News and Media

Published: Sep 16, 2009

SAVANNAH, Ga. - The Savannah College of Art and Design's art history department is hosting a new guest lecture series, LIVE/ART/HISTORY. The inaugural talk, "Signs of Art" by SCAD anthropology professor Susan Falls, Ph.D., will be held Wednesday, Sept. 30, 6:30 p.m. The second fall lecture, "Our Lady of the Grilled Cheese Sandwich and Other Artful Apparitions" by Metropolitan Museum of Art Senior Research Associate Mia Fineman, Ph.D., will take place Wednesday, Oct. 7, 6:30 p.m. All lectures will be held in the Arnold Hall auditorium, 1810 Bull St., Savannah, and are free and open to the public.

Through LIVE/ART/HISTORY, the SCAD art history department will invite emerging and established artists and scholars to present Wednesday evening lectures about their current projects. LIVE/ART/HISTORY presents the history of art as a living and live(d), constantly changing, energetic field by seeking guest speakers whose work will respond to SCAD's dynamic art history curriculum and has been inspired by a broad, interdisciplinary range of inquiry. LIVE/ART/HISTORY will feature guests from all over the world, as well as SCAD professors and members of the public, encouraging field-trip and learning opportunities by establishing a forum for the exchange of ideas. Additional lectures will take place in Winter and Spring 2010.

"Signs of Art" by Susan Falls, Ph.D.

Wednesday, Sept. 30, 6:30 p.m.
Historically, the "wall dogs" who hand-painted commercial signs developed recognized personal styles. In Savannah, hand-painted signs, unique in terms of font and palette as well as thematic content and form, have marked everything from churches and barber shops to hardware stores and restaurants, places that represented central nodes in the production of vibrant society. These signs, now made mainly by and for African-Americans, are disappearing in the face of largely white gentrification and development, and with them, a mode of delineating sites of community-making, regional aesthetic sensibilities and a local artistic vernacular. As one resident said, "It is as if Savannah has been frozen, and now that it is heating up, the façade is literally melting away."

Art? Sign? Just what are these objects? How do they accrue value? What reading strategies do they invite? "Signs of Art" explores the transformation of signs into commercially profitable "outsider art," which simultaneously seeks to maintain "authenticity" and preserve "pieces" by, ironically, removing them from their original context, and as lenses through which to understand the construction of value by situating them, intensely, within their original sites. In particular, Falls will discuss how contemporary battles over the practical treatment of these signs reflect historical conflicts based on a racialized political economy of difference.

Falls has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from CUNY-Graduate Center in New York. Her work focuses on social conditions at the intersection of expressive activity, political economy and semiotics. Her recent projects have analyzed transnational artisan partnerships, commercial art/signage and diamonds.

"Our Lady of the Grilled Cheese Sandwich and Other Artful Apparitions" by Mia Fineman, Ph.D.

Wednesday, Oct. 7, 6:30 p.m.
In 2004, a grilled cheese sandwich bearing an image that some perceived to depict the Virgin Mary sold for $28,000 on eBay. This lecture will consider the deep-seated human tendency to see faces in inanimate objects-rocks, clouds, inkblots, sandwiches-and what this might tell us about the origins of art and the sources of creative inspiration. Among the topics to be addressed in this wide-ranging talk are animal mimicry, Rorschach blots, Leonardo's "Treatise on Painting," Mantegna's clouds, the Surrealism of Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, the low-tech illusionism of contemporary artists Mark Tansey and Vik Muniz, and a very special three-million-year-old pebble.

Fineman is senior research associate in the department of photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since joining the Metropolitan in 1997, she has organized numerous exhibitions, including "Richard Avedon: Portraits" (2002), "On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag" (2006) and "Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography" (2008). Fineman writes frequently about art and culture for the New York Times and Slate, and has contributed essays to monographs on Walker Evans, Gabriel Orozco, Sean Scully and others. She is currently at work on three projects: an exhibition tracing the history of doctored images before Photoshop, an oral history of Richard Avedon, and a book about cell-phone photography.

For more information, call 912.525.6068 or e-mail the art history department.