VITAL CONSTITUTIONS: THE APPEARANCE OF "HEALTH" IN HISTORY

Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference
Hosted by the Department of Art History
Rice University, Houston, Texas

Conceptions of health and the healthfulness of bodies, societies, and environments, are sprawling. Vital Constitutions aims to facilitate an open and interdisciplinary dialogue about representations and realities of care and condemnation across time and geography as related to imaging in art, art history, and visual culture; architecture; anthropology, and beyond. A group of nine emerging scholars and artists will share their research and practices during three panels: "Biology, Politics, and Mutation," "Building, Memory, and the Forsaken," and "Ritual, Remedy, and Form." We encourage the public to not only attend the presentations but also participate in a town hall style discussion that will conclude Saturday's programming. This portion of the conference will be led by invited panelists Dr. Suzannah Biernoff, Erika Blumenfeld, and Dr. Jairo Moreno — whose research engages subjects such as mixed-ability communities, the Anthropocene, and music history, respectively — who will speak on their work, respond to the panels, and encourage conversation.

Planning Vital Constitutions included attention to its own role as an academic conference. We hope that the line-up and format help expand ideas of such gatherings. In addition to the presentations, ample coffee breaks will offer audience members and participants a chance to visit key parts of the conference: an exhibition of visual art and a temporary non-circulating library located in the Moody Center Lantern Room. This complementary space will, we hope, offer 'food for thought.' The Moody Center, a site straddling the border of the campus and the city, is an apt metaphor for our goal to engage Houston at large and layer perspectives.


Public Programming:

Saturday, October 14, 2017
9:30AM-6:30PM
Moody Center for the Arts, Second Floor
Rice University

10:00am
Biology, Politics, and Mutation

"'Let’s flesh things out.' Conceptualizing Physiognomie in the Siècle des Lumières"
Delanie Linden, MA student, Art History, Southern Methodist University

"Medical Machines: Architecture to Flip Your Soul"
Victoria Bugge Øye, PhD candidate, History and Theory of Architecture, School of Architecture, Princeton University

"Sparking Evolution: The United States Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Gardening at the Inter-American Institute for Agricultural Science in Turrialba, Costa Rica, 1943-1960"
Nikki Moore, PhD candidate, Art History, Rice University


11:45am
Building, Memory, and the Forsaken

"A Theater of Death: Sarah Bernhardt’s Morbid Photographs and Belle Époque Consumerism"
Lacy Murphy, MA student, Art History and Archeology, Washington University in Saint Louis

"On Prisons and Museums: Niche Construction and the Dialectic of Care and Castigation at Donald Judd's 'The Chinati Foundation' (Marfa, Texas, 1986)"
Emily Verla Bovino, PhD (awarded 2017), Art History, Theory and Criticism, University of California, San Diego

"Lesions, Hernias, and Post-Soviet Anxieties: Boris Mikhailov’s Community of Loss"
Christian P. Whitworth, PhD student, Art History, Stanford University


2:30pm
Ritual, Remedy, and Form

"The Body of Work: Weight Loss as Body Art"
Janine DeFeo, PhD student, Art History, City University of New York, Graduate Center

"Healing in the Studio: An Artist Talk"
Hanna Washburn, MFA student, School of Visual Arts

"Practical Aesthetics: Negotiating Sickness in Eastern Serbia"
Christina Novakov-Ritchey, PhD student, Culture and Performance, World Arts and Cultures/Dance, University of California, Los Angeles


4:30pm
Invited Speaker Panel & Town Hall Discussion

Dr. Suzannah Biernoff, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Visual Culture, Department of History of Art, Birkbeck, University of London
Dr. Jairo Moreno, Associate Professor, Department of Music, University of Pennsylvania
Erika Blumenfeld, Transdisciplinary Artist, ROSES PDART Artist-in-Resident (2016-19), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

6:15pm
Closing Remarks


The conference and exhibition are free, but seating is limited. For further details and to register please visit vitalconstitutions.com or vitalconstitutions.blogs.rice.edu/. The Moody is wheelchair accessible.
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The Vital Constitutions Interdisciplinary Conference is generously supported by the Department of Art History and the GradStarter Initiative at Rice University. We are also grateful for our relationship with the Moody Center for the Arts.