Read the terrific review of Professor Kenneth Silver’s latest show, “Walls of Color: The Murals of Hans Hoffmann,” in the “New York Times”

View the article and images as they appear in the NY Times here!

Grey Gallery Event

Wednesday, May 13, 6:30 pm
Grey Art Gallery, NYU
100 Washington Square East

Gallery Conversation

With Vivian Huang, PhD candidate in Performance Studies, NYU.

Free of charge, no reservations.

*****

Offered in conjunction with the exhibition
Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera
on view at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery
from April 21 to July 11, 2015.

For more information on the exhibition,
please visit www.nyu.edu/greyart
Email: greyartgallery@nyu.edu
Tel: 212/998-6780

Grey Art Gallery Hours:
Tuesday/Thursday/Friday: 11 am–6 pm
OPEN LATE Wednesday: 11 am–8 pm
Saturday: 11 am–5 pm
Closed Sunday/Monday/Major holidays.

:

The Fine Arts Society – Ring Out the Old Board, Ring in the New!

Tremendous thanks to this year’s stellar Fine Arts Society executive board — Co-Presidents Valerie Itteilag and Nora Gorman, Treasurer and Secretary Alexandra Guglielminetti, Marketing Chair Daria Zlobina, and Board Members Sarah Bigler, Ozana Plemenitash, Oriana Mansur, and Elizabeth Fazzare — for steering the club with such remarkable energy and for putting together a truly impressive program of events for the 2014-15 academic year (see our February 23^rd, 2015 blogpost). And congratulations and best wishes to all of the executive board members who are graduating this year: we in the Department of Art History will miss you and hope that you will keep in touch.

It is a pleasure to introduce the club’s executive board for the 2015-16 academic year:

Co-Presidents:

Sarah Bigler (Art History; Media, Culture and Communications minor ’16)

Ozana Plemenitash (Art History; French minor ’16)

Secretary:

Alexandra Gulglielminetti (Art History/Journalism; South Asian Studies/Italian minor ‘16)

Treasurer:

Rex Wei (‘17)

Marketing Chair:

Emma Holter (Art History; Creative Writing/English Literature minor ‘17)

Board Members:

Marissa Nadeau (Art History; Italian/Creative Writing minor ‘16)

Daniela Mayer (Art History/Journalism ‘16)

Camila Cury (Media, Culture and Communications; Art History minor ‘17)

Chloe Choi (Chemistry ‘16)

It is wonderful to see so many returning executive board members. Many thanks to all of you for your willingness to serve on the board of our CAS student club.

 

Majors News, Spring 2015

Congratulations to all of our Art History and Urban Design and Architecture Studies majors on their hard work and many achievements this academic year.  And congratulations to those majors who are graduating, and best wishes for a productive and restorative summer and beyond!  To supplement or correct the information in this post, please contact Professor Kathryn Smith (Kathryn.smith@nyu.edu) with a copy to Peggy Coon (peggy@nyu.edu)

Lisa Ballard (Art History ’15) is the recipient a Faculty Choice Award from the Department of Art History.

Erik Battista (Urban Design and Architecture Studies ’15) presented a paper titled “An Exploration of Bike-Oriented Development Patterns in Scandinavia” at this year’s Undergraduate Research Conference.

Jillian Brenner (Art History/French minor ’15) will be interning this summer at Musée Carnavalet in Paris for six weeks through the French Heritage Society. She will assist with the museum’s archives, research, and preparation for their 150th anniversary exhibition.

Barron Brocksmith (Art History ’16) was awarded a DURF grant to be used toward the research expenses for his honors thesis on images of the wound of Christ in medieval manuscript illumination. He was named this year’s Herman J. Wechsler Research Scholar in Fine Arts, “awarded to a student researching European fine art or art history and who will study or has studied at one of NYU’s European academic sites.”

Monica Bulger (Art History/Classical Civilization ’15) presented a paper titled “Let Them Say, ‘He is a Better Man Than His Father!’: An Examination of Paradigmatic Behavior in Portrayals of Heroic Fathers and Sons in Ancient Greek art and Literature” at this year’s Undergraduate Research Conference. She is the recipient of a Faculty Choice Award from the Department of Art History.

Nora Chuff (Art History/Steinhardt-Studio Art ’15) is the recipient of a Faculty Choice Award from the Department of Art History. A Studio Art major specializing in sculpture, Nora exhibited her work in a collaborative Senior Thesis show titled “On Air,” on view from April 8^th-18^th of this year; Here are photos of the show and Nora’s work.. Nora’s plans for this summer include a sojourn of about six weeks, starting in August, on Fogo Island in Newfoundland, where she will be an artist in residence. There she will work on her own artwork, and on an essay regarding reliquaries as they relate to contemporary art.

Gabriella Cirasella (Art History/History ’15) is the recipient of a Faculty Choice Award from the Department of Art History.

Natalie Covill (Urban Design and Architecture Studies ‘16) was awarded a DURF grant to go on a research trip to San Diego. She will study archives related to the planning of highways and transportation systems as part of the work on her thesis.

Julia Dankberg (Art History ’16) was an Individual Development Intern at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum this past semester.

Dominic Deluque (Art History ’15) writes, “This year I’ve curated two shows, one during the fall semester, ‘REIFERWEDEN’ (NYU Art Studios at St. Agnes, Berlin, in December 2014, co-curated with CAS student Maia Smillie) and another this semester called ‘Conterpret’ (an apartment show in Berlin Kreuzberg, opening 8 May, co-curated with GLS student Lola Harney). Additionally, NYU’s Global Dimensions blog interviewed me about the first show and a talk I gave about it at the NYU Abu Dhabi Global Leadership Summit.”

Ilana Dresdner (Art History ’16) received a Gaeltacht Summer Award grant to study in Ireland this summer in a language immersion program offered through the Ireland-United States Commission for Educational Exchange and the Fulbright Commission.

Laura Edelman (Art History ’15) presented a paper titled “Edward Burtynsky: Photographing the New Landscape” at this year’s Undergraduate Research Conference. This is also the title of her honors thesis, for which she earned high honors. After graduation, Laura will be an Art Genomer at Artsy, where she will contribute “to a Pandora-like online search and recommendation tool for art.”

Ellis Edwards (Art History/French ’15) has been accepted to NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts for fall 2015 to pursue a Master’s degree in Art History and Archaeology. Ellis plans to concentrate in modern and contemporary art in graduate school.

Ashley Frenkel (Art History/Russian and Slavic Studies ’15) presented a paper titled “Garudas and Nagas: An Eastern Approach to the Monstrous” at this year’s Undergraduate Research Conference.

Nathan Gelman (Art History ’15) is the recipient of the Jane Costello Memorial Award, presented to a graduating senior for excellence in the study of the history of art.

Nora Gorman (Art History/History minor ’15) presented a paper titled “Manuscript Collecting as Statecraft in the Courts of King Charles V of France and Jean, Duke of Berry, 1364-1416” at this year’s Undergraduate Research Conference. A co-president of the Fine Arts Society, she is the recipient of a Faculty Choice Award from the Department of Art History.

Alex Greenberger (Art History/Cinema Studies ’15) presented a paper titled “One Big Soul: The Unity of Bill Viola’s ‘Going Forth By Day’” at this year’s Undergraduate Research Conference. He is the recipient of the Douglas F. Maxwell Award in Art History, presented to a graduating senior for excellence in the study of art history.

Jesslyn Guntur (Urban Design and Architecture Studies ’15) presented a paper titled “Glocalizing Expressway Conversions: From Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to Public Urban Tech-Park ‘Midline” at this year’s Undergraduate Research Conference.

Rachel Hong (Art History ’15) was accepted to Emory Law School.

Valerie Itteilag (Art History/Urban Design and Architecture Studies minor ’15) presented a paper titled “Beirut’s Reconstruction: Colonialism, Architecture and Identity” at this year’s Undergraduate Research Conference and traveled to France during Spring Break on a DURF grant. A co-president of the Fine Arts Society, Valerie is the recipient of the Eileen Guggenheim Award from the Department of Art History, presented for scholarly accomplishments in the history of art, and the William and Pearl C. Helbein Scholarship for leadership from NYU. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa this year.

Seoyoung Lee (Urban Design and Architecture Studies ’15) was accepted to the Masters of Architecture program at Pratt.

Sharel Liu (Urban Design and Architecture Studies ’18) was awarded a DURF grant and named the Joan C. Suttles Estate Scholar. She gave a panel presentation at this year’s Undergraduate Research Conference on her vision for the architectural idiom of our time titled “Designing the Dynamism of Life.”

Nele Diane Mayer (Art History ’16) is the co-winner of the H. W. Janson Scholarship, presented to a junior for excellence in the study of the history of art. Nele also was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Lizzbeth Melendez (Art History ’15) is the recipient of a Faculty Choice Award from the Department of Art History.

Ariel Menche (Art History ’15) is the recipient of a Faculty Choice Award from the Department of Art History.

Elizabeth Meshel (Urban Design and Architecture Studies ’15) presented a paper titled “Reconsidering the Roles of Aplu in Etruscan Society” at this year’s Undergraduate Research Conference. She is the recipient of the Ada Louise Huxtable Award, presented to an outstanding graduating senior with the highest grade point average and most promise for future success in the field of Urban Design and Architecture.

Laura Miller (Art History/Italian minor ’16), writes, “For the summer of 2014, I received a grant from the Getty Foundation as a Getty Multicultural Undergraduate Intern. I worked in the photo-imaging laboratory department of The Getty Center in Los Angeles, California. The program was founded after the Rodney King Riots, in the hopes of creating more diversity within the artistic community of Los Angeles.”

Layo Olayiwola (Art History ’15) presented a paper titled “No Art Scene is an Island: Sites of Artistic Production in Trinidadian Art” at this year’s Undergraduate Research Conference.

Alexa Pearce (Art History ’17) writes, “I recently received a DURF grant for my work on exploring the role of illustrations in ‘translanguaging’ French/English children’s books! I’m using my grant to create two different models of illustrated bilingual books — the ‘Text-Based/Predominant’ and the ‘Illustration-Based/Predominant’ — which will explore the ways in which illustrations can potentially either engage/contextualize or distract the young second-language learner. I will be testing the books in both English-speaking New York classrooms and French-speaking Parisian classrooms when I go abroad.”

Alexa Pearce Illustration Based Model

Alexa Pearce Text Based Model

Shivam Jumani Prem (Urban Design and Architecture Studies ’17) was awarded a DURF grant.

Raka Sen (Urban Design and Architecture Studies/Sociology ’15) presented a paper titled “Locating the Middle Class in Mumbai” at this year’s Undergraduate Research Conference.

Tommy Sheridan (Urban Design and Architecture Studies ’16) received the Rudin Internship Award.

Robin Smith (Urban Design and Architecture Studies ’16), who is studying in Berlin this semester, was awarded the Evelyn Jablow Lilienthal, ’64 Heights Arts and Science Award, presented each year to an accomplished junior in the Urban Design and Architecture Studies Program. He will intern at Harden and Van Arnam Architects in Brooklyn, NY, this summer.

Claire Voon (Journalism/Art History ’15) presented a paper titled “The Urban Death Dilemma: Making Room for Memorialization in 21^st-century New York City and Beyond” at this year’s Undergraduate Research Conference.

Sylvia Xin Yue Wang (Art History/French/Management ’15) writes, “This spring interning at Christie’s, I did extensive provenance research, prepared for auction preview, and communicated with potential buyers for the exceptional collection of Robert Ellsworth, a legendary collector and dealer of Asian Art. Ellsworth’s collection achieved four world auction records and resulted in sales of $134 million during Asia Week in March. Possessing a passion for medieval art, this summer I will volunteer and renovate a chapel in a small town in France through the NGO Volunteer for Peace. In fall, I will pursue my Master’s degree in Visual Arts Administration at NYU. I wish to create cultural exchange exhibitions between the West and China and to help the public understand art from different traditions.”

Anqi Xu (Art History ’16) is a co-winner of the H. W. Janson Scholarship, presented to a junior for excellence in the study of the history of art.

Daria Zlobina (Art History/French minor ’15) was accepted to the M. A. program in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She’ll begin her studies this fall.

For the complete program of this year’s Undergraduate Research Conference, which took place on April 24^th, 2015, look here.

Shelley Rice Wins Teaching Award

Please join us in congratulating Shelley Rice on being selected as a recipient of the 2014-2015 David Payne-Carter Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Tisch School of the Arts.

The David Payne-Carter Award was inaugurated in 1992 with an endowment from Bob Littell in honor of David Payne-Carter, a former faculty member of Undergraduate Drama. It is an annual award with the recipient announced in the spring. Mr. Littell emphasized that the award express the views of the student body in recognizing superior capabilities in the classroom. A student committee was formed in each department and charged with soliciting nominations from the students of their department. Each committee then forwarded a single candidate to the Office of the Dean. To be nominated is to be acknowledged by your students as an outstanding teacher.

We, in the DAH, are thrilled to share Shelley with the Department of Photography and Imaging and could not agree more that she deserves this award!

Rawson Projects

Allen Glatter: Toro

Opening reception: Thursday May 7, 6–7:30 PM

On view at Ahearn Park now through March 20, 2016

Allen Glatter’s abstract steel sculpture Toro is now on view at Ahearn Park on Manhattan’s Lower East Side at the intersection of Grand St. and East Broadway. Exhibited in cooperation with NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks program, this will be the first temporary public art installation in Ahearn Park, which is one of New York City’s oldest parks.

“At first sight, the sculpture of Allen Glatter might appear to be a literal take on Paul Klee’s remark that a drawing is simply a line going on a walk. Each work, including Toro, takes the form of a continuous curve zigzagging through space, rising from the ground to above eye level and traversing the better part of a gallery room, or in the case of the outdoor work, a sidewalk.

Constructed from seamlessly joined steel tubing, uniform in diameter, the freestanding sculptures simultaneously gather and perforate the spaces around them. Walking around the work produces a pleasant feeling that seems to derive from a rhythm of anticipation and surprise; despite the few formal elements involved, the overall experience varies radically from one vantage point to another. Each sculpture has a definite axis, and when viewed in that direction, the piece tends to open up into a number of loop windows. Though there are many changes of direction in its path, the curve is less of a meandering walk than a sequence of turns, an itinerary.” – Excerpted from a text by Philip Ording

This exhibit is sponsored by New York Foundation for the Arts.

For more information about the installation click here.

Allen Glatter received a BFA from Pratt Institute and lives and works in Brooklyn. In the summer of 2013, he installed his first large-scale outdoor sculpture Tally-Ho at the intersection of York and Front Streets in Dumbo, Brooklyn as part of the New York City Department of Transportation Arterventions Program. Additionally, his work has been exhibited at the 2012 Dumbo Arts Festival, NY; Contemporary Sculpture at Chesterwood, Stockbridge, MA; NADA Hudson, Hudson NY; Model Theoriesat fordPROJECT, NY; and was the subject of the one-person exhibition Trots and Bonnie at Rawson Projects, NY.

For more information please contact the gallery at info@rawsonprojects.com or call 212 256 0379

Grey Gallery Event

Tseng Kwong Chi Niagara Falls, New York, 1984, from the East Meets West series Vintage gelatin silver print 36 x 36 in. Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

Wednesday, May 6, 6:30 pm
Grey Art Gallery
100 Washington Square East

Gallery Conversation

With Julia Pelta Feldman, graduate curatorial assistant, Grey Art Gallery.

Free of charge, no reservations.

*****

Offered in conjunction with the exhibition
Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera
on view at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery
from April 21 to July 11, 2015.

For more information on the exhibition,
please visit www.nyu.edu/greyart
Email: greyartgallery@nyu.edu
Tel: 212/998-6780

Grey Art Gallery Hours:
Tuesday/Thursday/Friday: 11 am–6 pm
OPEN LATE Wednesday: 11 am–8 pm
Saturday: 11 am–5 pm
Closed Sunday/Monday/Major holidays.

   

Congratulations to Professor Carol H. Krinsky, winner of a 2015 Golden Dozen Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from the College of Arts and Science!

Each year, the College of Arts and Science recognizes faculty for their outstanding contribution to learning in the classroom. Twelve regular full-time faculty members are chosen to receive Golden Dozen Teaching Awards from nominations submitted by CAS students and faculty. We are so pleased – yet not surprised – that our own DAH faculty member, Carol Krinsky, won this year. Congratulations, Professor Krinsky!

Faculty News, Spring 2015

Miriam M. Basilio returned from her post-tenure leave in Fall 2014 and enjoyed seeing her colleagues in the Department of Art History, our students, and teaching “Museums and the Art Market” as well as her course in the graduate Program in Museum Studies. In the Spring, she taught a seminar on the global culture of biennials in Department of Art History. She was invited to give several lectures following the publication of her book, Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War (Ashgate, 2014). In May 2014, she spoke in Madrid at Spain’s National Research Council (CSIC)’s interdisciplinary seminar, “Faces and Traces of Violence,” on museums, contemporary art, and historical memory in Spain. In July of that year, she lectured on Spanish contemporary art and historical memory at a panel held at the Fundacio Joan Miró in Barcelona as part of the exhibition and public programs project Amnesia Col.lectiva. She also presented on this facet of her book at Columbia University’s Cultural Memory Seminar in October 2014. In conjunction with the NYU Grey Art Gallery’s exhibition The Left Front: Radical Art in the “Red Decade”: 1929-1940, she presented a paper about The Exhibition of Government Posters held at The Museum of Modern Art in 1937 at the panel “Left, Left, Left, Right, Left: The Spanish Civil War and Visual Culture” at NYU’s King Juan Carlos I Center. Most recently, she spoke on “Ritual and Spectacle in Franco’s Spain” as the Robert Rosenblum Memorial Lecturer at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her book was reviewed by Laura Iamurri, “The Field of Vision of War,” in Critique D’Art 43 (Autumn 2014); Antonio C. Moreno Cantano in Hispania Nova 13 (2015); and Sara Matthews, “Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War,” Curator: The Museum Journal, Vol. 58, No. 2 (April 2015), 229-233.

Professor Basilio published a number of articles related to her research on the history of exhibitions, Spanish art under the dictatorship, and contemporary Spanish art during her sabbatical and this past academic year. These include “The ‘Exhibition of Government Posters’ (1937) in The Museum of Modern Art: Carteles republicanos cómo modelos de diseño vanguardista y de efectividad pedagógica,” in Miguel Cabañas Bravo and Wifredo Rincón, eds. Las redes del arte desde 1900 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 2014), pp. 67-74; “Equipo Crónica: Art History, Narrative Figuration, and Critical Realism,” in Robert S. Lubar and Maria Dolores Jiménez Blanco, eds. Transatlantic Dialogues: Art History, Criticism, and Exhibition Practices in Spain and the United States (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2014); a short contribution to ARTMargins 3:3 (2015), “Francesc Abad: The Open Archive,” and a review of recent books on the history of exhibitions, “Reacomodando el tablero de la historia del arte. Algunos recursos para el estudio de las exposciones de arte,” Estudios Curatoriales. Teoría. Crítica. Arte. Revista Digital Universidad Trece de Febrero, Buenos Aires, Año 2, No. 2 (2014), pp. 159-169. She reviewed the exhibition Past Disquiet: Narratives and Ghosts from The International Exhibition for Palestine, 1978, held at MACBA, Barcelona: “A Tale of Two Exhibitions and the Politics of Forgetting,” Hyperallergic, March 26, 2015.

In addition to teaching at NYU, Professor Basilio will collaborate with colleagues at various universities on research, conferences, publications, and more as part of two international projects: “Modernidad(es) Descentralizada(s): Arte, política y contracultura en el eje trasatlántico durante la Guerra Fría” (2015-2017) and the Cátedra Miró, New York University, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and Fudació Miró. She also represents the Department of Art History in initiatives to collaborate with site directors and professors at two of NYU’s global sites, Buenos Aires and Madrid, with the goal of strengthening our art history curriculum. In October 2014 she made a site visit to NYU-Madrid to meet with our colleagues there.

Professor Basilio’s summer plans include a visit to the Venice Biennale, and she will spend most of the summer in Spain, where she will conduct research, work on an article and continue writing her next book, tentatively titled Museum Collection Displays and Canon-Formation: The Museum of Modern Art and the Category “Latin American art.” While in Spain, she will also eat delicious food, see family and friends, and expand her collection of Spanish shoes.

Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Photo: Chad Heird

Finbarr Barry Flood began the year with the publication of an article on the theme of “Bodies and Becoming: Mimesis, Mediation and the Ingestion of the Sacred in Christianity and Islam,” published in Sally M. Promey, ed., Sensational Religion:  Sensory Cultures in Material Practice (Yale University Press, 2014). Throughout the year he organized, with the help of Fatima Quraishi, a new lecture series on Islamic Art, Points of Contact: New Approaches to Islamic Art, which brought scholars working on Islamic art in regions ranging from Spain and Ukraine, East Africa and Indonesia, to New York to speak about their research. The last in the series, which will focus on new work on the Deccan region of south India, took place at the Department of Art History on April 23rd.

At the start of the 2014 academic year, Professor Flood gave a lecture on images in Islam at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco in September. In November he delivered one of the Wilkinson lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the topic “From Mali to Alchi: Art on the Margins of the Caliphate.” In December he undertook research in Ethiopia, traveling on to India to give a series of seminars entitled “Horizons: A Thematic History of Islamic Art,” and “The Trouble with Images: Aniconism and Iconoclasm in Theory and Practice,” at Jnanapravaha, Mumbai. He was also invited by the Deccani Heritage Foundation to deliver a lecture on “Deccani Art Across the Ocean: Hoysalas, Kadambas and Medieval Ethiopia” in Mumbai and at the National Gallery Of Modern Art, Bangalore, India. He ended his time in India by participating in two panels, one on The Buddhas of Bamiyan and the other on The Rise of Monotheism at the Jaipur Literary Festival, the world’s largest literary festival, just before returning for the start of the spring semester at the end of January.

While in India, Professor Flood traveled in the Deccan region of the south, visiting medieval and early modern sites with Professor Dipti Khera and other colleagues. These visits were undertaken in preparation for a graduate colloquium that both professors co-taught this spring in connection with the exhibition Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1700: Opulence and Fantasy, which opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this April. In April, Professor Flood spoke on his research in Ethiopia and India at the University of Pennsylvania’s South Asia Colloquium. At the end of April he will speak on “Sanctified Sandals: Polemics and Relics in an Era of Technological Reproducibility,” in the History, Theory and Criticism Lecture Series at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In May, he will travel to Kuwait to deliver a lecture at the Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah. In June, he has been invited to speak in a symposium organized to honor Professor Dame Marina Warner, this year’s recipient of the Holberg Prize, the “Nobel” equivalent for the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, at the University of Bergen, Norway. There he will deliver a paper entitled “Stories in Stone: Self-Made Images in Mosques and Modernism.”

Prof. Flood examining Qur’an manuscripts, Sherif Harar City Museum, Harar, Ethiopia (photo Sana Mirza)

Prof. Flood in the courtyard of the Sherif Harar City Museum, Harar, Ethiopia (photo Sana Mirza)

Dennis Geronimus spent last spring semester in Florence as a scholar-in-residence at the Dutch University Institute for Art History. There, he prepared his texts for the catalogue that was to accompany the first-ever exhibition on Piero di Cosimo, a Renaissance painter of mysteries both Christian and pagan. Co-curated by Gretchen Hirschauer (Associate Curator, National Gallery of Art) and Prof. Geronimus, “Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence” opened at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, on February 1 and will continue its run until May 3. After a brief rest, Piero’s paintings will depart Washington for the artist’s home soil – to re-open at the Galleria degli Uffizi. “Piero di Cosimo, 1462-1522: Pittore fiorentino “eccentrico” fra Rinascimento e Maniera” (June 22-Sept. 27), the exhibition’s second iteration, will also include Piero’s drawings and the works of a select number of his contemporaries, such as his teacher Cosimo Rosselli, Filippino Lippi, and Fra Bartolomeo, among others. In late March, Professor Geronimus chaired a session on Piero at this year’s Renaissance Society of America conference in Berlin, where he escaped to marvel at the Gemäldegalerie and the collections of Museum Island at every opportunity. Come September, Professor Geronimus will be organizing a separate conference on Piero at the Dutch Institute in Florence, bringing together a selection of international scholars to discuss new findings and approaches to Piero inspired by the two exhibitions in Washington and Florence. Closer to home, Professor Geronimus is concluding his first year as department chair. In addition to teaching the Renaissance Art survey and a seminar on Renaissance portraiture, he has had the pleasure of supervising an Honors Thesis on the often under-appreciated northern artist-entrepreneur Gerard David and, this March, moderating a panel hosted by NYU’s Wasserman Center of Career Development, What’s Next?: The Humanities. The Fine Arts Society’s now-annual “Meet the Professors” series, meanwhile, brought Professors Khera, Martin, and Geronimus together with twenty or so of our undergraduate majors to discuss the three DAH colleagues’ respective career paths and experiences in the field. With the summer approaching, Professor Geronimus is eager to return to his next monograph-in-progress, Jacopo da Pontormo: Altered Grace, Human and Divine (Yale University Press), thus continuing to trace the legacy of a master (Piero) as expressed in the career of his most gifted pupil (Pontormo).

Piero di Cosimo exhibition banner on the notth facade of the National Gallery of Art’s West Building

Dennis Geronimus and Gretchen Hirschauer (NGA), co-curators of “Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence” at the exhibition’s opening on February 1, 2015

Carol Krinsky lectured about several topics during the 2014-2015 academic year in addition to her annual walking tour of midtown Manhattan, delivered to her students and to visiting students from Germany. Among the lecture topics was her College Art Association presentation (February 2015) about the new purposes to which synagogues have been put in recent years, especially in parts of Europe where Jews were murdered en masse during the Second World War.

In the southern Polish town of Rzeszow, the 17^th-century, fortress-like synagogue is now an arts center (above) with new windows on the top floor. After serving the town of Zamosc as a public library for several decades, that synagogue (below) has now been emptied of books to be a tourist attraction in this planned late Renaissance town.

Professor Krinsky published an article in the online Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art VI/2 (2014)  explaining how the Turin-Milan Hours manuscript was produced. Another article about why Jan van Eyck never painted anything in that manuscript will appear in the scholarly journal Artibus et Historiae later this year. Former students in Professor Krinsky’s Northern Renaissance Art courses who had to analyze one miniature will see their negative assessments vindicated, with additional evidence.

Professor Krinsky also traveled widely. She went to Austin, TX for the Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, an organization open to all interested lovers of architecture and urbanism, where she saw Wendy Price, a former student. She lectured at DePaul University at the invitation of Simone Zurawski, another former student who is now a professor there. She went to Germany and Italy during the summer, taking photographs for use in classes and seeing familiar and new works of art and architecture. In Berlin, she saw Tarek Ibrahim, another former student who is now an architect but who is finishing his M.A. in art history at Humboldt University while working as a tour guide. (What guide could possibly be better trained?)   She wrote book reviews and an article for a Dutch scholarly journal about stained glass in American churches of the first generation after the Second World War.

Alice Millar Chapel, Northwestern University

And slowly, slowly, she has been amassing material for a future book. She enjoys being Director of Undergraduate Studies again this year because she gets to meet all the new majors and minors who are signing up, and is delighted one again to be the faculty advisor for Ink & Image, the Department’s journal of undergraduate research in the history of art, architecture, and urban design, where she is the first faculty member to see the new articles.

Michele Matteini writes, “I joined the NYU faculty in January 2015, and I am extremely happy to be working in such a dynamic and inspiring environment. This year, I completed two essays and took part in several conferences. One essay reconstructs the practice of inscribing poems or paintings on dried leaves of the Bodhi tree, the sacred tree under which the Buddha reached enlightenment, in early-modern East and Southeast Asia. The essay engages my ongoing interest in the value of materials in Buddhist religious practice, and will be published in an edited volume on the cult of texts in Buddhism. I have also written a more historiographical piece that considers recent Western perceptions of China as the ‘cradle of the counterfeit’ and the ways that this perception affects our understanding of Chinese pre-modern culture. Part of this project, with a focus on painting, was presented at a workshop at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA in February 2015. Lastly, I have been involved in a new, multi-year interdisciplinary project on cosmopolitanism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China. The first meeting was in Chicago in March 2015, and the next will be in Taipei in June. Beside my research, I am developing new courses on different aspects of East Asian Art, and I look forward to meeting new students the next year.”

Louise Rice has recently returned from a two-week research trip in Germany, where she visited major print rooms and participated in the annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America, held this year in Berlin. Delivered in a session on “New Research in Italian Baroque Art,” her paper on “Joshua and the Jesuits: A Study in Multiplicity of Meaning” delved into the history surrounding an intriguing and somewhat mysterious project for the apse fresco in the Gesù in Rome. She is about to head back over the Atlantic to attend a conference on the drawings of Gianlorenzo Bernini, which will take place in Rome on April 20-21 in connection with a major exhibition of Bernini’s drawings now on view in Palazzo Barberini. She has recently begun a survey of Bernini’s presentation drawings based on advanced conservation and digital technologies and her paper on this occasion will present some of her initial findings. In recent months, Rice has published a couple of substantial articles on the sculptural program of St Peter’s basilica in Rome. “The Pre-Mochi Projects for the Veronica Pier in St Peter’s” (in The Eternal Baroque: Studies in Honour of Jennifer Montagu, ed. C. Miner, Milan: Skira, 2015) focuses on the evolution of the all-important crossing area and high altar of the basilica; “The Unveiling of Mochi’s ‘Veronica’,” Burlington Magazine, CLVI, 2014) shines a spotlight on the keen involvement of Pope Urban VIII Barberini in the projects he sponsored. She also contributed an essay on the seventeenth-century Florentine painter Baccio del Bianco and his comical drawings of cuckolds to a volume on Cuckoldry, Impotence and Adultery in Europe, 15^th-17^th Century, ed. S. Matthews-Grieco, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).

Shelley Rice spent much of 2014 and early 2015 in Paris, as both NYU’s Remarque Fellow and a Visiting Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where she lectured on both historical and contemporary photography and participated actively in the French academic and art worlds. While there, she helped to organize, in December, with ENS and the Remarque Institute, an international conference about research and the arts that included not only well-known artists and leaders of French academies and conservatories of art, music, drama and film but also administrators and faculty representing NYU’s Faculty of Arts & Science, Tisch, Gallatin and Steinhardt schools. She also spoke at and helped to organize another major international conference, this one at NYU/Abu Dhabi on “Emerging Terrains” in Contemporary Photography, which united thirty participants from around the globe for a fascinating and fruitful dialogue about the medium’s history and influence in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and elsewhere.

As for writing, that too has been a global affair this year, since Rice has published catalog essays about the Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal, the global reach of contemporary Israeli photographers, and Tisch alum Hank Willis Thomas. She has contributed to Bookforum and other magazines, and co-authored a book about the 19^th-century studio of Marc Ferrez in Rio de Janeiro, for a Steidl 2-volume set published to celebrate the 150th anniversary of that beautiful city. And she is hopeful that the Prestel monograph on the contemporary Chinese artist Xing Danwen, for which she wrote the text and conducted a major interview, will appear before the end of the year. When not writing, Rice has been talking (as usual). Since April 2014, she has been the hostess of the radio talk show Meeting Point with Shelley Rice, embedded in the online magazine of the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, and has conducted a number of interviews with major artists like Bernard Tschumi, curators like Quentin Bajac and Chantal Pontbriand and critics like Marc Lenot and Jeanne Mercier.

As for teaching, Spring 2015 has seen the birth of a new seminar class called Surrealism, Anthropology, Photography: Then and Now, which has examined not only Surrealists’ attitudes toward and usage of photography and ethnography, but also the continuing relevance of their ideas for contemporary global art, philosophy, photojournalism and social media.

Shelley Rice with curators Hélène Pinet and Hélène Marraud at the Rodin Museum exhibition Mapplethorpe-Rodin, from The Meeting Point

In 2014-15, Jon Ritter was promoted to Clinical Associate Professor, and he was elected as an Alternate Senator to the new body representing full-time contract faculty in the university, the Continuing Faculty Senators Council (C-FSC). He continues to work closely with students in the Urban Design and Architecture Studies Program, the M.A. in Historical and Sustainable Architecture, and the Freshmen Honors program.  Over the past year he has lectured about the civic image of Greece and Rome in New York, for the New York Classical Club; led tours of Washington Square Park for the NYU Women’s Initiative and for the Dean’s Service Honors Corps; and he has organized numerous lectures and events in our department, as president of the New York chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Julia Robinson writes, “I moderated or presented on several panels in the fall. The first for the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition The Production Line of Happiness on the contemporary conceptual photographer Christopher Williams. In October 2014, I gave a paper at a conference organized by NYU’s Department of Performance Studies devoted to Fred Herko, countercultural figure – dancer and subject of many Warhol films – as part of a multifaceted festival devoted to the artist. I was pleased to be invited by two of our grad students, Alexis Lowry and Delia Solomons, to moderate a panel discussion in November, on the occasion of the exhibition they curated at the Drawing Center in SoHo on the artist Sari Dienes. At NYU’s Deutsches Haus in November, I discussed the exhibition Zero: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s on view at the Guggenheim with its curator Vallerie Hillings and Tiziana Caianiello from the Zero Foundation in Düsseldorf. Recent publications include contributions to Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture, edited by Spyros Papapetros & Julian Rose (Cambridge: MIT Press: 2014), which revisited the renowned essay by Rosalind Krauss from the late 1970s; and to the volume Art by Telephone – Recalled, edited by Sébastien Pluot & Fabien Vallos: Montpellier, France: Editions Mix, La Panacée, Talm, Ebabx,: 2014.

“In January 2015 I participated in a Scholar’s Day at the Met on their proposed first exhibition for the Breuer Building (a.k.a. the “old” Whitney Museum). Finally, in April I presented an event-performance devoted to the new book, Curating A-Z by Jewish Museum curator Jens Hoffmann in Chelsea. Twenty-six curators and art historians were invited to perform ‘a live reinterpretation’ of the theoretical alphabet Hoffmann has laid out to defining curating practice of the last twenty years.”

Ann Macy Roth, a Clinical Associate Professor in the Departments of Art History and of Hebrew & Judaic Studies, gave a public lecture on June 14th, 2014 at Southern Methodist University, sponsored by the North Texas Chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt. Her talk, entitled “Foreigners in Ancient Egypt: Patterns in their Representation,” tracked the contexts in which foreigners are represented throughout Egyptian history, concluding that foreigners were initially shown only with kings, as defeated forces of chaos, while the representations in non-royal contexts that eventually occur are uniformly peaceful, a pattern that is paralleled by literary works. Another conclusion was that defeated foreigners were not primarily shown on the visible parts of royal furnishings and dress to warn viewers of his victorious power, but on the inside surfaces—the upper surfaces of sandal soles, interior panels of thrones and chariots, and the grips of walking sticks—where they were often invisible and presumably served to magically strengthen the king in some way. Her research on this topic was published in the Fall 2014, in an essay entitled “The Representation of ‘the Other’ in Ancient Egypt: Foreigners in Pharaonic Iconography” in A Companion to Egyptian Art, edited by Melinda Hartwig.

Professor Roth also presented two talks at conferences in 2014. In April, she gave a talk titled “Passivity and Power in Egyptian Art,” at the Annual Meeting of the American Research Center in Egypt in Portland, Oregon. The paper argues that passivity is seen as a marker of higher status in Egyptian art, and the explanation has its roots in the association of passivity and masculinity. The research, which will form a chapter of her book on representations of gender and fertility in ancient Egyptian art and literature, has now been revised and extended and has been accepted for presentation in Florence in August 2015 at the 11^th International Congress of Egyptology.

At the sixth international conference on Old Kingdom Art and Archaeology in Warsaw, Poland, (July 2-6, 2014), Professor Roth presented paper on “Ritual Activities in the Life of a Tomb: Some uninscribed mastabas in the Western Cemetery at Giza.” Her talk described a variety of previously undocumented ritual activities that are attested archaeologically in the group of tombs she has been excavating since 2000, such as the careful filling or covering of burials, and the burial of offering basins adjacent to masonry stolen from other tombs, presumably as a kind of expiation.

Kathryn A. Smith was honored to be named one of 15 Notable Art Professors in New York City by The Art Career Project (see our blogpost of September 24th, 2014) — although she firmly believes that every one of her colleagues in the Department of Art History richly deserves this recognition. This academic year she is a co-convener of the Medieval Virtual Seminar, a series of four lectures on a variety of topics in medieval studies, all presented and moderated virtually, an exciting initiative launched by the University of Bristol and co-hosted by NYU with Bristol, the University of Oslo, and Middlebury College. Professor Smith has joined the Standing Editorial Board of Oxford Bibliographies Online in Medieval Studies and continues to serve as Series Editor for the book series Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages (Brepols). This year, Professor Smith taught for the first time an undergraduate “special topics” course on the history of the medieval Christian illuminated manuscript. She and medieval historian Andrew Romig of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study are delighted to have been awarded a Team-Teaching Grant for 2015-2016 by NYU’s Humanities Initiative. They will co-teach a graduate seminar on The Art of the Psalms in Medieval European Culture in Fall 2016.

Professor Smith delivered a number of lectures this academic year. She spoke on “‘A Lanterne of Lyght to the People’: English Narrative Alabaster Images of John the Baptist in their Visual, Religious, and Social Contexts” at the Columbia Medieval Seminar, Columbia University (September 16^th, 2014). At Fourteenth-Century Illuminated Manuscripts: A Conference, held at The British Library in London and organized in honor of Department of Art History Helen Gould Sheppard Professor Emerita of Art History Lucy Freeman Sandler, Professor Smith delivered a paper on “Crafting the Old Testament in the Queen Mary Psalter (BL MS Royal 2 B VII)” (December 1st, 2014), and at Les Enluminures here in New York she spoke on “Women and their Books” in connection with that gallery’s exhibition, Women and the Book in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (February 12^th, 2015). She spoke on “History and Legend, Romance and Devotion: Crafting the Old Testament in the Queen Mary Psalter (BL Royal MS 2 B VII)” at Reading and Writing in City, Court, and Cloister: Conference in Honor of Mary C. Erler, the 35^th Annual Conference of The Center for Medieval Studies, Fordham University, New York (March 7th, 2015). At the Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting (March 11-14, 2015), held this year at the University of Notre Dame (South Bend, IN), Professor Smith delivered a paper on “The Scribe as Artist and Reader: The Marginal Drawings in the Rylands Vie seint Edmund le rei and their Creator” in a session on Manuscript Studies and Medieval Reading Practices: Text, Image, Margin and Voice; Department of Art History Professor Emerita Lucy Freeman Sandler gave a paper in the same session. 2014-15 was Professor Smith’s final year of service on the Academy’s Haskins Medal Committee, which she chaired this year. Publications this academic year include the essay, “The Drawings of Rylands French 142: Technique, Creator, Date, Iconography and Relationship to the Text,” just published in Denis Piramus, La Vie seint Edmund le rei, edited by D. W. Russell, Anglo-Norman Text Society, Annual Texts 71 (Oxford: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2013/14), and two book reviews that appeared in The Art Newspaper and the journal Manuscripta.

 

Edward Sullivan’s book, From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of Impressionism, was published in September 2014 by Yale University Press (see our September 11th, 2014 blogpost). Students and faculty enjoyed a lecture by Professor Sullivan on the material in that book on November 19^th, 2014; great thanks to the Fine Arts Society for co-sponsoring that event with the Department of Art History. Also published in 2014-2015 were the articles “‘’La magie de l’authenticité’: Deux décennies d’exposition et d’étude de l’art haïtien aux États-Unies et en Grande-Bretagne,” which appeared in Gradhiva. Revue d’Anthropologie et d’Histoires des Arts 21 (2015); and “Artists Before the Lens: Painters and Photographers in Haiti,” to be published in the exhibition catalogue Through the Lens: Haiti from Within and Without (Ft. Lauderdale Museum of Art, 2015). Another essay, “Landscapes of Desire: The Land as Resource in the Caribbean,” will appear this spring in the exhibition catalogue, From Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic: Landscape Painting in the Americas (Art Gallery of Ontario, May 2015). Two exhibition reviews by Professor Sullivan appeared in the journals Art News and Hispanic Research Journal.

Professor Sullivan co-curated with Richard Aste, Curator of European Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art the exhibition “Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and his Transatlantic World”. The show will open in June 2015 at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin. It will come to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in October 2015 and travel to the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, in January 2016. He organized several symposia and lecture series, including ““Destroying Radical Icons: Mexican Muralism and the New York Left,” held at NYU’s King Juan Carlos Center (February 27th, 2015), the Frick Collection Symposium on the topic of “The Americas Revealed: Collecting Colonial and Modern Latin American Art in the United States” (May 16-17 2014), and the Latin American Forum, six lectures by Latin American art historians and artists at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. Lectures delivered include a public conversation with artist Laura Anderson Barbata on the occasion of her exhibition “Transcommunality,” at BRIC, Arts Media House, Brooklyn, NY (July 15th, 2014); the keynote address at a three-day conference on “Transnationality on Modern Latin American Art,” which was held August 20-23, 2014 at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia; “Paisajes del Deseo: El Caribe” IV Symposium in the History of Art, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia (August 22nd, 2014); “Landscapes of Desire: Art in the Caribbean, Nineteenth Century” University of Texas, Austin (September 17th, 2014); “Belkis Ayon and Contemporary Cuban Art” FRG Objects and Design Gallery, Hudson N.Y. (September 21st, 2014); and “Passion for Objects: Collecting and Exhibiting Latin American Art in the U.S.,” the keynote address at Latin American and Latino Art at the Allen: A Symposium (October 3rd, 2014).