The rock-cut church of Cavusun in Cappadocia, Turkey, is dated to the tenth century and the reign of the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros II Phokas. The talk will focus on the ways in which viewers of the paintings that adorn the church perceived them during 3 successive reigns. The picture in the poster is a detail of the north wall paintings of the 40 Martyrs of Sebasteia.

Dr. Jones specializes in the arts of Byzantium and the medieval East. Her current book project examines the cult of the emperor in the middle Byzantine period, and the ways in which the cult of St. Constantine the Great was promoted by the needs and desires of the Macedonian Dynasty (867–1056). Dr. Jones’s research has been supported by fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Cypriot American Archeological Institute, and the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations at Koç University, among others.

This event is sponsored by the Art History Department and the Mesaros Art Fund.

With support from the Payne Fund in the Arts, the Art History Department is pleased to host Erin Thompson. Erin L. Thompson holds a PhD in Classical Art History and a JD, both from Columbia University. She is an associate professor of art crime at John Jay College (City University of New York), where she studies the damage done to cultural heritage and communities through looting, theft, and deliberate destruction of art (as well as its deliberate preservation). She is the author of Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors (Yale, 2016) and Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of American Monuments (Norton, 2022). She is a member of the Advisory Committee for the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign.

With support from the Payne Fund in the Arts, the Art History Department is pleased to host Laura Raicovich. Laura Raicovich is a New York-based writer and curator whose lauded book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest was published in June 2021 by Verso Books. She recently served as Interim Director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art; was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio Center; and was awarded the inaugural Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators at Hyperallergic.
While Director of the Queens Museum from 2015 to 2018, Raicovich co-curated Mel Chin: All Over the Place (2018), a multi-borough survey of the artist’s work that filled the entire museum. She has also held positions at Creative Time, Dia Art Foundation, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Public Art Fund. Raicovich lectures internationally and in 2019-20 co-curated a seminar series titled Freedom of Speech: A Curriculum for Studies into Darkness at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics, from which she is co-editing an anthology of writings. She also is the author of At the Lightning Field (CHP 2017) and A Diary of Mysterious Difficulties (Publication Studio 2014); she is co-editor of Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (OR 2017).

A lecture by Claudia Zapata, Curatorial Assistant for Latinx art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.