“Between Collage and ‘Elemental Media’: Ellen Gallagher’s Ecosystems”

This lecture will address the underwater ecologies created in Ellen Gallagher’s two most recent, ongoing series of work: "Watery Ecstatic" and "Ecstatic Draught of Fishes." It will consider those ecosystems in twofold relation to: the history of modern thought about the medium of collage, and the eco-critical revision of medial history suggested by John Durham Peters’s concept of “elemental media.”
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Dr. Carol Armstrong, appointed to the faculty of the Department of the History of Art at Yale University in 2007, teaches and writes about 19th century French painting, the history of photography, the history and practice of art criticism, feminist theory and the representation of women and gender in art and visual culture. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in 1986, and has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned tenure in 1990; the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; and Princeton University, where she was professor of Art and Archaeology and Doris Stevens Professor of Women’s Studies from 1999 to 2007, as well as Director of the Program in the Study of Women and Gender from 2004 to 2007. She has published books and essays on Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, and 19th and 20th century photography, modern and contemporary women artists; her most recent book, "Cézanne’s Gravity," concerning some of Cézanne’s afterlives, won the 2019 Robert Motherwell Book Award for an Outstanding Book on Modernism in the Arts. She has curated exhibitions at Princeton University Art Museum, the Drawing Center in New York, the Yale Center for British Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. She is currently working on a book project, to be titled "Medium Matrix Materiality," concerning discourses of medium specificity in the visual and verbal arts from a feminist point of view, from which the lecture on Ellen Gallagher is taken. An anthology of her writings on modern painting and photography, "Painting Photography Painting," will be published by Mack Books in the Spring of 2023.