Thursday, February 26th, 2026
Dr. Gretchen Ernster Henderson - "Ugly Waters: (de)Composing Arts & Aesthetics with Blue Humanities"
Department of Art History Symposium: "UGLY: Unruly Aesthetics in the Humanities"

Eskenazi Museum of Art - Martin Commons in the 2nd floor Center for Education | 4:00 p.m.

The Department of Art History presents their 2026 Symposium "UGLY: Unruly Aesthetics in the Humanities". Please join us for the keynote address by Dr. Gretchen Henderson. 

Gretchen Ernster Henderson is the Spence L. Wilson Distinguished Professor in Humanities at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. She is the author of Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea (Trinity University Press, 2023), Ugliness: A Cultural History (Reaktion/University of Chicago Press, 2015), Galerie de Difformité (Northwestern University Press, 2011), and other works. Her work cross-pollinates critical and creative practices through interdisciplinary field engagements. Some past commitments include being Co-Director of a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute on Museums: Humanities in the Public Sphere at Georgetown University and UC-Santa Cruz, Associate Director for Research at the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin, and Artist-in-Residence at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Her solo exhibition on Dear Body of Water is currently on view at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts at Appalachian State University (December 2025-May 2026).

Friday, March 6th, 2026
Dr. Kirsten Pai Buick - "Who is Responsible For Remembering?" Three 19th Century Case Studies @ Visuality and Forgetting
Eskenazi Museum of Art - Martin Commons in the 2nd floor Center for Education | 4:00 p.m.

In a cultural climate where we are being actively encouraged to forget or mis-remember, this lecture argues that forgetting can be constitutive of visuality itself—that we must forget as the very condition of seeing. What does the slave narrative of James Williams (1838) mask, for example? What of Edmonia Lewis’s sculpture Forever Free (1867) or John Gast’s painting American Progress (1872)? Turning on the central question of “who is responsible for remembering,” each work resists illegibility by withholding the unspeakable and the unspoken.  

Kirsten Pai Buick (B.A. 1985, Art History, The College of the University of Chicago; M.A. 1992 and Ph.D. 1999, Art History, The University of Michigan) is a Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico where she has taught since 2001. She was a SAAM Predoctoral Fellow and a Charles Gaius Bolin Fellow at Williams College. Her recent publications have appeared in exhibition catalogs for artists such as Deborah Roberts, Augusta Savage, and an essay on Renee Stout that appears in the catalog for the VMFA exhibition “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse.” Her work has been included in anthologies such as The Routledge Companion to African American Art History edited by Eddie Chambers; and in Race and Vision in the Nineteenth Century edited by Shirley Samuels. She lectures nationally and internationally. Buick is a recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize for African American Art and was named Distinguished Scholar by the College Art Association for 2022. She has published extensively on African American art, including her book Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Duke Univ. Press, 2010). Her second book, In Authenticity: “Kara Walker” and the Eidetics of Racism, is in progress.

Friday, March 27th, 2026
Dr. Sampada Aranke - "The Hammons Effect"
Eskenazi Museum of Art - Martin Commons in the 2nd floor Center for Education | 4:00 p.m.

This talk will consider the ways that famed Black American conceptual artist David Hammons cites, leverages, and operationalizes white, western canons to probe the generative limits of art historical discourse and canonization. The artist's intentional engagement with the practices and legacies of artists whose oeuvres have formed an avant-garde western canon like Duchamp, Klein, Matta-Clark, is not about mere adoration, but in fact a strategic assessment, if not deformation, of art historical discourses. Operating like a trojan horse, Hammons has seamlessly created opportunities for alignment and association, making it so that named collectors of Duchamp and museums that collect Matta-Clark have incomplete collections if they do not own a work by Hammons. This project will work alongside two key Hammons works, The Holy Bible: Old Testament (2002) and Days End (2021) to consider how the artist breaks disciplinary canons in order to make radically renewed associations.

Sampada Aranke is an Associate Professor of Art History and Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. Her research interests include performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and black cultural and aesthetic theory. Her work has been published in e-flux, Artforum, Art Journal, ASAP/J, and October. She has written catalogue essays for Sadie Barnette, Betye Saar, Rashid Johnson, Faith Ringgold, Kambui Olujimi, Sable Elyse Smith, and Zachary Fabri. She has curated and co-curated exhibitions at galleries and museums, including the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis and The Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the recipient of the 2021 Art Journal award for her article "Blackouts and Other Visual Escapes." Her book, Death's Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power (Duke University Press, 2023) examines the ways artists and activists reconceptualized death as a generative visual and political force in the Black Power era. Death’s Futurity was awarded the Modern Language Association’s 2023 William Sanders Scarborough Prize.