Creative Misuse
Lewis 'Alan' Longino, UChicago graduate student and scholar of postwar Japanese art, 1987‒2024
Lewis “Alan” Longino, a University of Chicago graduate student who studied and curated contemporary art around the globe, passed away on July 8 in Biloxi, Miss., after a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 36.
A Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History, Longino focused his research on postwar Japanese conceptual art and global contemporary art. In particular, he examined the Japanese artist Yutaka Matsuzawa’s approach to a dematerialized practice, which was based upon a system of quantum physics, non-Zen Buddhism and parapsychology. In 1988, Matsuzawa (1922‒2006) published his “Quantum Art Manifesto,” which set out directions, instructions, kōan and other meditations for readers to consider their connection to art on a quantum level.
Vanessa German brings open mind and Sun Ra to Exhibition at Chicago's Logan Center for the Arts
vanessa german knows how it sounds. Her metaphysical manner of speaking. Talking about magic. She feels eyes rolling.
“One of the things that people would say to me is they're not going to take you seriously; Black artists can't talk this way,” german (b. 1976, Milwaukee, WI), who spells her name in all lowercase letters, told Forbes.com. “They can't talk about love and their spirit because quote-unquote, they–the all-present, all-powerful ‘they’–will not take me seriously.”
Florence Illuminated project to receive generous NEH grant
Humanities Assoc. Prof. Niall Atkinson is spearheading a comprehensive, collaborative, multi-university digital research platform called Florence Illuminated: Visualizing the History of Art, Architecture, and Society. The National Endowment for the Humanities is supporting this crucial scholarship with a grant of $349,969. It’s one of 238 humanities projects in 2024 to “help preserve and expand public access to important historical records and humanities collections at archives, libraries, museums, and universities” nationwide, according to the NEH.
The NEH grant for this project will provide a model for other digital collaborations, which will allow individual projects in the digital humanities to grow and expand on their own while also seamlessly integrating scholarship. Through a public web-based interface, the Florence Illuminated project will consolidate data from five digital humanities projects focused on the cultural history of late-medieval and early-modern Florence, supporting even more research in many fields and prompting questions that scholars haven’t even considered yet.
George Haley, acclaimed critic of the Golden Age of Spanish Literature, 1927‒2024
Prof. Emeritus George Haley, renowned University of Chicago author of many books and articles about Miguel de Cervantes and Vicente Espinel, passed away on June 6 at his home in Chicago. He was 96.
Known for his scholarship on Spanish and Portuguese literature of the 16th and 17th centuries, Haley covered the work of obscure poets to the enigmatic Don Quixote by Cervantes. His famous article “The narrator in ‘Don Quixote’: a discarded voice,” was published in the Modern Language Notes journal in 1965, has been translated in several languages and is still taught in classrooms today. The article was the first one on Spanish literature that embraced the New Criticism of the Chicago School.
