The Ranger Online

Issue date: 4/4/08 Section: Premiere

Media Credit: Courtesy Photo Victorian postmortem photo, photographer unknown. This image will be shown and discussed during Annie Davis' lecture, "Memento Mori: Remembering Life by Capturing Death," Thursday.

Media Credit: Courtesy Photo This untitled image, photographer unknown, will be shown and discussed by Laura Rodriguez in her lecture, "Interview with Matthew Buckingham," Thursday in the Spring Student Symposium in Art History.

The annual Spring Student Symposium in Art History will take place from 10:50 a.m.-12:05 p.m. Thursday in Room 120 of the visual arts center.

Four students will present research papers produced for art appreciation or art history classes.

These papers were chosen from hundreds of papers submitted to Professors Marlene Hoover and Debra Schafter from teachers of those classes.

The 20 or 30 semifinalist papers were the papers that stood out the most and were selected from the hundreds submitted in spring, summer and fall 2007. The symposium originated eight years ago to parallel the annual Juried Visual Arts Student Exhibition - a showcase of fine art and digital design students' best work. The exhibition will open April 24 and run through September.

The symposium will consist of four lectures accompanied by Power Point presentations. A reception will follow.

Three of the four students selected are nontraditional students who took a course for personal enrichment or continued education but have shown exemplary work in their research, Schafter said.

"This year there was an overwhelming number of papers that dealt with real personal involvement …

"Our students are really out there investigating and working with the artists themselves," Schafter said.

Chantal Harrison, originally from France where she studied mathematics at the University of Paris, came to the United States at the age of 22.

Harrison works in the pathology department at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Harrison took an online art history course in 2007 to broaden her liberal arts horizons. During a recent trip to China, Harrison investigated Chinese bronzes, which became the topic of her selected research paper.

Kate Carey, an educator at the McNay Art Museum since 2004, focused her research on St. George and the Dragon, a 16th century mythological figure. Carey worked in the archives at the McNay and conducted original research tracing the origins of the myth, which will become a docent resource for the museum and will be incorporated in the audio guided tour.

Carey is pursuing a master's degree in art history and criticism at the University of Texas at San Antonio after completing an art history course at this college.

Annie Davis took an art history class during the summer at this college and is a junior at Texas A&M University where she is majoring in history and minoring in English literature.

Davis is an emergency medical dispatcher in College Station. She is in training to become a paramedic, which she plans to pursue as a profession upon graduation.

Davis researched death portraits of young children at the San Antonio Museum of Art.

"It was custom in the Victorian English and Mexican cultures to show deceased family members in portraits," Schafter explained.

A single portrait and photo from a collection from the San Antonio Museum of Art will be viewed and discussed at the symposium.

Fine arts freshman Laura Rodriguez, who was awarded an internship to ArtPace during her first semester at this college, will speak about her personal assistance to one of the visiting ArtPace artists, Matthew Buckingham.

This will be the "most contemporary subject" discussed at the symposium, Schafter said. "It's good to see how many students are taking the information from their class work and digging deeper."

For more information, call Shafter or Hoover at 733-2894.

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