Symposium: Seeing the City
Symposium: Seeing the City, Inscribing Identity – Describing a New Metropolis
Saturday, September 13
Marking the final weekend of the exhibition Seeing the City, this interdisciplinary symposium examines the metropolis at the beginning of the twentieth century, with presentations on the art, literature, film, history, and architecture of Chicago and New York.
All talks will take place at the Cochrane Woods Art Center, across the courtyard from the Smart Museum of Art.
Free parking is available a half a block away in the Ellis Avenue Garage (on 55th Street between Ellis and Greenwood).
Register Today
The symposium is free! Advanced registration is recommended, as seating is limited. Box lunches may be ordered in advance. Click here to register and reserve your box lunch.
Schedule
All talks will be 30 minutes long with fifteen minutes for discussion.
| 8:30am | Check-in at the Smart Museum of Art Continental breakfast available |
| 9:00am | Welcome: Anthony Hirschel, Dana Feitler Director, Smart Museum of Art
Introduction to Seeing the City: Sloan’s New York and symposium: Anne Leonard, Smart Museum Curator and Mellon Program Coordinator |
| 9:15am | Rebecca Zurier
Associate Professor, History of Art, University of Michigan Whose Metropolis, Whose Mental Life? Modernists and other Mental Maps This talk questions and contextualizes the paradigmatic vision of the "unreal city" as presented in modernist art, literature, and cultural analysis. It proposes instead that the experience of the local and the neighborhood, in tension within the larger metropolis, has been equally defining of the modern city, thereby recuperating a range of expression as characteristic of urban mental life. |
| 10:00am | Carl Smith
Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of English & American Studies, Northwestern University The Book and the Street: The Emergence of a Modern American Urban Literature The rise of the American industrial city, of which Chicago was the leading example, seemed to many to be antithetical to traditional literary forms and to the values that literature was expected to express. This presentation discusses how a pioneering group of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers rose to the challenge of the city as literary subject and, in so doing, contributed centrally to the development of modern American literature. |
| 10:45am | Break |
| 11:00am | Judy Hoffman
Senior Lecturer, Committee on Cinema & Media Studies and the Department of Visual Arts, University of Chicago Halsted Street: Flâneur with A Movie Camera Screening and discussion of Halsted Street, a 1934 film about Chicago's street of immigrants, commerce, and class struggle. The film was produced by Conrad Friber (aka C. O. Nelson), a member of the Chicago branch of the Film and Photo League. |
| 11:45am | Lunch and viewing of Seeing the City: Sloan's New York Reserve a box lunch |
| 1:30pm | Neil Harris Professor Emeritus, Department of History, Art History, Committee on Geographical Studies, and the College, University of Chicago Chicago and New York: Alliances and Altercations This presentation will examine the sometimes rancorous dialogue between the First and Second cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, noting how the press in each city took up the municipal cause in this battle for national and artistic respect. |
| 2:15pm | Wendy Greenhouse Independent Art Historian To See or Not to See: Picturing Chicago, 1890–1930 The social realism of paintings by the artists dismissed by Chicago critics as the "Crazy Eight" elicited only a faint echo here as local artists struggled to give pictorial expression to their city’s characteristic features. How they did so—what they did and did not let us see of the city—was shaped by many aspects of Chicago's cultural life, from the economies of artistic practice to ideals of art's purpose in the life of a city devoted to material and commercial greatness. |
| 3:00pm | Peter Hales
Chair, Department of Art History, University of Illinois Romance and Realism: Photographs of the Urban Experience in Chicago and New York, 1889–1941 While urban-scene painting engaged in a lively crisis over the location of "the real," the competing medium of photography aggressively, if clumsily, staked a larger claim, one that sprawled beyond documentary, into the realms of romantic and even moral realism. By the later 1930s, when urban realism had returned to legitimacy as a site for painting, painters found themselves out-flanked by a mature and sophisticated tradition of urban photographers—many of whom, in fact, came from or fed the ranks of painting. |
| 3:45pm | Concluding remarks |
| 4:00pm | Reception in Eunice Ratner Gallery, Smart Museum of Art |