Art History Lecture Series at SUNY New Paltz presents Remembering the Second Civil War: Civil Rights Memorials in the South

NEW PALTZ, NY —

(New Paltz, NY)-The Art History Association, a funded member of the SUNY New Paltz Student Association welcomes Dell Upton, Professor of Architectural History at the University of California at Berkeley to the Art History Lecture Series. His lecture is titled Remembering the Second Civil War: Civil Rights Memorials in the South. It is presented on Thursday, November 4, 1999 at 7pm in Lecture Center 112 on the SUNY New Paltz campus. The event is free and open to the public.

Throughout the South, the 1990s have been an era of unprecedented monument-building to commemorate the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. These range from simple tombstone-like memorials such as that to slain civil rights volunteer Viola Liuzzo, through the complex sculptural programs at Kelly Ingram Park, Birmingham, to Maya Lin’s synoptic Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery.

Professor Upton will consider the disparate view of the place of race in the millennial South that these works present through their forms, inscriptions, and siting. Taken together, these monuments and their settings proclaim the end of the old, discriminatory South. Just as the wave of Confederate monument building in the 1890s and 1900s reframed the Civil War and defined a new racial order for an urbanized New South, so the Civil Rights monuments of the 1990s reframe the second civil war to define a distinctive (non)racial order for a globalized “new” New South.

Professor Upton is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, as well as a member of the editorial boards of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, the Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, and the Material History Review. His publications include Architecture in the United States, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia, Madaline: Love and Survival in Antebellum New Orleans, America s Architectural Roots: Ethnic Groups That Built America, and (with John Michael Vlach) Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture. His books have won the Louisiana Literary Award, the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award, the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize, and the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize. Upton has been a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of a Getty Senior Research Grant in Art History. He teaches courses on the history of architecture and urbanism, vernacular architecture, material culture, cultural landscapes, and research methods.

For additional information please call the Art History Department at 914-257-3875.

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