This symposium will include lectures by internationally reknown art historians Steve Baker and Monika Bakke, supported by the Vollmer Fries Distinguished Lecture Series.

Steve Baker (Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Central Lancashire) is author of Artist|Animal (2013), which has been praised for its “deep understanding of the nuance, intricacy, and contradictions in how artists work today.”  Baker’s lecture, The Redescription of the World, will examine how art engages with questions of animal life, building on Niklas Luhmann’s observation that “the function of art is to make the world appear within the world.”

Monika Bakke (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland) is author of Bio-transfigurations: Art and Aesthetics of Posthumanism (2010) and editor of The Life of Air: Dwelling, Communicating, Manipulating (2011).  Bakke’s lecture, And the Plant Responded, explores the complex, sensual, and arguably cognitive lives of plants,  questioning how art projects and ethical frameworks can address plants as active and autonomous beings that perceive the world in ways we still know so little about.