Alumni News, Fall 2019

We received a fantastic response to our call for alumni news!  Greatest thanks to all of our alumni who got in touch, and hearty congratulations on all of your achievements and activities.  We hope to hear from more of you for our next Alumni News round-up, which we’ll post sometime in spring 2020.  Hearty thanks also to Department of Art History/Program for Urban Design and Architecture Studies faculty Carol Krinsky and Mosette Broderick, both of whom contributed news to this post.

It is with sadness that we report that Virginia Zabriskie (B. A. Art History ’40s) died on May 7, 2019 at age 91.  Virginia was native New Yorker and a graduate of the High School of Music and Art and NYU.  As the obituary in The New York Times noted (5/11/19), “Through her galleries in New York and Paris, she contributed substantially to the knowledge and appreciation of American art, including photography. She received awards from the Art Dealers Association of America and the Medaille d’Honeur de la Ville de Paris.”

Jary Larsen, Ph.D. (B.A. Art History ’87) is a licensed neuropsychologist. He is currently affiliated with the Neuropsychology Service at the University of California, San Francisco/Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital (UCSF/ZSFG) and the Cognitive Neuropsychology and Electrophysiology (CNE) Laboratory at VA Northern California, where he has also been Chair of the human research ethics board since 2012.  He is on the Board of Directors of the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration (AFTD), and was Board Chair from 2013-2016.  AFTD is a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to providing compassionate care, support, and a future free of frontotemporal degeneration, the most common dementia for people under age 60.  Jary has also been the Management Committee President of the FTD Disorders Registry since 2017.

Johannes Nathan (B.A. Art History ’87) is now an art dealer, with offices in both Potsdam and Zurich.  His firm, Nathan Fine Art, is part of a family tradition of dealing in works of art created between the sixteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.  Johannes earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London; his wife, Dr. Antoinette Roesler-Friedenthal, is also an art historian.  Johannes recently visited New York where he saw Professors Lucy Freeman Sandler and Carol Krinsky.

Baylor Lancaster (B.A. Art History ’95) earned an MBA from the Stern School of Business and now works on Wall Street.  She reports that her new employer collects photography, and when he hired her, he told her that he valued liberal arts majors.  She is married to Larry Samuel, whose book about the Tudor City apartment development on East 42nd Street will be published in October 2019.  Baylor remembers fondly having studied with Professors Mosette Broderick, Joan Connelly, Carol Krinsky, Lucy Freeman Sandler, Ken Silver, and Guy Walton, and had a special memory of being in a seminar that Guy Walton took to Venice in the fall of 1995.

 Victoria Young (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies ’95), Professor and Chair of the Art History program at St. Thomas University, was named the University’s 2019 Professor of the Year.

Nicholas Sawicki (B.A., Urban Design and Architecture Studies ’96; Ph.D., History of Art, University of Pennsylvania ’07), Associate Professor of Art History at Lehigh University, will soon be taking on the role of chair of the university’s Department of Art, Architecture and Design.  In spring 2019 he was in residence as Distinguished Scholar at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he advanced work on a new book project and completed a study of the cubism collector and curator Douglas Cooper, with additional support from a fellowship at the Getty Research Institute.  He has also recently collaborated with colleagues at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center on an online digital edition of previously unpublished archival documentation from Pablo Picasso’s exhibition at the Moderne Galerie in Munich in 1913, the artist’s first retrospective.

Edith Taichman (B.A. Art History ’99) writes, “I recently had my first piece of writing published at tablet mag. Although not art history-related, the topic is definitely a timely one in light of the national opioid crisis currently raging.”

Beth Citron (B.A. Art History ’02; Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania ’09) sends this news:  “I am a 2019 recipient of an Asian Cultural Council Fellowship for research in India with a renowned private collection and archive of modern Indian art and will begin work on this longer term project in winter 2020.  On November 8, my final exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art Shahidul Alam: Truth to Power opened to the public, focusing on an inspiring career of art and activism by Bangladesh’s leading dissident.  Finally and most importantly, I welcomed a son, Maxwell, on October 12.”

Liam Considine (B.A. Art History ’02; Ph.D. Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, 2012) sent the good news that his book American Pop Art in France: Politics of the Transatlantic Image was published this month.

Sara Allain-Botsford (B.A. Art History ’09) is living in Abu Dhabi, UAE with her husband and two cats. She has begun a two-year Masters program in Museum Studies and Art History at Paris Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi.  A module on Middle East civilizations reminded Sara of some of the material she studied at NYU in “History of Western Art I,” taught that semester by Professor Kathryn Smith.

Ksenia Nouril (B.A. Art History ’09; Ph.D. Rutgers University ’18) writes, “I’m happy to report that I’ve organized as Guest Curator the exhibition Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov: Stories About Ourselves, which opens at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick on November 30, 2019. This exhibition explores the album, an innovative genre of visual art popularized in the 1970s by conceptual artists in Moscow. Drawing primarily from the Zimmerli’s Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, this exhibition juxtaposes the albums of Kabakov and Pivovarov with their paintings and children’s book illustrations of the same period. More information is available here. For the exhibition, I’ve edited an accompanied catalogue, published by Rutgers University Press.”

Julianne Cordray (B.A. Art History ’10) is a Berlin-based art writer and editor. She earned her M.A. from University College London with a focus on architecture and the politics of image making in the context of modern and contemporary art.  Her writing has been published in online magazines including Hyperallergic, Berlin Art Link, Samizdat Online, and THE SEEN – art journal of Expo Chicago, among others, as well as in various artist and exhibition catalogues. In September 2018, along with curator Sarie Nijboer, she launched the art writing platform t e x t u r, which is conceived as a quiet space among contemporary modes of content distribution, bringing a focus to the text medium as a visual mode through which to view and experience art.

Insung Kim (B.A., Urban Design and Architecture Studies/Politics ’13; J.D./LL.M., Boston University School of Law ’17) sends this news:

“Through the Urban Design program and my Honors Thesis on Seoul Greenbelt Development and the Necessity of Preservation at NYU, I became interested in studying the law because of the importance that the law plays in real estate development in conjunction with green space preservation.” Insung completed a dual-degree in J.D./LL.M. in Tax Law at Boston University, where he found tax aspects of affordable housing development to be fascinating (i.e., that tax credits are used to facilitate private development of housing for low income households). (Interview on affordable housing while at BU Law).

Insung began his career at the International Tax Group at PwC in New York, then worked as an M&A tax specialist at Crowell & Moring in Washington DC.  He is now at Goulston & Storrs in the New York office, where he works on a broad range of tax issues with a focus on real estate.  Because Goulston & Storrs has a particular strength in real estate law, Insung is working on general real estate related tax issues (e.g., M&A, REITs), as well as tax credit matters that help preserve landmark buildings (i.e., historic rehabilitation tax credits) and develop affordable housing (i.e., low-income housing tax credits).

Nasim Mirzai (B.A Art History ’14) writes, “I am now pursuing my MBA at Duke University, The Fuqua School of Business (’21). Previously, I worked as a gallery director at The Java Project in Brooklyn, NY, and now I plan to pursue a career in luxury retail strategy/marketing post-MBA.”

Hyunkyung Amanda-Kay Lee (B.A Art History ’15) is currently pursuing a Masters degree at Seoul National University in Korea in Art Business, while working as an Art Consultant at “Tori Bridge” in Seoul.

Valerie Itteilag (B.A. Art History ‘15) is in the second year of her Masters at Royal College of Art for Interior Design.  She recently exhibited a “Democratic Seat,” a seat embodying the uncomfortable experience of minorities in democracies, at an exhibition for Kortrijk, Belgium, a Unesco Design Capital, for Kortrijk Creativity Week.  She will be focusing on material research, use, and applications in the coming year, culminating in the final year show.  Valerie will complete her Masters course in July 2020 and hopes to continue working in London, UK or in Europe.

Sarah Bigler (B.A. Art History ’16) earned an M.A. in 19^th-century French
Art from Columbia University in 2018.  She has been working at the Frick Art Reference Library since 2017 and was recently promoted to Assistant Photoarchivist.

Karin Hostettler (B.A. Urban Design and Architecture Studies; Studio Art/Italian Studies minors ’16) earned her Master of Architecture in 2019 from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she also was awarded the Alpha Rho Chi Bronze Medal for leadership and professional merit.  This past summer she returned to New York, joining Dattner Architects as an Entry Level Designer.

Emma Holter (B.A. Art History ’17), formerly Administrative Assistant in the Office of the Chief Curator at The Frick Collection, was promoted earlier this fall and is now Curatorial Assistant to the Chief Curator at The Frick.

Frederike Kurowski Cardello (B.A. Art History ‘18) writes:  “After working at Lévy Gorvy for almost two years (as an Intern, part time, and full time employee), I feel that NYU’s Art History Department prepared me to make the most of the great and daunting opportunity to work with high level professionals in the commercial art world. The department at NYU not only taught me to think critically and articulately about art and art history, but also to work independently.  These project management skills allowed me to focus my attention on the new challenges in my job, rather than the transition from student to working life.  By the end of my term at Lévy Gorvy, I was working for one of the gallery’s founders, an experience that raised the bar for my professional performance and completely changed my understanding of the attention, sacrifice and passion involved in running a large gallery business.

“In September, I moved to London to pursue an M.A. in UCL’s History of Art department, with a focus on Cabinets of Display and German Art.  In 2020, I intend to submit my thesis on New Objectivity and to organize my first exhibition at UCL.”

Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez (B.A. Art History ’18), who is pursuing a Ph.D. in Art History at Stanford, sends this news:  “I have two essays that will be published in the next few months.  The first is on the photographer Mark McKnight whose work is the subject of an exhibition at the Aperture Foundation in November. The essay I wrote on McKnight, titled “Decreation,” will be published in Contact Sheet 204: Light Work Annual 2020 in January.  It is accompanied by a small sequence of images of McKnight’s work that I edited. The second essay will appear in Jeu de Paume’s le magazine in late November.  It will be translated and published in French.  It is a reduced excerpt/revision of my senior honors thesis on Peter Hujar, Steve Lawrence, and Newspaper.”

(Charlotte) Yuyin Li (B.A. Art History ’19) writes, “This summer I spent a month in Agios Georgios, Cyprus as the team conservator of NYU Yeronisos Archaeological Field School.  I was in charge of treating recently excavated pottery shards and limestone capitals, managing the warehouse, as well as participating in the actual excavation.  Currently I am a conservation intern at the Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History.  I work on object and textile conservation for the Northwest Coast Hall Renovation project.”

Iracema Alvarez (B.A. Art History/French ’19) is continuing a Studio Assistant position working with the artist Milagros de la Torre in New York.  She also recently started an intern position in Cristin Tierney Art Advisory Services, LLC, where she is continuing her studies and gaining practical experience about the art industry.

 

 

 

 

Silsila fall 2019 Lecture Series, Bonded “OF LOVE AND BONDAGE: SERVICE, FRIENDSHIP AND MATERIAL TIES IN TIMURID HINDUSTAN” Mana Kia, Columbia University

“Two Safavid Princes,” attributed to Aqa Mirak, c. 1530.

Historicizing slavery and its material culture in Perso-Islamic contexts requires consideration of a wider context in which servitude and bondage were celebrated ideals and also the means by which Persians could realize themselves as ethical subjects. Persianate polities cohered around hierarchically structured social bonds linking individuals and groups marked by dissimilar origins, religious affiliations, social locations, occupational groupings, and claims to power. Here, I explore the language and practices of social bonds in the midst of shifting political structures in 18th-century Hindustan, specifically the ways relations of service and patronage were spoken in terms of love and friendship. To realize and render these relations legible required the production and exchange of images, compositions, books, and objects, as well as particular bodily practices. Slaves and their descendants were part of these relations as well. Beyond helping move past the lens of Atlantic slavery, the understanding that many of our textual and material sources were produced as instruments of bondage furthers discussions on how to read them.

Mana Kia is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Her interests are the early modern connected social, cultural, intellectual histories of West, Central, and South Asia from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Her first book, Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism, explores how early modern conceptions of place and origins provided expansive possibilities of Persian selfhood. She is at work on a second book, Sensibilities of Belonging: The Transregional Persianate between Iran and India, which outlines how a shared sense of aesthetic and ethical form (as culture) was socially enacted in the transregional circulation of people, texts, and ideas between Iran and India.

Date: Wednesday, Dec 4th
Time: 6:30-8:30pm
Location: 4 Washington Square North, 2nd floor

RSVP here: https://forms.gle/KYzneKfxRu1TKYNE8
_{*Since space is limited, it is essential to RSVP. If for any reason you have rsvp’d and cannot attend, please use the RSVP form to let us know.} 

URDS summer in London!

Seminar on Ancient Art and Archeology at the IFA

Thursday, November 14, 2019, 6:30pm
Series: Seminar on Ancient Art and Archeology
Title: Late Roman Lead Caskets from Lincoln
Speaker: Paul Stephenson, University of London

Lead was ubiquitous in the Roman world, employed in quantities unknown before, and it remained in heavy use through the late Roman period. The environmental record is clear that by around CE 400 an age of mining and smelting, of industry and pollution, of long-distance shipping and large-scale building of infrastructure, had ended. This age, the Roman age, has left signals across northern Europe and the northern Atlantic world, including in Ireland, Sweden, Iceland, and Greenland, as well as in peat bogs and lake beds, salt marshes and glaciers closer to centres of Roman metal production, notably Spain, the Balkans, and Britain. As the production and exportation of lead declined in fourth-century Britain, where lead sulphide ores and mines were peculiarly abundant, lead and put to many uses, in the manufacture of brine pans and sieves, more decorated lead coffins even than those known from the Levant, in circular tanks often interpreted as fonts, and in a group of rectangular caskets discovered across the East Midlands of England, focussed on the Roman city of Lincoln.

Paul Stephenson is currently Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he is exploring early Byzantine culture through human responses to and interactions with things fashioned from natural materials, elements and alloys: lead and silver, copper and bronze, wood, soil, sand and clay, stone, water and air, flesh and bone. He is author or editor of nine books, most recently The Serpent Column: a cultural biography (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Fountains and Water Culture in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2016), edited with Brooke Shilling. He has held chairs at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Durham University (UK), and Radboud Univerity Nijmegen (Netherlands). His research has been supported by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, the Onassis Foundation, The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the British Academy, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Met.

Silsila fall 2019 Lecture Series, Bonded “RELIGIOUS ARTIFACTS AND SLAVES IN THE EARLY MODERN MEDITERRANEAN” Daniel Hershenzon, University of Connecticut

The El niño Jesús de Meknes

Religious artifacts—Korans, Bibles, crosses, pictures of Christ and the Virgin, and relics—circulated in the thousands in the early modern western Mediterranean, crossing boundaries between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. This mobility was largely a byproduct of piracy, which between 1500 and 1800 was the fate of two to three million persons and intertwined Spain, Morocco, and Ottoman Algiers. This project argues that disparate religious artifacts trapped by the plunder economy acquired a common identity as contentious objects. As religious communities articulated conflicting claims over them in learned discourses and in practice, they became religious boundary markers, defining group membership and determining how these groups interacted with one another.

Daniel Hershenzon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at the University of Connecticut. His book, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Commerce, and Communication in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), explores the 17th century entangled histories of Spain, Morocco and Ottoman Algiers, arguing that captivity and ransom of Christians and Muslims shaped the Mediterranean as a socially, politically, and economically integrated region. Hershenzon has published articles in Past and Present, the Journal of Early Modern History, African Economic History, History Compass, Philological Encounters, and in edited volumes.

Date: Wednesday, Nov 13th
Time: 6:30-8:30pm
Location: 4 Washington Square North, 2nd floor

RSVP here: https://forms.gle/MtUkanocfZoo7L2y8

_{*Since space is limited, it is essential to RSVP. If for any reason you have rsvp’d and cannot attend, please use the RSVP form to let us know.} 

Two new publications from Barry Flood!

Jon Ritter to Speak at Richmond County Courthouse Centennial: Its History, Cases, and Place in the Civic Life of Staten Island

https://history.nycourts.gov/events/richmond-county-courthouse-centennial-its-history-cases-and-place-in-the-civic-life-of-staten-island/

Richmond County Courthouse at 18 Richmond Terrace, January 26, 1938. Courtesy NYC Municipal Archives.

November 15 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm EST

 The Society Joins Richmond County Centennial Celebrations!

Richmond County Surrogate’s Court — 18 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island

As part of the Richmond County Courthouse Centennial celebrations, the Historical Society of the New York Courts will present a program with speaker presentations examining the history of this majestic building and the importance of courthouse architecture in the civic life of New York past and present. The second part of the program will be a panel of judges and lawyers looking back at notable cases litigated in its courtroom.

Free Admission — Limited Seating Available

Light Refreshments to be Provided

Free NY CLE Credits Pending
Application for New York accreditation of this program is currently pending before the Richmond County Bar Association.

Sponsored by Richmond County Bar Association

Program

Introduction
John Peter Sipp, Esq., Chair of the Surrogate’s Court Committee, Richmond County Bar Association

Welcome

Stephen P. Younger, Esq., Chair of the Board of Trustees, Historical Society of the NY Courts and Partner, Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP

Historical Presentations
Robert Pigott, Esq., Vice President & General Counsel, Phipps Houses
Jon Ritter, Clinical Associate Professor, New York University

Panel Discussion
Moderated by John Peter Sipp, Esq.
Hon. Stephen J. Fiala, Richmond County Clerk
Hon. Desmond A. Green, Administrative Judge, Supreme Court, Richmond County
Hon. Daniel Leddy, Former Judge, Family Court, Richmond County and Resident Historian
Hon. Matthew J. Titone, Surrogate, Surrogate’s Court, Richmond County

Registration Opens Soon!