Online lecture: Unstable Realisms

Thursday, Sep 10, 2020 6:30 – 7:30 pm

The University of Chicago
5550 S. Greenwood
Chicago, IL 60637

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How can art serve as evidence? Intensely naturalistic art—be it a photograph or an ancient sculpture—seems to make truth claims about the world around it. But a discussion of objects reveals that interpreting representational practices produces a host of common questions and dilemmas that thread through time and place.

Drawing upon photographs, ceramics, and sculpture, Professor Claudia Brittenham and Smart Museum curator Leslie Wilson consider the ways that material objects serve as testimony to a particular moment, period, and site, and reveal how, in so doing, they both convey and obscure meaning.