| “Picturing the Nation” | |
| A conference sponsored jointly by | |
| The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
and The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the United Kingdom |
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| Thursday, October 23, 2008 Old Post Office Building, Room M-09, Washington, D.C. |
| Co-sponsored by the National Endowment for
the Humanities (NEH) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the United Kingdom,
this conference was held to foster scholarly collaboration and research in the humanities.
“Picturing the Nation” featured presentations from scholars from the United States
and the United Kingdom on how art can illuminate a nation’s history. This conference was
designed to complement both cultural agencies’ special arts initiatives. NEH’s
Picturing America initiative brings great American art to schools and
public libraries to help students and citizens learn about the people, events, and ideas that
have shaped our nation’s history. Because works of art reveal important aspects of our
history and culture, the artwork is designed to be used in any classroom subject and as a gateway
to the broader world of the humanities. AHRC’s Beyond Text is a strategic program to
generate new understandings of, and research into, the impact and significance of the way we
communicate. The program addresses key issues of how people and societies communicate without
using the written word; how we learn from watching and imitating others; how we learn from images
and objects; and how and why we respond to performance, sound, and place.
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Transcript
of remarks: PDF
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| Shearer West, Director of Research, Arts and Humanities Research Council, United Kingdom | |
Slide presentation: PDF
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| Session One: Picturing America Barbara Bays, Senior Program Officer and art historian, National Endowment for the Humanities | |
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[Barbara Bays spoke on the history and development of the
Picturing America project. Giving examples
of the various ways that the images can be addressed either individually or in groups,
she discussed the flexibility of the collection for use in a broad range of classroom
subjects and grade bands.] |
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| Session Two: What is National about the Nation's Art? Evelyn Welch, Professor of Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary University of London, and AHRC Programme Director for “Beyond Text: Performances, Sounds, Images, Objects” |
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| Session Three: A Complex Parade: Problems and Prospects for Picturing the Nation Wilfred McClay, Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga |
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Transcript
of remarks: PDF
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| Session Four: American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell Laurie Norton Moffatt, Director and CEO of the Norman Rockwell Museum |
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Transcript
of remarks: PDF
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| Session Five: The Public Catalogue Foundation: a National Collection of Oil Paintings and its Interpretation Gervase Rosser, Head of the Department of Art History in the University of Oxford and the Academic Partner of the Public Catalogue Foundation | |
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Transcript
of remarks: PDF
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