ASCHA | Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art
U P C O M I N G
Spiritual Moderns: A Roundtable Conversation with Erika Doss
Friday, February 16, 2:30-4:00pm
Join us at the College Art Association 112th Annual Conference February 14–17, 2024, at Hilton Chicago.
Erika Doss’s recent publication, Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists & Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2023), joins the ranks of significant, often provocative publications in recent years that have sought to reveal and reevaluate the religious or “spiritual” resonances of artistic modernism. Focusing on the work and life of four iconic American artists of the 20th century – Joseph Cornell, Mark Tobey, Agnes Pelton, and Andy Warhol – Doss challenges the presumed secularity of modern art and illuminates the compelling, often dense, sacrality of modern American visual culture. This roundtable discussion, featuring four prominent scholars in dialogue with the author, will explore the assumptions, motivations, and insights of Doss’s analysis, and consider a more open, inclusive, and diverse reading of American Modernism.
CONVENOR:
Ronald R. Bernier is Professor of Humanities at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, MA. His books include The Unspeakable Art of Bill Viola (2014), Beyond Belief (2010), and Monument, Moment, and Memory: Monet’s Cathedral in Fin-de-Siècle France (2007).
PANELISTS:
Stephen S. Bush is Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. He has published Visions of Religion: Experience, Meaning, and Power (2014) and William James on Democratic Individuality (2017). He is currently working on a project on religion, politics, art, and aesthetics.
Matthew J. Milliner is Professor of Art History at Wheaton College. He is a recipient of a Commonwealth Fellowship at the University of Virginia, and his books include Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon (2022).
Robert Weinberg received an MA with Distinction in History of Art from the University of Buckingham, United Kingdom, for his dissertation, The Awakening of Spirit: Artistic and Thematic Influences on the Evolution of Mark Tobey's 'White Writing'. He is the author or editor of 13 published books including major biographies of Ethel Jenner Rosenberg and Lady Blomfield, significant figures in the history of the Bahá'í Faith in Britain. He is an elected member of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of the United Kingdom - a body on which Mark Tobey himself served in the 1930s - and between 2009-2013 he served for four years as Director of the Office of Public Information for the Bahá'í International Community, based in Haifa, Israel.
Gilbert Vicario is Chief Curator at the Pérez Art Museum Miami since October 2022. Before joining PAMM, Vicario was Chief Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art at Phoenix Art Museum where he curated diverse exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. Recent exhibitions include: California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold, Orange County Museum of Art; Desert Rider; Stories of Abstraction: Contemporary Latin American Art in the Global Context; Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist; and Sheila Pepe: Hot Mess Formalism. In 2006, Vicario was named U.S. Commissioner for the International Biennale of Cairo by the U.S. Department of State for the exhibition Daniel Joseph Martinez: The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant; and was a participating curator in the 2007 Lyon Biennial: The History of a Decade That Has Not Yet Been Named.
RESPONDENT:
Erika Doss is Professor of Art History in the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas, Dallas, and former Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her books range from Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (1991) to Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion (2023).