Upcoming Events

2025 Public Events:

Extracting the Past: How the 'AI' Industry Exploits Art History and What We Can Do to Stop It
  • Tuesday September 16, 4:30p.m., Boger 112

Sonja Drimmer, Associate Professor, History of Art & Architecture, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Over the last several years, universities and museums have partnered with commercial technology firms like Google, Microsoft, and Meta, who have promised that their AI products will enhance both historical research and accessibility to historical collections. These promises, however, are not supported by the reality of what computer vision--the branch of AI most relevant to the history of art--can achieve. So why have major institutions in education and the arts been so quick to take up these firms' offers?

This talk responds to this question by providing an introduction to computer vision's origins in military surveillance, an overview of its development under late capitalist regimes of exploitative micro-labor, and an orientation to how computer vision works. However, the main focus of this talk is not what computer vision does. Rather, I consider the culture of the AI industry, its main objectives, and the dangerous vision for the future that it promises--and whether those promises are credible or even in good faith. This vision for the future has relied on extracting history, and art history in particular, and I argue that it is our responsibility as art historians to be knowledgeable about the forms this extraction takes. I conclude with suggestions about what we can do to protect the subjects and practitioners of our discipline, as well as education in the humanities more broadly, against this incursion. I do not intend an intransigent rejection of a given technology; rather this talk articulates a challenge that is grounded in knowledge of the historical origins and corporate practices of the AI industry today.

 

Past Events:

 

Senior Talks in Art History
Thursday April 24, 4:30 p.m., Boger Hall, Room 112

Art History majors Sophie Raiskin-Wood '25, Chloe Schaeffer '25, Emily Petersdorf '25, and Valerie Gottridge '25.

 

Thrown Upon the World and No Place to Stay: Reconsidering the Neue Sachlichkeit
Monday February 17, 4:30 p.m., Boger 112
Sabine Kriebel, Senior Lecturer, History of Art, University College Cork, Ireland

The year 2025 marks the centenary of the “Die Neue Sachlichkeit” exhibition curated by Gustav Hartlaub, which gave the signature aesthetic movement of Weimar Germany its name. Variously translated as “The New Objectivity” or “The New Sobriety,” it swiftly became a buzzword of mid- to late- Weimar cultural production, from painterly mimesis to architectural austerity. Cold, detached, alienated, capitalist, cynical, retrograde, protofascist. These are among the descriptors associated with this broadly realist tendency in German painting that characterized the “stable” Weimar Republic of the mid-1920s. This lecture revisits the New Objectivity, or “Magical Realism,” as co-curator Franz Roh called it, to offer new directions of interpretation, using the work of Christian Schad, Otto Dix, Aenne Biermann, Florence Henri, among others, to revive our understandings of this often maligned avant-garde.

Sabine Kriebel has published extensively on the art and visual culture of the Weimar Republic, including Dada, Bauhaus, and photography. Her monograph Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield, 1929-1938 appeared with the University of California Press in 2014. Her current book project, Objectivity, Viewed Obliquely: The Neue Sachlichkeit Reframed, rethinks this moment of dubious modernism through the lens of psychoanalysis and phenomenology.

 

Truth and Image: Portraits in China 1000–1900
Tuesday February 11, 4:30 p.m., Boger 112
Joseph Scheier-Dolberg, Oscar Tang and Agnes Hsu-Tang Curator of Chinese Painting, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Portraiture has long been treated as a minor branch of Chinese art history, understood for its functional role in ancestor veneration but rarely considered along stylistic or intellectual lines. This talk will offer pathways toward reimagining the study of portraiture in premodern China, arguing that portraits were deeply integrated into the lives of elite intellectuals and that they stimulated and mediated a rich discourse on questions of selfhood, identity, and representation.

 

Urban Studies in Action: Transforming Cities Through Partnership
Thursday February 6, 4:30 p.m., Boger 112
Douglas Land '12, Senior Manager, JetBlue Airways Corporation

Join Douglas Smith Land, Wesleyan Class of 2012, for a discussion on bringing urban studies to life in the real world. Offering lessons on bridging the gap between a liberal arts education and a career in urban development, Douglas Land will explore navigating complex stakeholder landscapes, balancing public and private interests, and delivering projects that enhance quality of life for diverse populations. Drawing on his career in urban planning, public-sector strategy, and real estate development, he will share insights from transformative projects across New York City, including the redevelopment of JFK Airport, the Bronx's first Hip Hop Museum, and affordable housing initiatives in Brooklyn. Attendees will gain perspective on translating urban studies into impactful practice.