UF to host lecture on art of adolescence in early Greece

February 6, 2006

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Susan Langdon, who specializes in early Greek pottery, sculpture and iconography, will lecture at the University of Florida on “It Takes a Polis: The Art of Adolescence in Early Greece,” at 8 p.m. Feb. 7, at the Keene Faculty Center in Dauer Hall. The event is free and open to the public.

The lecture by Langdon, an associate professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, is presented by Gainesville Society, the Archaeological Institute of America, the UF School of Art and Art History and the UF Department of Classics.

One of the most important developments in Greek art during the Late Geometric period, 750-700 BCE, was the reappearance of animals and human figures on funerary pottery. Langdon argues that such figural art was employed for social rituals in the emerging cities. These rituals included the rites of personal transition – birth, adolescent maturation, marriage and death – and thus, the transformation of boys and girls into proper men and women. Through Langdon’s analysis, it becomes clear that the process of maturation involved not just a family, but the entire community in raising a child to adulthood.

Langdon curated the traveling exhibition “From the Pasture to Polis: Art in the Age of Homer,” and edited the exhibition catalogue and a volume of papers from the accompanying symposium, “New Light on a Dark Age.”