Ļć½¶Ö±²„program next week spotlights āNikeā restoration, preservation
Contact: Karyn Brown
STARKVILLE, Miss.āAn internationally recognized art researcher and teacher from Georgia brings her vast knowledge of ancient Greece to Mississippi State next week.
Bonna Daix Wescoat, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Art History at Atlantaās Emory University, will be on the Starkville campus April 6. Free to all, her 4 p.m. Thursday presentation takes place in Salon U of the Colvard Student Unionās second-floor Bill R. Foster Ballroom.
Titled āFrom the Vantage of Victory: New Research on the āNike of Samothrace,āā the program will explain the discovery and multi-stage restorations of a second century B.C. marble sculpture of the Greek goddess whose name means victory.
Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014, Wescoat led efforts by a team from Emory and New York Universityās Institute of Fine Arts to improve, as much as possible, the appearance of the eight-foot-tall figure also known as the āWinged Figure of Victory.ā
Since the late 1800s, the sculpture has been in the care of Franceās Louvre Museum. For more, see .Ģż
Event co-sponsors include MSUās Institute for the Humanities and its Distinguished Lecture Series, as well as the College of Architecture, Art and Designās Department of Art and the College of Arts and Sciencesā Cobb Institute of Archaeology.
āIn a very real way, her research has brought these works of art back to life, and her research continues to do that for students through lectures like this one,ā said Angi Bourgeois, art department head and a former graduate student of Wescoat.
Michael Galaty, Cobb Institute director, called Wescoat āa first-class art scholar who also is an excellent field archaeologist.ā
Galaty, who also heads the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures, said he and his colleagues āare looking forward to hearing about restoration of the Nike, but also about its origin and context of discovery on the island of Samothrace.ā
In researching ancient Greek art and architecture, Wescoat has devoted a special emphasis to the Archaic and Hellenistic periods. She is the author of āThe Temple of Athena at Assos,ā āArchitecture of the Sacred: Space, Ritual, and Experience from Classical Greece to Byzantium,ā and āSyracuse, the Fairest Greek City.ā Additional biographical information is found at .
William Anthony Hay, Institute for the Humanities director, said Wescoatās distinguished career is a prime example of how the spirit of human inquiry forms the core of humanistic study. āRestoring a lost artwork, as we will hear, opened the way to studying beauty and form,ā he added.
For more about Wescoatās visit, contact Hay at whay@history.msstate.edu, or Karyn Brown, College of Arts and Sciences communication director, at 662-325-7952 or kbrown@deanas.msstate.edu.
Information about MSUās Institute for the Humanities is found at ; Cobb Institute of Archaeology, ; and Department of Art, .
Ļć½¶Ö±²„is Mississippiās leading university, available online at .