Howard Singerman: Sharon Lockhart and the Pastoral

In this lecture, esteemed professor Howard Singerman will use the concept of the pastoral to examine the work of contemporary photographer and filmmaker Sharon Lockhart. Over the course of her career, Lockhart has employed strategies of restaging and reenacting, drawing on a variety of sources that range from historical American photographs to family snapshots. A key part of Lockhart’s work is the negotiation between her visual and narrative sources and the actors—most often children—who reenact them. In film and photography projects such as Pine Flat (2005) and Rudzienko (2016), she has drawn on the long visual history of the pastoral tradition and its possibilities. They emerge in the recurring themes throughout her work, including the contrasts between the landscape and the cinematic tableau, children’s time and film time, and labor and leisure.

Howard Singerman, Phyllis and Joseph Caroff Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Hunter College, is author of Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (1999) and Art History, After Sherrie Levine (2012). He has contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogues, among them A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation and Public Offerings, both at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where he was museum editor from 1985 to 1988. His essays have appeared in a number of journals including Artforum, October, Oxford Art Journal, and La Part de l’Oeil, and he has previously taught at the University of Virginia, Barnard College, ArtCenter College of Design, California Institute of the Arts, UCLA, and UC Irvine.

Cosponsored by Ohio State’s History of Art Department.