The Forbidden Eakins: The Sexual Politics of Thomas Eakins and His
Circle - Monday, June 24, 2002  7:00pm

Free and Open to the Public
Stony Brook Manhattan
401 Park Ave South (at 28th), 2nd floor
New York, NY 10016

Panel Participants:
     Martin Berger, SUNY, Buffalo
     Deborah Bright, Rhode Island School of Design
     Jennifer Doyle, University of California, Riverside
     Michael Hatt, University of Nottingham in England
     Michael Moon, Johns Hopkins University
     James Smalls, University of Maryland at Baltimore
     Jonathan Weinberg, Senior Fellow in-residence, the Getty Museum

Moderator: Jonathan Katz, Stony Brook University

This event takes the June 2002 opening of the Thomas Eakins exhibit at
the Metropolitan  Museum  of Art as an occasion to gather in one place
scholars at the leading edge of the field to discuss queer and feminist
approaches to the subject of sex and gender in Eakin's paintings,
photography, and biography.  It is necessary because the Met has failed
to acknowledge a now quite developed and highly influential queer
studies bibliography towards the re-framing of an important artist.

In this round-table conversation, panelists will take up subjects like:
homoeroticism, race, and masculinity; women in Eakins's work; Eakins's
photographic interest in the naked body; class difference; and the
challenges Eakins poses to people working in gay and lesbian studies.
We will, furthermore, take up the larger subject of queer perspectives
in art history, and the curatorial practices of the museums that manage
Eakins's presence in the public sphere.

The conversation partners include art historians, American studies
scholars, queer theorists, literary critics, and artists all with
distinct investments in Eakins and in the subject of pleasure, sex, and
politics in American culture.  Each participant will speak briefly
about their own investment in the artist before the conversation opens
up to a discussion between panelists and with the audience.

This event emerged directly out of conversations between queer and
feminist members of the arts community looking for an antidote to the
official discourse on the artist.  This symposium is sponsored by the
Humanities Institute at Stony Brook and co-sponsored by the Larry
Kramer Initiative at Yale University, the Center for Lesbian and Gay
Studies at the City University of New York, the Center for the Study of
Gender and Sexuality at New York University, Barnard College and the
Queer Caucus of the College Art Association.

Seating for this event is limited. For information on registration,
call the  Office of Conferences and Special Events at Stony Brook
University, 631-632-6320.

The  Humanities  Institute  at  Stony  Brook, E4341 Melville Library,
Stony Brook University, Stony  Brook,  NY  11794-3394;  tel.631-632-
7765, fax 631-632-7794.

The Panelists:
>
> Martin  Berger teaches Art History and English at SUNY, Buffalo.  He
is the author  of  Man  Made:  Thomas  Eakins  and  the Construction of
Gilded Age Manhood  (University  of  California Press, 2000), and
numerous articles on Eakins   and   masculinity.    His   current
work  centers  on  race and nineteenth-century American painting.  He
will be in residency next year as a fellow at the Smithsonian American
Art Museum.
>
> Deborah  Bright is an Associate Professor of Photography and Art
History at the  Rhode  Island School of Design.  Her essays and visual
works have been published  in  several  anthologies  and  in  numerous
journals, including Afterimage,  Exposure,  Art  Journal,  and Views.
She is the editor of the collection  of  essays  The  Passionate
Camera: Photographies and Bodies of Desire (Routledge 1998).
>
> Jennifer  Doyle  teaches  American  Literature  and  Visual  Culture
in the English  Department  at  the  University  of California,
Riverside.  She is co-editor  of  Pop  Out:  Queer  Warhol  (Duke,
1996) and is the author of several  articles  on art and sexual
politics, including "Sex, Scandal, and Thomas  Eakins's  The  Gross
Clinic,"  and "The Effect of Intimacy: Tracey Emin's Bad Sex
Aesthetics."
>
> Michael  Hatt  teaches  the  History  of  American Art at the
University of Nottingham  in  England,  and  has  written extensively
on race, class, and sexuality in American art.  Recent publications
include the articles "Ghost Dancing  in  the  Salon:  The  Red Indian
as a sign of White Identity," and "Eakins'  Arcadia:  Sculpture,
Photography  and  the  Redefinition  of the Classical Body."
>
> Michael  Moon  is  a  Professor  of  English  and  a member of the
> Steering Committee  of the Program in Women's, Gender and Sexuality
Studies at Johns Hopkins  University.  His research has focused on the
writings of queer New Yorkers  from  Walt  Whitman  to  Horatio  Alger
and Henry James and on the interaction  of  visual  and literary
representations in the work of Joseph Cornell,  Jack  Smith, Charles
Ludlam, and Andy Warhol. He is the author of Disseminating Whitman
(Harvard, 1991) and A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and  Initiation
in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Duke, 1998).
>
> James  Smalls is an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the
University of Maryland at Baltimore where he teaches courses on art and
visual culture of the  19th  and  20th  centuries  in  Europe  and
America. His research and publication  interests  focus on the
intersections of race, gender, and gay and  lesbian  issues  in
visual  culture.  He has published extensively on Modern  and
Contemporary  Black  Visual Culture.  His first book is titled
Escalve,  Negre,  Noir:  The Black Presence in French Art from 1789 to
> 1870 (forthcoming).
>
> Jonathan  Weinberg  is  an  artist  and art historian.  He is the
author of Ambition  and  Love  in Modern Art (Yale Press 2001) and
Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality  in  the  of  Charles  Demuth,
Marsden Hartley and the First American  Avant-Garde  (Yale  Press
1993).   He  has  just  be  awarded a Guggenheim  Fellowship,  and
will  be  a senior fellow in residence at the Getty Museum in Los
Angeles.

--------------

Forwarded to several lists (forgive the duplication) by Sherman Clarke,
NYU Libraries - [log in to unmask]

p.s. sorry about the spacing

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