Friday, February 1, 2013

Daemen College/Sister Jeanne File Art History Memorial Lecture Series


American activist, art historian, educator, and writer Dr. Jonathan D. Katz will speak at Daemen College 7 p.m., February 7, 2013, in the Haberman Gacioch Center for Visual & Performing Arts.  Dr. Katz’s presentation, “Hiding in Plain Sight: Same Sex Desire in American Art,” is part of the 2012/2013 Sister Jeanne File Art History Memorial Lecture Series at Daemen.  It is free and open to the public.

           This event is sponsored by Joan Stovroff, President and Stovroff & Taylor Realtors and Stovroff & Taylor Travel.

The Haberman Gacioch Center for Visual & Performing Arts is located on the Daemen College campus, 4380 Main Street, in Amherst.

Dr. Katz is director of Doctoral Studies, Department of Visual Studies, at State University of New York at Buffalo. He holds a Ph. D. in art history from Northwestern University, and an M.A. from the University of Chicago. His B.A., in philosophy and comparative literature, is from The George Washington University.

Jonathan D. Katz works at the intersection of art history and queer history, one of the busiest intersections in American culture, and yet one of the least studied. A specialist in the arts of the Cold War era, he is centrally concerned with the question of why the American avant-garde came to be dominated and defined by queer artists during what was perhaps the single most homophobic decade in this nation's history.

Dr. Katz is the former executive coordinator of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University. Additionally, he is a former chair of the Department of Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City College of San Francisco, and was the first tenured faculty in gay and lesbian studies in the United States. Dr. Katz was an associate professor in the Art History Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he also taught queer studies.

Dr. Katz is the founder of the Harvey Milk Institute, the largest queer studies institute in the world, and the Queer Caucus for Art of the College Art Association.

Dr. Katz co-founded Queer Nation San Francisco. He has made scholarly contributions to queer studies the focus of his professional career. He was the first artistic director of the National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco and has published widely in the United States and Europe.

His forthcoming book, The Homosexualization of American Art: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and the Collective Closet, will be published by the University of Chicago Press. An internationally recognized expert in queer postwar American art, Katz has recently published "Jasper Johns' Alley Oop: On Comic Strips and Camouflage" in Schwule Bildwelten im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Thomas Roeske, and "The Silent Camp: Queer Resistance and the Rise of Pop Art," inPlop! Goes the World, edited by Serge Guilbaut. 

Dr. Katz was co-curator with David C. Ward and Jenn Sichel of the exhibition "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" at the National Portrait Gallery, the first major museum exploration of the impact of same-sex desire in the creation of modern American portraiture.  

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