 MAR

    “Fragmentary Ruins and the Enduring Image”: Cammy Brothers on Drawing as a Way of Thinking

    In this final episode of the season focused on the craft of writing, Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator in the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Cammy Brothers, a scholar of art and architecture at Northeastern University. In this episode, Brothers examines Michaelangelo’s drawing practice and that of his contemporary, Giuliano da Sangallo, and the ways in which da Sangallo’s architectural drawings aim to assemble fragmentary images of Rome on the page. Brothers also refl...

    43 min

  2. 19 MAR

    "A Critique of What Art Can Do”: Jennifer Nelson on Undoing Mastery

    In this episode, Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator in the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Jennifer Nelson, a poet and scholar of early modern art at the University of Delaware. Through the lens of their first book on Holbein, and a second, forthcoming, on Cranach, Nelson describes how comparative studies of elite cultural production can allow us to the see the category of art as capacious, and capable of dismantling our concept of mastery. They offer concrete advice on...

    40 min

  3. 12 MAR

    “To Give Shape to a Way of Seeing the Past”: Shira Brisman on the Intimacy of Writing the History of Social Art

    In this continuation of a season focused on the craft of writing in art history, Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator in the Research and Academic Program) speaks to Shira Brisman, a historian of early modern art and assistant professor of the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania. Through the lens of her two books, the first on Albrecht Dürer, and the second, forthcoming, on the goldsmith Christoph Jamnitzer (1563–1618), Brisman explores how art can shape communities, an...

    44 min

  4. 5 MAR

    “The Magic Art of Framing”: Alexander Nemerov on Writing History and Making a World

    This is the first episode of a new season focused on the craft of writing in art history. Sara Houghteling (special projects coordinator for the Research and Academic Program and a fiction writer) speaks with Alexander Nemerov, professor of art history at Stanford University, about his most recent book, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s. He discusses his writing process, how his craft has changed over time, and this current book’s varied sources of inspiration—from painting and...

    41 min

  5. 18/04/2023

    "On Living Archives": Tsedaye Makonnen on Collaboration and Black Performance Practices

    In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with artist and curator Tsedaye Makonnen about her multidisciplinary studio, curatorial, and research-based practice. They discuss how Tsedaye’s sculptural installations and performances thread together her identity as a daughter of Ethiopian immigrants and a Black American woman to explore the transhistorical forced migration of Black communities across the globe.

    37 min

  6. 11/04/2023

    "Attention Becomes a Kind of Politics": Sarah Hamill on Sculpture and Interpretation

    In this week episode Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Sarah Hamill, a scholar of modern and contemporary art and professor at Sarah Lawrence College, about the role of description in art history, and how description is always a form of interpretation. Sarah describes how the embodied experience of sculpture captured her imagination and how she came to understand the role of photography in mediating our encounters with art objects. She also ...

    34 min

  7. 04/04/2023

    “Shifting Focal Points”: Sergei Tcherepnin on Sonic Attention

    In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Sergei Tcherepnin, an artist who works in the intersections of sound, music, sculpture, theater, and photography. We discuss how his work is made to be interacted with, creating new intimacies—listening by hearing, but also listening by touching, by walking, by pressing, by feeling. Sergei describes how he seeks to create multiple focal points within each work, activating a kind of queer sou...

    42 min

  8. 28/03/2023

    “What ‘Minor' Histories Allow Us to See”: Donette Francis on Writing African Diaspora

    In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program) speaks with Donette Francis, an Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami, Coral Gables. A founding member of the Hemispheric Caribbean Studies Collective, her research and writing investigate place, aesthetics, and cultural politics in the African Diaspora. They discuss the politics of making visible what Donette calls “minor histories.” Across her work on the novel as well as in the re...

    42 min
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About

What does it mean to make art history? In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing considers the role of art in society, how knowledge is shared (or obscured), and the way histories are made and unmade—while also considering the personal stakes of scholarship. Each episode offers a lively, in-depth look into the life and mind of a scholar or artist working with art historical or visual material. Discussions touch on guests’ current research projects, career paths, and significant texts, mentors, and experiences that have shaped their thinking. We invite you to join us and listen in on these conversations about the stakes of doing art history today.

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