Monday 15 September (College of Design Auditorium)
7:30-9:00 PM Keynote Address & Reception RECONSTRUCTING EAST GERMAN CULTURE Stephen Brockmann (Carnegie Mellon University)
Tuesday 16 September (Memorial Union Gallery)
8:30-9:00 Registration and Opening Remarks
9:00-11:00 Panel I: EAST GERMAN ART IN THE EARLY YEARS
Barbara McCloskey (University of Pittsburgh) A Useable Past for East German Socialist Realism?
Heather Mathews (Pacific Lutheran University) “Flucht vor der sozialistischen Wirklichkeit”: Art and Reality in the Late 1950s
Katharina Heider (Martin Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg) From Arts and Crafts to Industrial Design – The Transformation of theArt School Burg Giebichenstein and the Consequences for Painting in Halle, 1945-58
11:00 Coffee Break
11:15 Panel II: SOCIALIST REALISM AND MODERN ART IN EAST GERMANY
Jérôme Bazin (University of Paris-Est Creteil) Visual Simplicity and its Problems. Modest Art from the GDR
Jessica Backus (Hunter College) “Real Modern Art” – Werner Tübke and the Question of Modernism in East Germany
12:35 Lunch Break
2:00-4:00 Panel III: CULTURAL POLITICS IN EAST GERMANY
Sigrid Hofer (Philips-Universität Marburg) The Historicization of the Modern: Museum Politics Respond to Cultural Political Directives in the GDR
Silke Wagler (Kunstfonds, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden) Commissions Before the Central German Art Exhibitions of the GDR
Kristine Nielsen (Illinois Wesleyan University) Medium Matters: Berlin’s 750th Anniversary
4:00 Daytime Program Ends
8:00-10:30 PM Film Screening – GOYA Director: Konrad Wolf, 1971 (134 minutes) Introduced by Seán Allan (University of Warwick) LOCATION: College of Design Auditorium
Wednesday 17 September (Memorial Union Gold Room)
8:30 Registration & remarks
9:00-11:00 Panel IV: WOMEN ARTISTS AND PERFORMANCE ART IN EAST GERMANY
Angelika Richter (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig) Defying the Constraints of Representation: Performing Women Artists in East Germany
Susanne Altmann (Hochschule für bildende Kunst Dresden) Occupy Erfurt! A Pioneering Women Artists’ Collective in the East German Province Fights the Restrictions of Communism
April Eisman (Iowa State University) Challenging the State Artist-Dissident Divide: Angela Hampel as Painter and Installation Artist
11:00 Coffee Break
11:15-1:15 Panel V: EAST GERMAN ART TODAY
Sara Blaylock (University of California, Santa Cruz) The Case of Cornelia Schleime: Reading Signs of Artist Agency in Stasi Files
Gisela Schirmer (independent scholar, Germany) The Controversy Around Willi Sitte – Will It Ever End?
Frank Zöllner (Universität Leipzig) Werner Tübke as a Communist Artist: What's Wrong with Painting the History of the Working Class?
1:15 Lunch Break
3:00-4:00 Roundtable Discussion: THE FUTURE OF THE STUDY OF EAST GERMAN ART
4:00 End of Public Program
This conference was generously funded by Iowa State University: the Office of the Vice President for Research, College of Design, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, World Languages and Cultures, Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Integrated Studio Arts, and a Women’s and Diversity Grants Program. Goya was provided by the DEFA Film Library.
The banner image at the top of this page and in the poster is a detail from Angela Hampel's painting, Penthesilea, from 1987/88. Thank you to the artist and to the Kunstfonds, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden for permission to use the image.
