Dr. Elizabeth Otto, professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Global Gender Studies at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York, will deliver the 2022 Barber Lecture on Monday, October 24, at 7 p.m. in the Humanities Fine Arts Recital Hall. Otto's talk, "Haunted Modern Art: Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics at Germany’s Bauhaus Art School,” is free and open to the public. A reception will follow Otto’s lecture.
Otto is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Global Gender Studies at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York and a specialist on gender and visual culture in early twentieth-century Europe. She holds a BA from Oberlin College, an MA from Queen’s University, and a PhD from the University of Michigan.
In this talk, Otto will delve into previously unexplored questions of sexuality and gender fluidity at the Bauhaus (1919–1933), widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential art and design school, famous for bringing functional design to the mainstream. She focuses on Bauhaus members who queered the school’s aesthetics in order to disrupt gender conventions, represent gay and lesbian subjectivities, and picture same-sex desire, moves that were not without risk during the Weimar Republic, a regime that criminalized homosexuality. In addition, Otto examines its members’ embrace of radical politics on both the left and the right—during the school’s Communist period, for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis. This talk disrupts the narrative of a normative Bauhaus to yield a more diverse and paradoxical history that only emerges when we consider modernism through a new range of artists and works and when we ask new questions of history.
Among Otto’s books are Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (2019) and the co-authored Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective (with Patrick Rössler, 2019). She has co-edited five books, including Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School (2019), Art and Resistance in Germany (2018), and The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (2011). Her essays and reviews have been published in edited books, exhibition catalogs, and journals including New German Critique, Genders, History of Photography, and October. During the 2022–23 academic year, Otto is writing a new book titled Bauhaus Under National Socialism with the support of a year-long fellowship from Germany’s Gerda Henkel Foundation and a short-term grant at the US Holocaust Memorial Foundation’s Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Research.
The Barber Lecture Series is made possible by a gift to the University of Minnesota Morris from Laird Barber, professor emeritus of English, and the late Dorothy Barber.
Learn more at https://academics.morris.umn.edu/english/barber-lecture-series.