Joni Kinsey, professor of American Art History in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa, will present the 2012 J. Bernard Schultz Endowed Lecture in Art History, Thursday, Feb. 23, at West Virginia University.

The lecture is titled “Triangulating the View: Art and the Great Surveys of the American West in the 1870s” and begins at 5 p.m. in the Museum Education Center (former Erickson Alumni Center) adjacent to the Creative Arts Center. It is free and open to the public.

Dr. Kinsey’s talk will explore the wide range of imagery created on federal expeditions in the West after the Civil War. Produced by painters, cartographers and photographers, the pictures and maps appealed to scientists, politicians and the public alike, as they appeared in art exhibitions and adorned the pages of government reports, magazines and guidebooks.

Most often regarded singly or only as loosely related, the artists and their images gain new meaning when understood as an integrated system related to the act of surveying itself, a process that combines multiple perspectives of a subject to gain an informed understanding of its dimensions and characteristics.

Visualizing the West was a complex enterprise that required a host of contributors working in different media and from different points of view, all ultimately contributing to a fuller picture of its rich subject.

Kinsey has taught at the University of Iowa since 1991. She received her doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis and specializes in landscape painting and theory and art of the American West.

She is the author of “Thomas Moran’s West: Chromolithography, High Art, and Popular Taste” (University Press of Kansas, 2006, winner of the 2007 Western Heritage Award Outstanding Art Book Prize); “Plain Pictures: Images of the American Prairie” (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996, winner of the Eugene M. Kayden National Book Award for 1996), and “Thomas Moran and the Surveying of the American West” (Smithsonian, 1992), as well as many articles and chapters of books.

The J. Bernard Schultz Lecture Series in Art History was endowed in the College of Creative Arts in 2004 by donors who wish to remain anonymous. The Lecture Series honors former College of Creative Arts Dean Bernie Schultz, who is also professor of art history in the School of Art & Design.

Each year, the lecture series brings a leading art historian to WVU to enhance the art history program as well as engage the intellectual life of the University.

The J. Bernard Schultz Lecture Series in Art History endowment was created through the WVU Foundation, a private non-profit corporation that generates and provides support for West Virginia University.

For more information about the lecture, contact the WVU College of Creative Arts at (304) 293-4359.

-WVU-

CONTACT: Charlene Lattea, College of Creative Arts
304-293-4841 ext. 3108, Charlene.Lattea@mail.wvu.edu

Follow @WVUToday on Twitter.