Dawn Odell
Professor of Art History
Mondays 1:00-2:00 pm; Thursday 4:00-6:00 pm; and by appointment
Professor Odell teaches courses on the history of European and East Asian art, with a focus on art produced between 1600-1900. In her classes, she highlights the ways that art and artists move between regional, cultural, and social spaces around the world. She has a particular interest in art produced in port cities such as Canton, Jakarta, Cape Town, Manila, and Amsterdam, and the richness of the visual culture that was created in and traveled between these cosmopolitan locations. Whatever the course topic, she encourages students to discuss issues that I believe are as pressing today as they were in the past, among these: art crimes (theft, forgery, looting, iconoclasm); the qualities that make an artwork appear lifelike or “real” and the effect of that “reality” on the viewer; the impact of urban environments on a sense of self (how do architecture, signage, clothing, popular publications make an inhabitant feel at home or estranged?); and the history and ethical practices of museums.
Her research is closely related to her teaching. Currently she is writing a book about an eighteenth-century Dutch East Indian Company merchant (A.E. van Braam Houckgeest). Van Braam traveled between cities in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas for much of his life. While living in China, he amassed a large collection of art that he eventually displayed at his Philadelphia residence, an estate he named “China’s Retreat.” Some objects from van Braam’s art collection survive today. Each chapter of her book addresses an art work van Braam owned and the port city in which that work was created. She focuses attention on the individuals (many of whom had been erased from the historical record) who created and gave meaning to these objects.
She is also co-editing a volume of essays, titled Nonextant Art: Studies in Speculative Art History, 1492-1800, with Reed College Professor Dana Katz. The volume builds upon ideas that Professors Katz and Odell first discussed while co-teaching a course on nonextant art offered jointly between Lewis & Clark and Reed.