Professor Miriam Basilio’s essay “Evolving Taxonomies at The Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s and ‘40s and the Definitions of the “Latin American Collection,” was published in Professor Edward J. Sullivan’s edited volume The Americas Revealed: Collecting Colonial and Latin American Art in the United States (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018), 28-43. The material in the essay is discussed in more detail in two of the chapters of her book Latin American Art at The Museum of Modern Art: The Power of the Canon, under contract with Routledge Press for publication in its Research in Museum Studies series. In addition to working on the last chapter of the book, Professor Basilio has been putting the final touches on her first artist’s book, which will be published soon. This Spring The Museum of Modern Art presented Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern, an important exhibition surveying Kirstein’s important contributions to various aspects of the Museum’s collecting and curatorial activities. Among these were his purchases of work by artists from various Latin American countries. Professor Basilio was invited by Inés Katzenstein, Director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art and Curator of Latin American Art in the Department of Drawings and Prints to participate in a conversation over the course of two days last May, “Gallery Sessions: Lincoln Kirstein and Latin American Art,” and in Spanish “HablaArte: “Lincoln Kirstein y el arte de América Latina.” In October 2018, Prof. Basilio spoke at the IFA Spanish and Latin American Colloquium Lecture, Institute of Fine Arts, presenting the lecture “Staging Franco’s Victory As Reconquest: The 1940 Exposicion de la Hispanidad.”
Professor Miriam Basilio in conversation with Inés Katzenstein at MoMA in front of Antonio Berni’s New Chicago Athletic Club (1037)
Professor Barry Flood had a busy year, spent between New York and Europe, lecturing and working on a series of book projects. Fall 2018 saw the initiation of a full program of lectures and workshops at Silsila: Center for Material Histories, the new Center for Material Histories of the Islamicate World that he has founded. In fall 2018 the series theme was “Matters of Mediation/Bodies of Devotion”, while the spring 2019 series was dedicated to the theme of “Replication.” In November, he delivered a Rewald Seminar at the Graduate Center, CUNY, on “Other Statue Histories: Jacquemart’s Lions and Iconoclasm as Anti-Colonialism in Khedivial Egypt.” In spring 2019, he was the Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, giving eight public lectures on “Islam and Image: Beyond Aniconism and Iconoclasm.” While in the UK, he spoke on “A Seljuk horizon and pre-Mongol ‘globalism'” at the York Islamic Art Circle in February. Back in New York, he spoke on “Architecture as Archive: India, Ethiopia and a 12th-century World System” at NYU’s Center for Global Asia in March. In May he was a visiting fellow at the Centre for Early Medieval Studies at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, delivering a public lecture “From Trace to Print: Histories of an Islamic Image Relic.”
During the year, Professor Flood worked on a book for the Louvre Museum in Paris to accompany a fall 2019 lectures series, and on the production of a volume containing the collected writings of the Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata, which he edited.
The year saw the publication of a number of essays, including an entry on “Iconoclasm” in the Encyclopaedia of Islam 3; “Picasso the Muslim. Or, how the Bilderverbot became modern (Part 2),” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics (69/70, 2018); “Genealogies of Whitewash: ‘Muhammedan Churches’, Reformation Polemics and the Aesthetics of Modernism,” in Diana Sorensen, ed., Territories and Trajectories: Cultures in Circulation (Duke University Press, 2018); “Bodies, Books and Buildings: Economies of Ornament in Juridical Islam,” in David Ganz & Barbara Schellewald, eds., Clothing Sacred Scripture (De Gruyter, 2018); “Signs of Silence: Epigraphic Erasure and the Image of the Word,” in Christiane Gruber, ed., The Image Debate: Figural Representation in Islam and Across the World (Gingko Press, 2019), and a contribution to a questionnaire on monuments in October (165, 2018).
Professor Dennis Geronimus spent last fall-winter in familiar haunts, returning to Oxford as an academic visitor hosted by the Department of the History of Art, where he earned his doctorate. He was back in New York just in time to celebrate the opening of Metamorphoses: Ovid According to Wally Reinhardt at the Grey Art Gallery (Jan.–Apr. 2019), co-curated by Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey, and Professor Geronimus. Marking Reinhardt’s first solo show, the exhibition was selected as an “Exhibition to Watch” by the New York Times. Professor Geronimus also contributed an introductory essay (“Seeing Shadows”) to a catalogue accompanying a second contemporary art exhibition in 2019, this time in Florence and starring an old friend: Living Bodies: Drawing and Memory, an exhibition of drawings by Signe Kongsgaard Mogensen, a Danish artist living and working in Tuscany. In March, Professor Geronimus traveled to Florence to participate in a roundtable discussion of Mogensen’s multifaceted work.
The past academic year saw the publication of Piero di Cosimo: Painter of Faith and Fable (Leiden and Boston, Brill Publishers), a three-year-long project bringing together the proceedings of a conference hosted by the Dutch University Institute for Art History (NIKI) in Florence and jointly organized by Professor Geronimus and Institute Director Michael Kwakkelstein. Co-edited by Professor Geronimus, the publication included his essay “Beautiful Monsters: The Language of Empathy and Grief in Piero di Cosimo’s Representation of Animals and Human-Animal Hybrids.” The two scholars joined forces again on the exhibition catalogue for Leonardo da Vinci: The Language of Faces, the first-ever exhibition devoted exclusively to Leonardo in the Netherlands and occasioned by the quincentenary of the master’s death. The catalogue included Professor Geronimus’s essay “Leonardo’s Last Supper and the Motions of the Mind.” Earlier in 2018, he collaborated with Turkish photographer Ahmet Ertuğ on a large-scale publication featuring state-of-the-art images of the restored mural in Milan, contributing the accompanying essay “A Vanishing Relic: The Afterlife of Leonardo’s Last Supper.” Mr. Ertuğ’s vivid photographs will be exhibited in triptych format in New York’s Union Club for a month this fall, beginning October 2. Another pair of publications focused on Jacopo da Pontormo, the subject of Professor Geronimus book-in-progress with Yale University Press: “Pontormo’s Apollo and Daphne,” in Art Purposes: Object Lessons for the Liberal Arts, published by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art; and “Northern Exposure: Pontormo, Dürer and the Humor of the Body,” in Diane Bodart, Andreas Beyer and Francesca Alberti, eds., Rire en images à la Renaissance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019).
It was a busy year on the lecture circuit! Professor Geronimus’s invited and conference talks included: “Pontormo’s Process,” here in the DAH (Sept. 2018); “Fourteen at the Table: The Legacy of Leonardo’s Last Supper,” in the symposium “Leonardo da Vinci’s Studies of the Human Face,” Philharmonie, Haarlem, accompanying Leonardo da Vinci: The Language of Faces (Nov. 2018); “Jacopo da Pontormo and the Curious Case of the Black Duke’s Daughter,” Research Seminar, Department of the History of Art, University of Oxford (Nov. 2018); “Into the Wild: Living Landscape and Wonderment in Renaissance Art,” MacIntyre Society lecture, Magdalen College, University of Oxford (Nov. 2018); “In Praise of Women: Pontormo, Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna, After the Wars,” in Pontormo: Painting in the Age of Anxiety conference at UCLA, in conjunction with the exhibition Miraculous Encounters: Jacopo da Pontormo from Drawing to Painting at the J. Paul Getty Museum, L.A. (Feb. 2019); and “Fear and Wonder: Natura naturans, from Ovid to Leonardo,” in Ovid and Art conference, NYU (Apr. 2019), followed by a public one-on-one conversation with Wally Reinhardt.
In spring 2019, Professor Geronimus taught a seminar at the IFA, titled Making as Meaning in Renaissance, a course that took the students to a chemistry lab, a conservation studio, the Met’s Antonio Ratti Textile Center and the show Relative Values (with its organizer Elizabeth Cleland as their guide), the Moroni exhibition at the Frick Collection on a visit led by the show’s curator Aimee Ng, and Print Rooms at both the Morgan and the Met – all in an effort to better understand the rich diversity of artistic methods and materials in the Renaissance. Last spring-summer, Professor Geronimus also welcomed two new roles outside of the classroom, as a “Proud to be First” Faculty Connect Advocate for first-generation students in the College of Arts & Science and as NYU’s Faculty Athletics Representative to the NCAA. Finally, speaking of sports, Professor Geronimus is on a ten-tournament winning streak on the tennis court – a competitive return from “work-induced retirement” that has taken him to events all over New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware!
Cover, Piero di Cosimo: Painter of Faith and Fable (Brill, 2018)
Cover, Rire en Image à la Renaissance (Brepols, 2019)
Symposium, “Leonardo da Vinci’s Studies of the Human Face,” Philharmonie, Haarlem, accompanying the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: The Language of Faces at the Teylers Museum, Haarlem, Nov. 2018
Michael Kwakkelstein, Dennis Geronimus and Signe Mogensen in a roundtable discussion occasioned by Mogensen’s Living Forms, exhibition at the NIKI, Florence
Professor John Hopkins spent last year settling in at NYU, getting to know students in the Department of Art History and the Institute of Fine Arts and discovering the best places to get work done around the Village. He was also invited to speak at the Institute, and to the Columbia University Department of Art History and the SUNY New Paltz Department of Art History, introducing his work to colleagues around the region and helping to create new connections between institutions.
Over the past academic year he co-directed a conference, “Valuing Forgery: Ancient Rome Between Authenticity and Fraud,” which brought together 17 eminent scholars working on Roman art and text and its manipulation from antiquity to the present. The project will culminate in an edited volume, currently titled Beyond Deceit: Valuing Forgery and Longing for Ancient Rome. He will teach a course at NYU this coming spring on the topic. He also continued work as co-director of the Collections Analysis Collaborative, a research and educational initiative with the Menil Collection to study the opportunities for collaboration between museums and the academy. The project brings together affiliated students, scholars and museum professionals to conduct object-based and provenance research and to identify innovative approaches to the issues of cultural heritage preservation, and public display that shape the efficacy of museums’ permanent collections and prospective acquisitions. The project will culminate in spring 2020 with the publication of a volume, for which Hopkins serves as co-editor, titled Assembling Object Biographies: Collaborative Engagement with Ancient Mediterranean Art. The volume was accepted by peer review in the spring of 2019 and is currently in production stages. Prof. Hopkins is co-author of the book’s introduction and author of a chapter in the volume, “Decapitated: The Reassembled Biographies of two Sculpted Heads.”
Professor Hopkins is also working on two independent projects. The first is an initiative to study the architectural decorative and protective elements from the Roman Forum, in collaboration with the Italian Ministry of Culture, Parco del Colosseo e Foro Romano and Sapienza Università di Roma. The project is still in planning stages and would encompass a catalogue, digitization, scientific analysis and a 3D web interface for the full corpus of architectural decoration and protective elements (over 1,500 objects) from the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill dating from ca. 725-100 BCE. His second project is a monograph, currently titled The Urban Environment of Early Rome: Accretion, Encrustation, Accumulation, and it examines the chaotic visually and spatially connective spaces of Rome from ca. 700-200 BCE. He spoke on material related to this work at the Cleveland Symposium, as keynote speaker. He also published several pieces related to this work, including, a long annotation for the Oxford Bibliographies on “Roman Republican Architecture,” a long critical review for the Journal of Roman Archaeology titled “Decoding the Regia,” and a review for the American Journal of Archaeology, of Building Mid-Republican Rome by Seth Bernard.
In addition to his research, Professor Hopkins taught courses on Ancient Art, Ancient to Medieval Art, and Early Roman Art and Architecture and served as doctoral exam supervisor for students at the IFA and on the committee for the program in Ancient Art.
Professor Pepe Karmel reports, “Last fall (October 2018) I helped organize two conferences: Contemporary Art and the Crisis of Globalization at the IFA; and Picasso and History at the Museo Picasso Málaga. In spring 2019, I helped organize a memorial evening, John Richardson: Picasso Scholar and Art World Luminary, at International Foundation for Art Research (May 29, 2019) and gave a lecture about Richardson’s Picasso biography.”
Professor Karmel also delivered the following lectures:
“Picasso as History Painter,” keynote lecture for symposium on Picasso and History, Museo Picasso Málaga, October 9, 2018;
Conversation with Iranian artist Shahpour Pouyan, in conjunction with the exhibition Speaking Power to (Post) Truth, organized by Sara Raza, at the Jane Lombard Gallery, February 9, 2019;
“Jackson Pollock: Three Kinds of Activity” (with conservator Jim Coddington), for Conserving Active Matter: Materials Science, symposium at the Bard Graduate Center, March 28, 2019;
“Modern Metamorphoses from Pablo Picasso to Wangechi Mutu,” for Ovid and Art: A Symposium, New York University, April 4, 2019
“From Imperial Modern to Global Postmodern,” for Worlds Among Us: Across Histories, a symposium at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, May 23, 2019; followed by a full-day discussion with museum curators on May 24.
Professor Karmel also published several essays:
“Sleep of Reason: New Work by Robert Morris,” in Robert Morris: Banners & Curses (New York: Castelli Gallery, 2018), 11-23;
“Cubisme et abstraction,” in Brigitte Léal et al, eds., Le Cubisme (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2018), 271-277 [English and German editions];
“Shock of the Nude [review of The Progressive Revolution at Asia Society, NY],” Art India (April 2019), 48-51;
“Willem de Kooning: Five Decades,” in Willem de Kooning: Five Decades (New York: Mnuchin Gallery, 2019), 9-29;
“Helen Frankenthaler: The Memory of Landscape,” in Pittura/Panorama: Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, 1952-1992 (Venice: Museo di Palazzo Grimani, 2019), 11-21.
And, over the course of this last summer, Professor Karmel finished his book, Abstract Art: A Global History. It is scheduled to be published by Thames & Hudson in fall 2020.
Professor Carol Krinsky reviewed books on several topics including the landscapes around mega-churches, and medieval architectural sculpture, and worked on a sample chapter for a proposed book about the architectural history of Forty-second Street in Manhattan. She wrote an article about the Lincoln Square Synagogue, a work by the firm of CetraRuddy (Nancy Ruddy, one of the principals of the firm is an alumna of our department), and is awaiting publication of this and other articles. She has been an editorial consultant for several journals, evaluating manuscripts for publication, and consulted on a documentary film. She lectured on American religious architecture at the University of Muenster, and on three generations of skyscrapers at the Technical University of Dresden, before visiting medieval sites in Burgundy and England in June. She gave tours of midtown to various groups including students and faculty from the University of Augsburg and for international scholars who attend a summer program at Steinhardt.
Professor Shelley Rice sends the following news:
Selected Publications:
“Espace local – Visions globales: Albert Kahn en contexte,” Un Monde et son Double: Regards sur l’entreprise visuelle des Archives de la Planète (1919-1931), ed. Isabelle Marinone, (Perpignan: Collections Cinémas, Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2019), 109-133;
“Shifting Spaces, Impossible Borders: Ana Mendieta and Liliana Porter,” lemagazine.jeudepaume.org (Paris: Jeu de Paume Museum, October 12, 2018);
“Walker Evans: The Quintessential American?” ArtNews, Winter 2018 in print; online later.
Selected Lectures:
Panel organizer and Moderator: “Curating Photography,” Grey Art Gallery public program in conjunction with the NeoRealism exhibition, New York University, September 20, 2018;
Conversation with artist Milagros de la Torre, New York, Institute of Fine Arts, October 10, 2018;
Lecture and Dialogue with Artist Esther Ferrer: “Ana Mendieta and Feminism in the 1970s,” in conjunction with the Jeu de Paume Museum’s exhibition Ana Mendieta: Film Works (Covered in Time and History). Paris, Ecole Normale Supèrieure, November 8, 2018;
Panel Discussion with MoMA’s Inès Katzenstein and artist Liliana Porter. New York, Museo del Barrio, November 10, 2018;
Book Launch and Panel Discussion: The Family of Man Revisited: Photography in a Global Age. Moderator and Respondent, Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 27, 2019;
Lecture: Steichen/Stieglitz: Money, Art and Life in Photography, sponsored by CNA (the National Audiovisual Center of Luxembourg and the University of Trier Center for American Studies. Luxembourg, Clervaux Castle, June 29, 2019.
Film:
Interviewee in Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable, documentary on the photographer by Sasha Waters Freyer, premiered Film Forum September 19, 2018. (Winner, Best Feminist Reassessment of a Male Artist, SxSW, 2018).
Professor Jon Ritter is happy to continue his work of teaching, publishing, lecturing, and administration in the Department of Art History. In 2018-19 Professor Ritter published “The Expression of Civic Life: Civic Centers and the City Beautiful in New York City,” in Classical New York: Greece and Rome in New York City’s Art and Architecture, 1830 -1940, ed. Matthew McGowan and Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). He also earned two grants from the NYU Global Faculty Fund, to bring London-based colleagues from our M.A. program to New York. In February 2018 Phil Crew presented “Learning from King’s Cross,” and in October of this year Richard Hill and Tanis Hinchcliffe will visit NYU to lecture in our department. You can see videos from Prof. Crew’s visit here.
In 2018-19 Professor Ritter gave public lectures on topics including the public sculpture of Karl Bitter for the New York Supreme Court of New York, and on “Classical New York” at the Skyscraper Museum. Professor Ritter also organized numerous lectures and special events in the department and as President of the New York Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians. You can find listings of future events on the department blog, “Field of Vision.”
Professor Ritter continues to represent full-time contract faculty at NYU as Alternate Senator on the Continuing Faculty Senators Council (C-FSC). He is a member of the University Faculty Committee on the Global Network University and he chairs the C-FSC Global Network University Committee.
In November 2018, Professor Julia Robinson participated in Fake Friends: A Symposium on Art History and Comparison at Princeton University.
Her paper, “From the Comparable to the Analogous,” addressed the postwar moment when members of a new generation of New York artists abandoned painting and began to calibrate their art to the “analogous means” of light and sound variables, and physics models then being mapped into the composition of electronic music, dispensing with the grounds of the comparable on which art history has for so long depended.
In the fall and spring 2018-2019, Professor Robinson advised and mentored her ex-student, Andreas Petrossiants (NYU, BA 2016), as he curated his first museum exhibition Inventing Dance: In and Around Judson, New York 1959 – 1970 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Nice, France (MAMAC)
In the spring of 2019 she connected with Anne Wheeler, Director of the newly-formed One Million Years Foundation (devoted to the artist On Kawara) to find NYU students who could work with this exciting organization over the summer and in its first year of operation- a great success – several of Professor Robinson’s recently graduated students were hired.
In early June, she gave a paper at a conference in Paris organized by the Grey Art Gallery as a think tank for their forthcoming exhibition Americans in Paris (1948-1968) – a collaboration with the Museum in Nantes (2022).
Also in June, Robinson conducted several interviews in Paris and Amsterdam for her ongoing film project, Woman Artists Before Feminism. The film, comprising about 15 interviews conducted between 2012-19, investigates the perspectives of artists who emerged in the 1950s—such as Susan Weil, Patty Mucha, Mary Bauermeister, Dorthea Rockburne, Alison Knowles, Carolee Schneemann—before the feminist discourse consolidated in the 1970s was available. In June 2019 she added three important voices to this project: interviewing Michèle Bernstein (Situationiste Internationale) in Paris, and Jo Baer (American Minimalist painter) and Jacqueline de Jong (Dutch painter) in Amsterdam.
Professor Julia Robinson speaking in Paris at Americans in Paris (1948-1968), organized by the Grey Art Gallery (June 2019)
Professor Julia Robinson and other members of the final panel at Americans in Paris (1948-1968), organized by the Grey Art Gallery (June 2019)
Artist Jo Baer at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Professor Julia Robinson interviews artist Jo Baer for her film project, Women Artists Before Feminism, at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
In June 2019, Lucy Freeman Sandler, Helen Gould Sheppard Professor of Art History, emerita, gave a paper titled “Psalter Illustration and the Rise of Coronation Imagery in Medieval England” at the St. Louis University Medieval Conference, at which Professor Kathryn A. Smith was also a speaker. The next month Professor Sandler gave the Inaugural Pamela Tudor-Craig Lecture, titled “It’s an Open Book: Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s Copy of the Gospel Commentary of William of Nottingham” at the Harlaxton Medieval Symposium in England, another conference at which Professor Smith spoke. Professor Sandler has three articles in press, “Religious Instruction and Devotional Study: The Pictorial and the Textual in Gothic Diagrams,” in The Visualization of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Adam Cohen, Marcia Kupfer et al., Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages 16 (Turnout: Brepols); “Visions of the Beginning and the End: The Hours of the Angels Added to the Psalter of Yolande of Soissons,” in Tributes to Richard Emmerson, ed. Elina Gertsman et al. (London: Harvey Miller); and “Psalter Illustration and the Rise of Coronation Imagery in Medieval England,” Journal of Medieval History, 2020. She is working on a broad study of images of books in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, to be published by The British Library.
Professor Kathryn A. Smith published two articles earlier this year. The first, “Crafting the Old Testament in the Queen Mary Psalter,” appeared in Reading and Writing in Medieval England: Essays in Honor of Mary C. Erler, ed. Maryanne Kowaleski and Martin Chase (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2019, 100-29 + plates), and grew out of lectures Professor Smith delivered in 2014-16 in London, Madrid, and New York. The second, “‘Specially English’: Gothic Illumination c. 1190-Early Fourteenth Century” (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2019, 569-600) is a chapter for the second, revised edition of A Companion to Medieval Art, Romanesque and Gothic, a volume of historiographic essays edited, as was the original, 2006 edition, by medieval art historian Conrad Rudolph of the University of California, Riverside.
Professor Smith lectured on material from her current book project, titled Scripture Transformed in Late Medieval England: The Religious, Artistic, and Social Worlds of the Welles-Ros Bible, at the Center for Historical Studies/Graduate School for Historical Studies, University of Groningen (March 21, 2019). She expanded that lecture, titled “Found in Translation: Images Visionary and Visceral in the Welles-Ros Bible (Paris, BnF fr. 1),” in an informal workshop in the Department of Art History in April. She also lectured on “Responsive Books in Some Late Medieval English Illuminated Manuscripts” at the 46thAnnual St. Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies at St. Louis University (June 18, 2019), a conference run by her former IFA classmate, Dr. Susan L’Engle; and at the 36th Annual Harlaxton Medieval Symposium, held at Harlaxton manor (Lincolnshire, UK; July 23, 2019). Professor Julian Luxford of the University of St. Andrews convened this year’s Harlaxton symposium around the theme of The Medieval Book as Object, Idea and Symbol. Professor Smith will publish an expanded version of this lecture in the Harlaxton Medieval Symposium conference proceedings, scheduled to appear in 2021.
Last academic year Professor Smith developed and taught a new undergraduate seminar titled “Apocalypse Then, Apocalypse Now: Visualizing the End of the World from the Early Middle Ages to Our Contemporary Moment.” She also taught new versions of her advanced undergraduate lecture courses “Romanesque Art” and “Gothic Art in Northern Europe” as well as the “Medieval Art” survey. She served as a doctoral examiner for the Department of Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center and co-supervised with Professor Virginia Cox of the Department of Italian Studies a dissertation on the Chantilly Inferno.
This summer Professor Smith and her husband traveled in France. They visited for the first time the Romanesque sites of St. Pierre, Moissac, and Ste. Foy, Conques, both of which Professor Smith teaches regularly. They also visited Lascaux IV, the most recent, complete replica of that spectacular prehistoric site.
Professor Smith continues to serves as Series Editor of Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages (Brepols), a book series that she co-founded with Publishing Manager Johan Van der Beke; as co-editor with Richard K. Emmerson and Pamela Patton of the journal Studies in Iconography (Princeton U./Western Michigan U.); and on the editorial board of the journal Manuscript Studies (Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, University of Pennsylvania). In 2018-19 she served her first year (of three) on the Council of the Medieval Academy of America.
Professor Edward Sullivan was named Outstanding Teacher of Art History by the College Art Association and received this honor at the annual convocation of the CAA in New York in February. He is most gratified to have been thus named, especially since previous awardees have included Department of Art History faculty, among them Carol Krinsky and H.W. Janson.
Professor Sullivan’s scholarship during the academic year from September 2018 to August 2019 has been principally concerned with the Brazilian master garden-architect, painter, sculptor and designer Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994). He served as curator of the largest exhibition organized thus far at the New York Botanical Garden entitled Brazilian Modern: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx.
In preparation for this exhibition Sullivan spent approximately three years studying the work of the artist, who was a principal figure within the cultural and artistic life of Brazil in the mid-twentieth century, a time of radical innovation and resistance to the conservative modes that had characterized Brazilian visual arts at the start of the century. Sullivan was also responsible for co-editing and writing two analytical essays for the book that accompanied the exhibition, which was on view from June 13 to September 29, 2019.
Professor Sullivan organized a panel for the College Art association annual meeting in New York in February, 2019 on the subject of recent scholarship in Brazilian art by anglophone scholars. On June 7, Sullivan organized an international symposium at the Botanical Garden on Burle Marx and his contemporaries.
Among his public lectures was his talk in the symposium (May, 2019) at the Phillipps Collection, Washington DC celebrating the exhibition of Cuban artist Zilia Sanchez.
He is at work on his next major research project, a book about artists and choreographers in the Americas in the mid-twentieth century.
Professor Sullivan continues to serve as Deputy Director of the Institute of Fine Arts. At the IFA he organizes the Latin American Forum and the Huber Colloquium on Spanish and Latin American Art, providing platforms for artists’ talks, symposia and scholarly discussion of the arts from the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries of all time periods.
Professor Sullivan will teach his lecture course “Art in Spain from El Greco to Goya” in the Department of Art History in spring, 2020.
Roberto Burle Marx during a botanical expedition in Ecuador, 1974. Photograph by Luiz Knud Correia de Araújo, Archive of Luiz Antonio Correia de Araújo
Franny Lilliston is a second year MA student at the Institute of Fine Arts studying medieval art and architecture. Her research focuses on the role of sculpture in medieval monastic spaces, and the relationship between medieval art and texts. Originally from Seattle, WA, Franny completed her BA in Studio Art and Art History at the Evergreen State College in 2017. Franny is available on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.
Fields of Vision 