Harold E. Dickson Memorial Lectures

The annual Dickson Memorial Lecture Series in Art History invites outside scholars to share their latest research.

Christine Ho, associate professor of East Asian art at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, gave the Harold E. Dickson Lecture, “The Rebirth of a Public: Mural fever in 1979” in March. Focusing on the eight murals created for the Beijing Capital Airport in 1979, especially Zhang Ding's Nezha Conquers the Dragon King, Christine Ho showed how the "mural fever" reshaped the everyday environment of the post-Mao public and opened new ways to reimagine the position of Chinese art in relation to the world. Ho argued that the murals tell another history of twentieth-century Chinese art, one that reflected upon the legacies of early twentieth-century liberal cosmopolitanism and socialist internationalism. What emerged was a vernacular modernism that persisted and reinvented itself in the aftermath of the Mao era.

Miriam K. Said, assistant professor of Ancient Art at Tufts University presented "Scales of Power: Magic and Materiality in the Assyrian Near East" in October. Said's talk explored Assyria's imperial domination of the ancient Near East in the 9th century BCE by focusing on the dialectical relationship between the monumental and the miniature and the materiality of the personal and the political.