Faculty Choice
Faculty Choice provides a forum for the exchange of ideas among Center curators, Stanford University faculty, the university community, and the general public. Individual faculty members are invited to select a work or works of art from the Center’s collections, identify the visual and conceptual ideas that have drawn his or her interest, and conceive a project or program in any format to engage museum visitors in the inquiry.
The Faculty Choice series is supported by the Barbara Silverman Fund.
The Eloquence of Hands: Performance and Portraiture
Thursday, May 22, 2008, 7 pm
Cantor Arts Center Auditorium
Peggy Phelan, Ann O'Day Maples Chair in the Arts, professor of drama and English, Stanford University
Performance studies theorist Peggy Phelan argues that the history of visual portraiture borrows from and advances the theatrical convention of gesture and character to create identity. Focusing on the depiction of hands in select portraits in the history of painting and photography, Phelan suggests that hands often function, quite literally, as the stage for the visual depiction of the drama of identity. Phelan's selections from the Center's collection are on view in the Freidenrich Family Gallery.
Past Faculty Choice Lectures
Ekphrasis: Writing in Response to Art
Sunday, November 4, 2007, 2:00–4:00 pm
Cantor Arts Center Auditorium
The opening Faculty Choice for the 2007 - 2008 Academic year invites you to attend a writing session on ekphrasis, the practice of writing in response to works of art, led by Dr. Audrey Shafer of the School of Medicine at Stanford University. Participants will meet as a group for a warm-up exercise, spread out through the galleries for individual exploration and writing, and return for discussion. Dr. Shafer, associate professor of anethesia, is also a writer and poet, and directs the Arts, Humanities, and Medicine Program, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. In addition to papers in her medical field, her publications include The Mailbox (Random House, 2006) and Sleep Talker: Poems by a Doctor/Mother (2001). All are welcome; previous writing experience is not necessary. If you favor your own pencil, please bring it.
Invention and Eloquence
Thursday, February 28, 2008, 6:30 pm
Cantor Arts Center Auditorium
How do we experience aesthetic objects and museum displays rhetorically? To address this question, Stanford’s John Tinker will offer rhetorical perspectives on the Center’s new acquisition, François-André Vincent’s Zeuxis Choosing His Models for the Image of Helen from Among the Women of Croton. Tinker, lecturer in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric and a founder of the Hume Writing Center at Stanford, teaches his students to find new ways of seeing, thinking, and arguing through their rhetorical work with the museum. His writing includes studies of style and a forthcoming textbook on writing, rhetoric, and visual argument.
Visitors are encouraged to view the Vincent painting in the early European gallery prior to the Faculty Choice presentation in the auditorium.