Department of the History of Art and Architecture Events

Sponsored by the UO Department of Art History and the Haseltine Endowment for Design and Decorative Arts 

Please join us for a conversation between critically acclaimed Serbian-American artist Vesna Pavlović and art historian Nicoletta Rousseva, moderated by Julie Hessler, UO Associate Professor of History. Their dialogue will explore Pavlović’s body of photographic work in relation to its primary subject: the social and political ideologies reflected in mid-century Socialist Yugoslavian architecture, with particular interest in connections between statehood, power, and design. By focusing her lens on largely abandoned or transitionally preserved spaces, Pavlović highlights how art, architecture, and design are intrinsically bound to the rise and fall of political regimes  and to the shaping of ideological worldviews.

Vesna Pavlović is the Paul E. Schwab Chair in Fine Art at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Her work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. She is the recipient of an NEA Art Projects Award, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and a Fulbright Scholar Award, among others. She has shown in solo and group exhibitions at distinguished institutions and in large-scale, international contemporary art exhibitions including The Phillips Collection and the Hirshhorn Museum; the 12th Istanbul Biennial; the 13th Havana Biennial, Rios Intermitentes Project; the Metropolitan Arts Center, Belfast; National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Bucharest Biennale 5; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Fondazione Giorgio e Armanda Marchesani, Venice; and the Photographers’ Gallery, London. Her work has featured in ARTMargins, Art Africa, Art in America, Artforum, The Washington Post, and Art Papers.

  Nicoletta Rousseva is a Visiting Assistant Professor of South Slavic Culture and the Michael Henry Heim Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. A specialist on modern and contemporary art across southeastern Europe, her research examines how art engages political structures and institutions at moments of extreme crisis and in an effort to broaden narrowed horizons of possibility. Nicoletta earned a PhD in Art History with an interdepartmental concentration in Central and East European Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago (2022). She is the recipient of fellowships from ACLS, AISEES (American Institute for Southeast European Studies), Fulbright, and the Mellon Foundation. Her essays and reviews have been published in ARTMargins, Art Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, caa.reviews, and elsewhere.

This talk precedes an exhibition of Vesna Pavlović’s photography at RecRoom gallery, opening October 17th, 4–6 pm. See RecRoomEugene.com for details