Fall 2022 Shouky Shaheen Lecturer Tim Barringer Asks us to Revisit Victorian-era Art Critic John Ruskin

The Lamar Dodd School of Art welcomes Paul Mellon Professor of Art History Tim Barringer of Yale University next week for the annual Shouky Shaheen lecture. At the invitation of retiring Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of Art History Janice Simon, Barringer will present his talk Why We Need Ruskin Now, which argues that revisiting the interconnected readings of nature, art, and education by British thinker John Ruskin can illuminate our relationship to images in the present era.

Attend the lecture on Thursday November 10 at 5:30 PM at the School of Art main building on 270 River Road in room S150. The event is free and the public is invited to attend.

Simon nominated Barringer to deliver the distinguished lecture at the University of Georgia given his role in co-curating two major exhibitions on English-American painter Thomas Cole, including the 2018 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossing. This recent scholarship “coincided perfectly with my graduate seminar this fall on the art of Cole,” Simon explained.

Moreover, the art historians have collaborated in the past. Simon and Barringer were co-authors of The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists exhibition catalogue, published in 2019 by Yale University Press with the National Gallery of Art.

On Barringer’s suggestion to discuss the present-day relevance of John Ruskin, Simon shares, “I thought the topic sounded like a great public lecture, as he is also an expert of Ruskin’s art and theories.”

The 2022 Shouky Shaheen lecture is part of the UGA Spotlight on the Arts festival. More information on the 2022 Spotlight on the Arts festival, including a schedule of events, can be found at arts.uga.edu

Lecture Abstract
In this age of climate crisis and political chaos and incoherence, our lives are dominated by images on screens. It’s time for us to look again at the works of Victorian-era art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900). Ruskin offers us a way in which to connect art-historical thinking to the great issues of the era, to approach images in the largest contexts. While flatly rejecting Ruskin’s flawed and offensive ideas about gender and race, the talk reconsiders the critic’s expansion of art historical discourse to embrace urgent questions of modernity. Ruskin asked: What can we learn from the natural world and how should we care for it? How should historical monuments be understood and preserved? What is the role of art in education? And finally, how can we make a more just society with the work of art as a model of collaboration and empathy?

Lecturer Biography

Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University, of which he was Chair 2015-2021. He specializes in British art and art of the British Empire. He gave the Paul Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in London, 2019 and was the J Clawson Mills Fellow, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2013-14. He was visiting Slade Professor of Fine Art, University of Cambridge in 2009.

His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (Yale, 1999; 2012) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (Yale, 2005). With colleagues he co-edited Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity (Yale, 1998); Colonialism and the Object (Routledge, 1998); Art and the British Empire (Manchester, 2007); Writing the Pre-Raphaelites (Ashgate, 2009) and Victorian Jamaica (Duke, 2018). He was co-curator of American Sublime (Tate, 2002); Art and Emancipation in Jamaica (Yale, 2007); Opulence and Anxiety (Compton Verney, 2007); Before and After Modernism (Central St Martins, 2010); Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate, National Gallery of Art Washington DC, Pushkin Museum , Moscow, and Tokyo, 2012); Pastures Green and Dark, Satanic Mills (Princeton, 2013); Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and National Gallery, London, 2018) Picturesque and Sublime (Catskill, 2018), Unto this Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin (Yale, 2019-20) and Radical Victorians (seven US museum venues, 2019-22).

Shouky Shaheen Lecture Series
The Shouky Shaheen lecture is given annually at the Lamar Dodd School of Art by an internationally recognized artist or scholar at the Dodd. This lecture was established through the generosity of Doris Shaheen as a birthday gift to her husband, Shouky.