The Department of Art, Art History & Design is pleased to announce that professor of art history and director of the IDEAS program in the School of Art and Art History, University of Illinois, Chicago, Hannah B Higgins will be this year’s featured speaker. The public lecture titled, "The People’s Flag,” will take place on March 28 at 5:30 p.m. in the Annenberg Auditorium at the Snite Museum of Art.
The United States is arguably unique in the world among nations for its love of the flag. Public school students begin each day by reciting a Pledge of Allegiance to it. Major public events are routinely begun by singing a hymn written for it, the Star Spangled Banner. During times of social upheaval, its use is closely regulated. This lecture offers a history of the American Flag as viewed through the lens of the arts in four chapters: its origins, its emerging status in the 19th Century and the rise of the flag protection movement, its legal status in the Vietnam era, and its iconic function today.
Along with articles on food and art, early computer art, the avant-garde and experimental education in arts, Hannah B Higgins books include Fluxus Experience (2002), The Grid Book (2009) and the anthology Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art (2012). She has received DAAD, Getty Research lnstitute and Philips Collection Fellowships in support of her research on sensation, cognition, and the shaping of information across the historic avant-gardes and contemporary material culture. She is co-executor of the Estate of Dick Higgins and the Something Else Press.