March 16, 2017

1920s art historian presents lecture next week

An expert in a wide range of 20th century avant-garde art – from Dadaism to computer art – visits campus next week as part of the School of Art and Design’s visiting artist program. 

Hannah B. Higgins will talk about “Paris Between the Wars” beginning at 7 p.m., Thursday, March 23, in the John C. Guyon Auditorium in Morris Library. The lecture is free. 

“Paris Between the Wars” refers to what is known as the “lost generation” of poets, painters and other artists, many of whom congregated in Paris in the 1920s. In the art world, this includes artists Constantine Brancusi, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and others. 

Higgins, an art historian whose wide-ranging knowledge places important art movements into a broader context, is the author of “The Grid Book,” in which she shows the pre-modern history of the grid as underlying form for art and architecture, and “Fluxus Experience,” an analysis of this post-World War II art movement. She is also co-editor of “Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art.” Higgins is a professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago.