Griselda Pollock, esteemed feminist art historian and author, will visit Sweet Briar College for an illustrated talk, "Charlotte Salomon's Theatre of Memory: Femininity, Modernity and Difference in the 1930s," on Wednesday, Nov. 10 at 8 p.m. in Memorial Chapel. The event is free and open to the general public.
Pollock is widely known for her articles and books examining gender, race, and class in 19th century Europe and America. A professor in the University of Leeds (England) department of fine art, her books include "Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art Histories" (1996); "Avant-Garde Gambits: Gender and the Colour of Art History" (1992); and "Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art" (1988).
Pollock's years of examining the social history of women led her to Charlotte Salomon. Commonly known as the "German Anne Frank," Salomon was a young German artist who fled the Nazis and was ultimately killed at Auschwitz. She left behind an evocative collection of images and writings, "Life Or Theatre?" which documents her artistic life, her period of hiding from the Nazis, and her family and beliefs.
Pollock has written extensively about women artists, images of women, women's work and other issues of the female within the social history of art, cultural and sychoanalytic theory. Her essay, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity," examines the landscape of 19th century Paris. She maps the city into neighborhoods where upper class women could or could not go, and illustrates the impact of these social divides upon artists such as Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot.
Pollock has also examined topics including representation and modernity, 1928-1968; women's cinema, 1940-1949; the legend of Tarzan: myths of empire, identity and place; and the work of Vincent van Gogh.
For more information, please contact Rebecca Massie Lane, director of SBC galleries, at (434) 381-6248 or
rmlane@sbc.edu. For media inquiries, please contact Shannon Wells, media relations coordinator, at 381-6388 or
swells@sbc.edu.
