U.Va.'s Lindner Center for Art History Kicks Off Spring Lecture Series Feb. 4

January 25, 2010 — The University of Virginia's Carl H. and Martha S. Lindner Center for Art History kicks off its spring lecture series with "On Not Making Boys: David Smith, Frank O'Hara and Gender Assignment."

The talk, by David J. Getsy, Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Chair in Art History and associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, examines the contradictory status of the claim "I don't make boy sculptures," made by the abstract expressionist sculptor David Smith to the poet and art curator Frank O'Hara in the context of a 1964 televised interview.

Pursuing the long-running professional relationship between the two and the converging ways in which they characterized Smith's sculpture, the lecture will investigate how this arbitrary assignment of a binary gender has come to serve as a cipher for interpretations of Smith's otherwise abstract bodies.

Getsy's talk will be held Feb. 4. at 6 p.m. in Campbell Hall, room 160 followed by a reception in Fayerweather Lounge.

On Feb. 25, Asher D. Biemann, Nathan Kolodiz Director of Jewish Studies and associate professor for modern Jewish thought and intellectual history at U.Va., will lecture on "The Dream of the Moving Moses: Michelangelo and the Jewish Imagination."

For information, contact the McIntire Department of Art at 434-924-6123.

— By Jane Ford

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