Monumental Anxiety: On the Presence and Prospects of Public Historical Monuments
A lecture by Fred Bohrer co-hosted by the CVPA School of Art and Design and the CHR
Monday, February 23, 2026 10:45 AM to 12:30 PM EST
Please join us for a lecture by Fred Bohrer, "Monumental Anxiety: On the Presence and Prospects of Public Historical Monuments"
Location: Main Reading Room, 2nd floor, Fenwick Library
Coffee and snacks will be available at 10:45 am, so come early! Lecture to begin at 11 am.
Virtually every civilization has created monuments. The current situation in America, however, uniquely highlights both the capabilities and weaknesses of monuments to public life. Even more important for the current talk, it illuminates the very structure of representation on which public historical monuments depend. The current monumental landscape widely (and not always consistently) inscribes varied political, cultural, ethnic, gendered and racial identities throughout the land. Drawing widely from monuments across the country, this talk will explore the changing assumptions of history and public as construed and misconstrued through monumental constructions, while suggesting also what they are capable of as a genre.
Speaker:
Fred Bohrer is Professor Emeritus of Art History at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. He has written widely on the theory and practice of public historical representations, particularly concerning present imaginations of the past. He is the author of Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in 19th-century Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Photography and Archaeology (Reaktion Books, 2011).
Organizer and Host:
John von Bergen (Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Expanded Fields, School of Art and Design, CVPA) earned his BFA Degree with Honors from School of Visual Arts in New York City. After relocating to Berlin, Germany in 2003 his work has been exhibited in various international museums, galleries and institutions, including Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, Pera Museum in Istanbul, and Smack Mellon in New York. Between 2017 - 2022 von Bergen had served as Director of Studio Arts for Bard College Berlin where he was also teaching studio arts courses, mainly with a focus on sculpture and Virtual Reality.
In 2022 von Bergen expanded his studio practice back to The United States. He has recently finalized his art commission “Wandlung” (English: “Transformation”), a 50' high interior relief fabricated in concrete, contracted for an extension of The German Bundestag in Berlin. Von Bergen’s international experience as a sculptor working on public and private commissions expands on his interests in collective memory, monumentality, and memorialization. These themes also connect with subjects in his current course offerings this semester at GMU, such as “Intro To VR For The Artist” and “Advanced Aesthetics”.
Discussant:
Catherine Olien (Associate Director, CHR) holds a PhD in Art History from Northwestern University with a specialization in the ancient Mediterranean. Her research has been supported by numerous fellowships, including a Fulbright Research Grant (in partnership with Technische Universität Berlin and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Institutional Fellowship in partnership with the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris.
Her dissertation, “Between Classicism and Orientalism: The Reception of Ancient Cypriot Sculpture, 1860-1900,” analyzes the early excavation, classification, and publication of Cypriot sculpture and its collection and display in European universal museums.
From 2018 to 2021, she managed public humanities programming at the American Library in Paris. She has been Associate Director of the CHR since 2021.
Event sponsored by University Life.
