Lincoln, Neb--Art historian Juliet Sperling will present the Bernard Rosenberg Lecture on Monday, Oct. 12 at 5:30 p.m. at Sheldon Museum of Art. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Following the lecture will be a reception sponsored by the University of Nebraska’s Nineteenth-Century Studies program.
Sperling’s lecture is titled “The Art of Labor: Visualizing Professional Touch Across Media.”
“Julie Sperling will be giving us a sneak preview of her argument in her forthcoming book, ‘Tactile Sensibilities’ about the meaning of artworks that engage both the sense of touch as well as the sense of vision: artworks with movable parts, or flap-book illustrations in medical texts, or sculptures like those by Hiram Powers,” said Wendy Katz, professor of art history in the School of Art, Art History & Design. “Powers was the most famous American sculptor of the 19th century, and Sperling presents an exciting new framework for explaining the popularity of his neoclassical nudes.”
During her visit, Sperling will also meet with classes in art history and the medical humanities to look at the overlaps in medical textbooks in Special Collections at Love Library.
“These odd illustrations, which provide proper hands for paper surgery, are a key source for her argument about how people thought about the body,” Katz said.
Sperling is Kollar Professor of American Art at the University of Washington and holds a Ph.D. in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of “Tactile Sensibilities: Seeing Through Print in American Art” (University of Chicago Press, 2027).
The Bernard Rosenberg Lecture is made possible with a gift to the University of Nebraska Foundation by Dr. Stuart P. and Lynn S. Embury of Holdrege, Nebraska. Embury is a 1966 graduate of UNL and 1969 UNMC graduate.
The lecture is named in honor of Rosenberg, a premier book dealer for American Art books. Many of the books on American Art, now a part of the Stuart P. Embury, M.D., Library of American Art located in the UNL Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections (Love Library, Room 29), were acquired because of his expertise and connections. UNL Libraries received more than 11,000 books and exhibition catalogues from Embury in 2010. He amassed what is considered one of the top private book collections on American art in the United States over 40 years.
