Dennis Geronimus Talks to CNN

At this time, American travelers can’t go to Italy and cities such as Rome (above), at least not for pure leisure travel.
ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP via Getty Images

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/us-citizens-international-travel-problems-covid-19/index.html

News from DAH Adjunct Leila Amineddoleh

Professor Amineddoleh’s  law firm represented Greece in a litigation against Sotheby’s. They received the court’s ruling last week, and they won!

https://www.artandiplawfirm.com/litigation-update-amineddoleh-associates-secures-second-circuit-win-for-the-greek-ministry-of-culture-in-a-landmark-cultural-heritage-case/

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/barnet-case-sothebys-1883349

Department of Art History faculty honors and awards, AY 2019-20

Congratulations to these members of the Department of Art History faculty on the fellowships, honors, and awards they earned this academic year:

Professor John Hopkins has been elected as a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study for 2020-2021.  He will spend the year in residence working on his current book project, The Urban Assemblage of Early Rome (for more information, see our March 6, 2020 blogpost.

 Professor Pepe Karmel has been appointed Distinguished Scholar at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art for the term January-August 2021. Professor Karmel will be researching the continuing interactions among the “essential” Cubists (Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Juan Gris) during the years 1915-1930.  He will also serve as an advisor to the younger scholars with 2020-21 Fellowships at the Lauder Center (for more information see our June 10, 2020 blogpost .

Professor Meredith Martin has been awarded a Spring 2021 fellowship at NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts to support her project, “Reviving the Ballet des Porcelaines.” Professor Martin plans to research, write about, and organize a restaging of the “Ballet des Porcelaines,” a little-known ballet pantomime from 1739 featuring dancers who transform into porcelain vases and a prince who searches for his lost love on an island ruled by an evil magician. In its own time, the ballet exemplified a European fascination with Asia and an interchangeability between persons and things. Performed today, it will hopefully bring alive the magic and mystery of eighteenth-century porcelain for contemporary audiences, particularly when placed in dialogue with porcelain displays in museum settings. The fellowship is also related to a course that Professor Martin will teach at the Institute of Fine Arts in Spring 2021 called “Visual and Performing Arts in 18th C. France.” This graduate course will be open to qualified undergraduates as well.

Professor Louise Rice has been awarded a Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College for the coming academic year.  She will devote her time there to her ongoing book project on Roman baroque thesis prints.

Professor Kathryn A. Smith was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society earlier this year (see our March 2, 2020 blogpost. She was awarded an American Philosophical Society Franklin Research Grant to support the research on her current book project, Scripture Transformed in Late Medieval England: The Religious, Artistic, and Social Worlds of the Welles-Ros Bible.

 

Pepe Karmel to be Distinguished Scholar at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art for the term January-August 2021

Professor Karmel will be researching the continuing interactions among the “essential” Cubists (Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Juan Gris) during the years 1915-1930.  He will also serve as an advisor to the younger scholars with 2020-21 Fellowships at the Lauder Center.

Message from the Chair

To our Department of Art History-URDS community,

 

Our program was founded on a belief in the transformative power of art, but it is made up of people. We are witnessing some of the darkest and most difficult days for our nation, one riven with division — and we cannot claim neutrality. We mourn and grieve with you. We are with you in sharing the heartbreak and outrage at the senseless loss of Black American lives, including those of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and so many other victims of apalling brutality, each precious life senselessly taken. Despite whatever gains have been made in the last several decades, there have been too many symbolic victories. The terrible truths of which we are being starkly reminded have plagued our society for centuries in many forms.

 

We have been forced to confront these truths while grappling with a global pandemic — that in turn has laid bare shocking anti-Asian and anti-immigrant violence — and while caring for our loved ones, tending to our communities, and continuing to work, persevering as best we can as we continue to witness intolerable abuses. And that which we have witnessed we cannot unsee. 

 

Our own Department and University at large cannot divorce itself from the struggle. We stand in solidarity with the Black community and all the people of New York and those around the country and the world appealing for an end to racism, inequality, brutality, and fear. We do so in recognition of the great amount of work to be done to achieve true social justice and to fight institutional and structural racism. In our own right, the DAH-URDS is committed to be a place of inclusion, diversity, and equality for everyone in our community. This is a time to raise our voices in a loud cry for social justice and to be accountable for our shared humanity. It is also the time to listen and learn. To this end, we look forward to hosting forums as early as this fall to bring together diverse voices in the spirit of community. 

 

We draw inspiration from the power of human expression and the courage, openness, and commitment of those who continue to advocate for progress through word and action. And we draw inspiration from all of you, our students past and present, in harboring the hope for a more just and equitable future.

 

In solidarity and support,

 

Dennis Geronimus

Chair, Department of Art History

Landscapes of Construction and Extinction: Art and Ecology in the Americas Speaker: Professor Edward J. Sullivan Tuesday, June 9, 2020

At The Institute of Fine Arts

https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/

LIVESTREAM at 6:00 PM EST

 

 

 

Please note this is a livestreamed event. You will receive a zoom link in your email upon your registration. 

Join Edward J. Sullivan, the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History, for an illustrated conversation exploring the concept of “landscape” and representations of nature from a preservationist point of view. It starts with comments on the pivotal role of Prussian naturalist and essayist Alexander von Humboldt who spent the years 1799 to 1804 traveling throughout South and North America. His scientific and artistic concerns regarding disappearing nature inspired future artists and naturalists to formulate their own strategies of representing “wild” and “tamed” landscapes (to use archaic terms popular in the 19th century) as reflective of shifts in society’s priorities regarding open spaces and the “progress of “civilization.”

Major figures of the Hudson River School such as Frederic Edwin Church and Martin Johnson Heade will be discussed. Latin American artists such as Mexico’s José María Velasco also played key roles in depicting the newly transformed landscapes of their nations as they approached modernity. The lecture then shifts to the mid-20th century and considers the contribution of Roberto Burle Marx, the extraordinary Brazilian garden architect, painter, environmental activist and political agitator for stricter regulations to combat incipient climate change and the destruction of the country’s forests in the Amazon region and the State of Minas Gerais. Parallels will be drawn with today’s calamitous situation in a trans-continental context.

Edward J. Sullivan is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts and the (CAS) Department of Art History. He has been awarded the “Great Teacher” citation from CAS and in 2019 was honored with the “Outstanding Teacher of Art History” award from the College Art Association. Professor Sullivan is currently Deputy Director of the Institute of Fine Arts and Provostial Fellow. He has had a decades-long career at NYU and in addition he has taught at such institutions as Trinity College, Dublin, Williams College and the University of Miami. He is author of some thirty books and exhibition catalogues. His most recent publications include The Language of Objects in the Art of the Americas (Yale University Press, 2007); From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of impressionism (Yale, 2014) and, Making the Americas Modern: Hemispheric Art 1910-1960 (Lawrence King Ltd. London, 2018)

RSVP

Image credit: Frederic Edwin Church, The Heart of the Andes, 1859, oil on canvas, 66.1 in × 119.3 in, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art