Herakles the New Zealand Pioneer on tour

Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/12/2015
5:30 pm - 6:45 pm

Location
Samuel Alexander Building

Categories


Dr Emma Stafford (University of Leeds) will be talking on Herakles the New Zealand Pioneer on tour.  Dr Stafford has kindly provided the following abstract:

“Marian Maguire’s series of lithographs and etchings The Labours of Herakles superimposes an image of Herakles inspired by Greek vase-painting onto nineteenth-century New Zealand landscapes, wittily casting the hero as a European Pioneer.  The prints are currently on tour, forming the basis of innovative exhibitions at a variety of European museums, each one juxtaposing the modern images to works in their own permanent collections.

This talk will provide an introduction to the prints, looking at their general and specific references to the ancient material and how these are combined with other sources to create a new (anti-?)hero, and to comment on on-going debates about New Zealand’s colonial past.  It will also briefly compare the three exhibitions which have taken place so far – at Leeds City Museum (Jan-March 2015), the Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology (April-August 2015), and now at Munich’s Antikensammlung (Sept-Dec 2015) – exploring the dynamics of the prints’ interaction with the very different local collections.”

The meeting will take place in room A7 of the Samuel Alexander Building.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *