About the Founder of the Pont Aven School of Contemporary Art

“Dr. Boyle-Turner obtained her Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University. She has been a Fulbright Fellow in France and a professor of art history at the American University in Paris and the Rhode Island School of Design. A guest curator at the Vincent van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam from 1985 to 1989, she founded the Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art in France in 1993, where she continues to serve as Executive Director. She has published numerous books and exhibition catalogues on Gauguin and his followers in Pont-Aven.”

"A Sense of Place: A Valid Tool of Explanation within Art History?
Caroline Boyle-Turner, Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art, and Veerle Thielemans, Musée d’Art Américain, Giverny, Terra Foundation for the Arts. A major part of research in art history involves the mapping of an artist’s itinerary to different places, or the tracing of an artistic network that developed in a certain place. We invite speakers to reflect upon the nature of the art-historical narrative in which the notion of place is operative. What kinds of meaning are attributed to the connection among place, artist, and artwork? What models articulate the causal relationships among these three elements? How are notions of a geographical and a cultural landscape intermingled? What are the historical variants of this form of research within art-historical discourse over time? What are the effects of turning “artist sites” into mythical places ready for consumption by mass tourism? Both case studies and theoretical papers are welcomed."