Join the Forsyth Galleries in welcoming exhibiting artist Dr. Katherine A. Schwab on March 23 at 5:30pm as she discusses her exhibition, An Archaeologist’s Eye: The Parthenon Drawings of Katherine A. Schwab. Dr. Schwab is both an artist and an art historian, and her work explores the very nature of time, preservation, interpretation, and decay in her drawings featuring the Parthenon. A reception and refreshments in the galleries will conclude the evening. The lecture will be held in the Memorial Student Center in room 2406, and the reception will take place in the Forsyth Galleries.
Dr. Schwab explores the art and architectural history of the Parthenon in Athens, Greece, through an analysis of a vital element of the temple’s symbolic message: the sculpted metopes that decorated the building’s Doric frieze. Although early travelers to Greece sometimes drew the well-preserved figures of Greeks battling centaurs on the south metopes, little attention was paid to the badly damaged sculptures of the east (Gods v. Giants), west (Greeks v. Amazons), or north (Sack of Troy) until the first half of the 20th century. In this lecture, archaeologist, art historian, and artist Schwab will present a contextual analysis of the metopes as part of a carefully designed visual program. The poor preservation of the relief sculptures has presented many challenges for contemporary researchers, and Dr. Schwab will explain how she and others have experimented to find a new approaches to “draw out” new information about the compositions, including current work on color and added metal attachments. The deliberate defacement of the metopes in antiquity can also be compared to recent attempts to destroy ancient art, architecture, and cultural memory at sites such as Bamiyan in Afghanistan and Palmyra in Syria.
Katherine A. Schwab is Professor of Art History in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut. Her traveling exhibition, An Archaeologist’s Eye: The Parthenon Drawings of Katherine A. Schwab is on display until July 23 in the Forsyth Galleries in the Memorial Student Center at Texas A&M University. For more information, visit uart.tamu.edu
This lecture is sponsored at Texas A&M University by: The Forsyth Galleries; the Montague Scholar’s Program of the Center for Teaching Excellence; the Department of Architecture; the Department of Visualization; the Center for Heritage Conservation; the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research; and the Glasscock Center Working Group in the History of Art, Architecture, and Visual Culture.
