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.

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Forwarded to several lists (forgive the duplication) by Sherman Clarke,
NYU Libraries - sherman.clarkenyu.edu

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