Celluloid Deities
Can street paintings and advertisements be studied as art? And can examining other cultures inform our answer to that question?
Preminda Jacob, an associate professor of art history and theory in UMBC’s Department of Visual Arts, replies in the affirmative to both questions. In her new book, Celluloid Deities (Lexington Books), she examines the collision of cinema, politics and religion in South Indian culture at street level. Movie posters in the city of Chennai, she found, not only advertise a film – they can also be improvised into religious shrines or impart a political message.
“The street is a great equalizer of the visual experience,” she told an attentive crowd at a presentation of her research at UMBC. Jacob also created a Web site, www.celluloiddeities.com, that extends her research on what she calls the “multitudinous signs that jostle for attention” into startling images and video.
Jacob has received several fellowships to support her research, including a J. Paul Getty Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities and a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship from the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University.
This story appears in the Winter 2009 issue of UMBC Magazine.
(10/2/09)
