Presenting Objects in a Domestic or Museum Setting
Architecture and the Interior: Presenting Objects in a Domestic or Museum Setting
An Online Panel Discussion with Barry Bergdoll, Bruce Boucher & Annabelle Selldorf
All registered will receive a link 24 hoursbefore the program. TUESDAY, MAY 2 AT 12:00PM ESTOnline Panel Discussion
Join us for an online panel discussion moderated by Columbia University art historian Barry Bergdoll and featuring Sir John Soane’s Museum Director Bruce Boucher and architect Annabelle Selldorf.
The conversation will focus on the interaction between architecture and the display of objects through a close look at the design of the Soane Museum and how its innovative use of light and space enhances the presentation of Sir John’s very personal collections.
The speakers will compare Soane’s vision for his house museum with his design for the Dulwich Gallery, both of which continue to inspire how we display art, and offer historical context for contemporary examples including renovations of the Frick Collection’s permanent home and its temporary installation in the Marcel Breuer building at 945 Madison.
Barry Bergdoll is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University, where he has been on the faculty since 1985 and the former Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA (2007-14)
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Bruce Boucher is the Deborah Loeb Brice Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum. He studied at Harvard University, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and the Courtauld Institute of Art. He taught for over twenty years at University College London before entering the museum world as curator and head of European Sculpture, Decorative Arts, and Ancient Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (2002-2009). He is currently at work on a book about Sir John Soane as a collector.
Annabelle Selldorf is the Principal of Selldorf Architects, which she founded in 1988. Ms. Selldorf serves as Lead Designer on each of the firm’s projects. Ms. Selldorf is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and serves on the Board of the Architectural League of New York, the World Monuments Fund, the Chinati Foundation, and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. She is also the recipient of the 2016 Medal of Honor from the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter.
A great advantage to working on the Mamluk period is the plethora of surviving sources on the material and social history of Egypt and Syria. Representative of this bounty is the trove of literature available on the reign of Sultan al-Malik al-Manṣūr Sayf al-Dīn Qalāwūn (r. 678 689/1279-1290), the seventh Mamluk ruler, under whom the sultanate was stabilized. He was a prolific builder who ordered the construction or restoration of several buildings throughout the Mamluk realm. However, most are no longer extant, making the massive urban complex that he commissioned in Cairo (684/1285) important to understanding the material culture and built environment of medieval Cairo. There are other factors that make this building worthy of discussion: construction was supervised by Amir ʿAlam al-Dīn Sanjar al-Shujāʿī (d. 693/1294), an ambitious and influential Mansūrī amir, giving us insight into the relationship between a patron and project supervisor; it was built in 14 months on the site of a 10th century Fatimid palace, factors that contributed to the wealth of material reuse incorporated in the building process; and it set a new precedent for later complexes in Cairo.Iman R. Abdulfattah is a PhD Candidate in Islamic Art and Archaeology at the University of Bonn, writing her dissertation on the urban complex commissioned by the Mamluk Sultan al-Manṣūr Qalāwūn (r. 678-689/1279-1290) in Cairo. Her primary areas of research are the material culture and built environment of medieval Egypt and the Mediterranean. She has published and lectured on the art and architecture of the Mamluk and Crusader periods in Egypt and Greater Syria; Norman art and architecture in Sicily; the veneration of relics in Islam; and the network of antiquarians who were active during the first half of the 20th century, looking at their contributions to building important Islamic Art collections in the Middle East, Europe, and the US. She also teaches courses on Islamic art and architecture at NYU’s School of Professional Studies, and works as an expert lecturer on cultural tours to the Middle East.Date: Wednesday, May 3rd Time: 6:30pm-8:30pm Location: Online and In Person Room 222, 20 Cooper Square,NY,10003 This event will be held in person at NYU in room 222, 20 Cooper Square, NY 10003. In accordance with university regulations, visitors must show a valid government-issued photo ID (children under 18 can provide non-government identification).Please use the following link to rsvp as an in-person attendee: https://forms.gle/Q72KgAxs7W5B328Y8This event will also take place as a live Webinar at 6:30pm EDT (New York time). To register as an attendee, please use the following link: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_cMN5VyaxTZCECDWSEcelsQOnly registered attendees will be able to join this event.Silsila: Center for Material Histories is an NYU center dedicated to material histories of the Islamicate world. Each semester we hold a thematic series of lectures and workshops, which are open to the public. Details of the Center can be found at: http://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/research-centers/silsila.html
Developed by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan who teaches the landscape section of the department’s MA program in Historical and Sustainable Architecture in London!
The Morgan Garden reopens on Friday, May 5th! Join us this spring and summer to experience the Morgan Garden! Visitors to the Morgan are able to enjoy the Garden with museum admission every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, through October 29, 2023. The Garden will also remain open during Free Friday Nights from 5–7 pm every Friday evening.
Developed by award-winning landscape designer Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, the Morgan Garden includes periwinkle beds flanking the Library’s loggia and colorful, low-height herbaceous beds. A generous grass lawn sweeps out from the modern pavilion next to the Library, bordering the latter and the Annex. Bluestone pathways are laid in patterns derived from the Library’s Renaissance-inspired floors, and cobbled stonework adds visual and textural interest. The garden also displays several antiquities from the Morgan’s collection that have previously been inaccessible to the public.
Come relax and enjoy one of New York City’s most elegant greenspaces!
Please join us in congratulating Art History major Kouros Sadeghi-Nejad who represented the DAH and did an admirable job. He spoke on the subject of his honors thesis “The Aesthetics of Opacity: Glissantian Poetics in Peter Doig’s ‘No Foreign Lands’ “
Waleed Ziad, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Wednesday, April 26th, 6:30pm EDT
Silsila Spring 2023 Program
Book cover; 5th Century Kidarite medallion, featuring a female deity holding a lotus flower and ear of grain.
In a lush valley within the Sakra peak in Gandhara (northwestern Pakistan, towards the Afghanistan border) is a vast limestone cave temple, part of an ancient Hindu sacred complex. From the 4th to 12th centuries, this cluster of shrines produced hundreds of varieties of their own votive coinage – a unique case in Central and South Asia. These were miniscule copper coins, issued for pilgrims, featuring eclectic and original combinations of Greco-Roman, Iranian, Indic, and Islamic iconography. The book relates the remarkable story of transculturation and artistic innovation during the most neglected yet formative years of the region’s history.
Waleed Ziad is Assistant Professor and Ali Jarrahi Fellow in Persian Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to this, he was an Islamic Law and Civilization Research Fellow at Yale Law School. He completed his PhD in the Department of History at Yale University, where his dissertation won the university-wide Theron Rockwell Field Prize. In the last decade, Ziad has conducted fieldwork on historical and contemporary religious revivalism and Sufism in over 120 towns across Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan. Dr. Ziad has studied Arabic, Persian / Dari / Sabk-e Hindi, Urdu, Sindhi, French, Uzbek / Chaghatai and Romanian. His recent book Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus (Harvard, 2021) won the Albert Hourani Book Award, the most prestigious award in Middle Eastern studies. His books also include In the Treasure Room of the Sakra King: Votive Coinage from Gandharan Shrines (American Numismatic Society, 2022), Sufi Masters of the Afghan Empire: Bibi Sahiba and Her Spiritual Network (Harvard, exp. 2023), and Beyond the Khutba and Sikka: Sovereignty and Coinage in Sindh (in progress). His articles on historical and ideological trends in the Muslim world have appeared in the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Christian Science Monitor, The Hill and major dailies internationally.
Date: Wednesday, April 26th Time: 6:30-8:30pm Location: Online and In Person in Room 22, 20 Cooper Square, NY 10003
This event will be held in person at NYU in room 222, 20 Cooper Square, NY 10003. In accordance with university regulations, visitors must show a valid government-issued photo ID (children under 18 can provide non-government identification). Please use the following link to rsvp as an in-person attendee: https://forms.gle/SF1KWFag2Jufiuj58
This event will also take place as a live Webinar at 6:30pm EDT (New York time). To register as an attendee, please use the following link: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_JX4Gt8bVQ4mNV1KFXl7MNA Only registered attendees will be able to join this event.
Silsila: Center for Material Histories is an NYU center dedicated to material histories of the Islamicate world. Each semester we hold a thematic series of lectures and workshops, which are open to the public. Details of the Center can be found at: http://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/research-centers/silsila.html
Heartfelt thanks to all of our alumni for writing in with so much wonderful news. Many congratulations on all of your achievements, activities, and milestones. We hope that you and your loved ones remain well and safe, and we hope to hear from more of you for our next “Alumni News” round-up, which we’ll post sometime in fall, 2023. Great thanks go to departmental faculty Mosette Broderick, Dennis Geronimus, Carol Krinsky, and Jon Ritter for their contributions to this blogpost; to our Administrative Aide Clara Reed—a Department of Art History alumna and M.A. candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts—for sending out the call; and to our Manager Peggy Coon for assistance putting it together.
Gabriel P. Weisberg (B.A. Art History ‘63; Ph.D. Art History, Johns Hopkins University ‘67), Professor Emeritus University of Minnesota, in addition to teaching in the Art History Department at the University from 1985 until 2017, has organized many art exhibitions in various museums in the United States, in Japan, and in Europe, among them the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the National Gallery in Helsinki, Finland. In France he was co-curator for the exhibition “Théodule Ribot. 1823-1891. Une Délicieuse Obscurité,” seen in three French Museums: Toulouse, Musée des Augustins, Marseille, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen, Musée des Beaux-Arts, in 2021-2022, published by Lienart, ISBN 978-2-35906-353-0; the last exhibition “Léon Bonvin Drawn to the Everyday, 1834-1866.” Catalogue raisonné, Maud Guichené and Gabriel P. Weisberg in Paris at the Fondation Custodia, 2022, ISBN 978-2-9583234-0-0 examined the career and work of the little-known draughtsman and watercolorist whose production is one of the treasures of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
Catherine McNeur (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘03; M.A./M.Phil./Ph.D. History, Yale University ‘12) is publishing her second book, Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science, with Basic Books this fall. The book uncovers the lives, work, and erasure of nineteenth-century Philadelphia entomologist Margaretta Hare Morris and botanist Elizabeth Carrington Morris. Catherine is an Associate Professor of History at Portland State University in Oregon.
Bianca Holtier Coury (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘06) sends this news: “As the Manager of Continuing Education at Procore, Bianca is responsible for driving Procore.org’s on-demand education content strategy in concert with industry advancement and workforce development program pillars. Bianca is dedicated to enhancing the way the construction industry learns and reinvents itself by developing dynamic, engaging content focused on elevating learners to enrich their experiences in optimizing, upskilling and embracing digital tools to equip and empower their daily workflows—all in the spirit of preserving the humanized approach to shape and sustain learning and development. She has more than 15 years’ experience in construction project management roles serving residential and commercial verticals, procurement and urban planning, alongside a strong concentration in technology, business development and sustainable initiatives. Bianca has been featured in several publications and appeared as a guest on several construction podcasts and speaker panels, including ENR BuildTech.
“Bianca is incredibly grateful for the guidance and inspiration from Mosette Broderick, Isabelle Hyman, Jon Ritter and many of the brilliant, creative minds who shared their love of the built environment and imparted their wisdom during her undergraduate years spent in Washington Square Park. With Mosette Broderick’s uplifting energy, extensive knowledge and dedicated leadership, NYU Urban Design in London Summer 2005 holds some of Bianca’s most cherished memories. She currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio with her husband Matt and two children, Maya (5) and Bruno (4). Her heart grows fuller every day when her kiddos express sincere curiosity about art, buildings, cities, construction equipment, traffic patterns and the spaces where people live, work and play.
“To learn more how Procore’s construction technology is improving the lives of everyone in construction, visit www.procore.com. As Procore’s social impact arm, Procore.org is committed to advancing the construction industry through advocacy, education and technology. Discover the multi-faceted programs and partnerships by visiting www.procore.org. For a glimpse into Procore’s continuing education offering, check out www.education.procore.com/page/continuing-education.”
Sara Allain-Botsford (B.A. Art History ’09) is working for the British Museum as an Assistant Collections Manager, Storage and Moves, Large Objects. The project is to pack and move the objects in the museum’s storage facility in West London’s Hammersmith district to their newly built facility, British Museum Archaeological Research Collection (BM ARC), in Reading.
Daye Kim (B.A. Art History/Journalism ‘09) has opened her own art gallery named SALIIM PROJECTS in Newtown Square (PA), located just twenty-five miles west of Philadelphia. The gallery’s inaugural exhibition, which ran from February 20 through April 2, 2023 and which has been extended until April 20, is titled Ora et Labora, and features works by South Korea-born artists, Soukjin Park and Hayeong Kang. Meaning “prayer and labor,” Ora et Labora brings together two women artists and their work created over a period of a decade. Upon embarking on their journey into marriage and motherhood, both artists go on to spend the countless and nameless hours serving their young families at home. In a time that our culture today calls “leave,” the artists encounter exhaustion and fragility, but also find their artistic perspectives purified and their expressions refined. This exhibition celebrates each artist’s distinctive expressive language, attained through years of introspection and artistic endeavor. SALIIM PROJECTS, 3715 West Chester Pike, Newtown Square, PA 19073.
Malcolm St. Clair (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies/Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ‘09) and his wife, Lucy, welcomed two new members to their family, Agnes Gardner St. Clair and Faye Beverly St. Clair, on January 10, 2023. The girls were born at New York Presbyterian’s Alexandra Cohen Hospital and are both doing well. Malcolm also became the Head of History at St. Bernard’s School, where he has been teaching for ten years.
Alex Polson (B.A. Art History ‘10) sends this news: “I’m excited to share that I recently completed the project management for Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection. Thebook features 136 artists whose work is included in the Shah Garg Collection, a private art collection I’ve managed since 2014. It is co-edited by curators Katy Siegel and Mark Godfrey and published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., and it will be widely available on May 2nd. The Collection is helmed by Komal Shah, a philanthropist and collector based in California.”
Carolyn Keogh (B.A. Art History ‘12, M.A. Art History; M.A. CCNY Art History and Art Education ‘19) began work in 2020 as the Director of Education & Public Programs at The Olana Partnership, a non-profit organization whose mission is to inspire the public by preserving and interpreting Frederic Church’s OLANA. Last year, recent progress in diversifying interpretation, broadening accessibility, and expanding the stories told at Olana were highlighted in History News, the American Association of State and Local History’s quarterly publication. Carolyn’s article, “Out of One, Many: Frameworks for Making Diverse and Contemporary Connections at Olana” was published in the fall, 2022 issue, and covers projects and programs that Carolyn has developed to connect diverse audiences to Frederic Church’s artwork and home in Hudson, NY.
Irina Tchania (B.A. Art History ‘12; M.A. Psychology, NYU) will graduate from the CUNY Graduate Center this June, earning a Ph.D. in Psychology.
Kaylee Alexander (B.A. Art History; French/Religious Studies minors ‘13; M.A. History of Art & Architecture, IFA ‘15; Ph.D. Art History, Duke University, ‘21) is currently the Postdoctoral Fellow for the Digital Matters Lab at the University of Utah, supported by an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellowship. Her first monograph, A Data-Driven Analysis of Cemeteries and Social Reform in Paris, 1804–1924, will be published in Routledge’s Research in Art History series this summer. Based on her doctoral dissertation, this book takes a novel, data-driven approach to the cemeteries of Paris, analyzing a largely text-based body of archival material as proxy evidence for visual material that has been lost due to systematic, and legally sanctioned acts of erasure.
Livia S. Huo (B.A. Art History, Business minor ‘14) sends this news: “Besides working as Senior Experience Design Lead at Standard Chartered Bank where I create customer journeys in digital banking for the global market, I am actively engaged in public programs at the Anhui Art Museum as a volunteer. We design programs that leverage multimedia, such as music and holography, to educate the public about western and Chinese artists. I have also completed a certificate degree in Chinese Paintings at the China Academy of Art (Hangzhou) in 2021.” Livia had this to say about how her education in art history benefitted her career: “The process of designing digital journeys, in some ways, is quite similar to curation. My research abilities helped shape my professional skills in ways that I didn’t expect. For me, the ability to find the perfect balance between exquisite details and a consistent outlook extended naturally from research into design.”
Anne LaGatta (B.A. Art History/Classics ‘16), a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Southern California, represented USC at the fifth annual Getty Graduate Symposium, held on February 3rd. The purpose of this symposium is to showcase the work of emerging art history scholars from PhD programs across California. You can watch her talk, entitled “Retrospection and Reanimation in Tiberian Imperian Portrait Statuary (14-37 CE),” along with a Q&A session.
Rex Wei (B.A. Art History ‘16) has begun working toward his Master’s degree in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Rebekah Coffman (M.A. Historical and Sustainable Architecture ‘19) recently began a new position with the Chicago History Museum as their Curator of Religion and Community History. As Rebekah reports, “It’s been a bit of a whirlwind transition between wrapping up my previous position, relocating, and jumping into the role, but I’m really enjoying the position. We have an absolutely incredible collection (including an impressive architecture collection), and the position lets me explore a lot of the themes I started with in my thesis.”
Sabina Vitale (B.A. Art History ‘19) sends this news: “After a wonderful sixteen months, I left my position as Executive Assistant to the Director at the Laguna Art Museum and will begin the Masters in Museum Studies program at the University of San Francisco in the fall of 2023. In the meantime, I am lucky to have the chance to travel. I have been weaving through Mexico for the last month, thoroughly enjoying the art, culture, and landscapes.”
Max Chavez (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies ‘20), the first Director of Research and Special Projects at Preservation Chicago, sends this news: “Every year, my organization announces a list of the seven most endangered sites in this city. This year I successfully advocated for listing the Warehouse, a nightclub in the ‘70s and ‘80s that catered to a queer Black clientele and is commonly cited as the birthplace of house music, created there by DJ Frankie Knuckles.
“The modest building is in a hot real estate area, was recently purchased, and had no historic protections, so I was very concerned. The Warehouse made our list and the public outcry was massive. We created a petition that went absolutely viral, racking up over 13,000 signatures from across the globe in just a few weeks. I was also interviewed for a front page article in the Chicago Tribuneand dozens of other local, national, and international publications. It has truly been a huge, international sensation.
“Incredibly, the City of Chicago reacted almost immediately and worked with me to bring the Warehouse in front of our landmarks commission for consideration as an official landmark. They voted unanimously yesterday to advance the nomination to the next stage, so if all goes well, it should be a landmark by the end of the summer!”
Ella Senglaub (B.A. Art History/Social and Cultural Analysis, Medieval & Renaissance Studies minor ‘20) will present a talk titled “Museums’ Re-defining of the Italian Renaissance’s Eurocentric Narratives: Art and Exchange during the 14th and 15th Century” at the international conference Diachronic Artistic and Spatial Convergences and Divergences in the Mediterranean, to be held at the Acropolis Museum in Athens on April 27th–29th. The covers of full conference programs are included below.
Gabriella (Gabby) Chinea (B.A. Urban Design & Architecture Studies, Spanish minor ‘21) sends this news: “I’m still working as a Project Coordinator at Central Park Conservancy, where we are currently working on constructing a new pool/rink in Harlem and renovating Conservatory Garden and the Chess and Checkers House. I recently earned a position on the board of the Brooklyn Queens Land Trust, which cares for thirty-five community gardens in both boroughs. In my spare time and at work, I’m passionate about architecture photography. I started taking photos for Professor (Jon) Ritter’s class and now it’s my favorite hobby. Here is a link to my architecture instagram”
Emilie Meyer (B.A. Gallatin, with a concentration in Art History ‘22) started working part-time as operations manager at Cabinet Magazine, a quarterly art and culture non-profit magazine run out of Brooklyn. Cabinet also publishes books and curates exhibitions. Emilie was an Editor-in-Chief of Ink & Image 14, the most recent number of the Department of Art History’s journal of undergraduate research in art history and urban design and architecture studies.
This year’s New York Workshop of Etruscan and Italic Art will center on the extraordinary discovery in 2022 of votive offerings from a healing sanctuary at the site of San Casciano dei Bagni, Italy. On Thursday, May 4, Jacopo Tabolli, director of excavations, will give a keynote lecture open to the public. On Friday, specialists will gather in the morning for a roundtable discussion on healing, the body and votive offerings; in the afternoon, we will have talks on Etruscan mirrors, gems, and sarcophagi. On Saturday morning, we will hold a celebration of the life and work of Larissa Bonfante, an inspiration and model for Etruscologists in the United States and in New York especially, where she received her PhD from Columbia and became an esteemed faculty member in the Department of Classics at NYU.
Please note space is limited for in-person events and reserved on a first-come, first-served basis.Thursday, May 4 King Juan Carlos I Center, New York University, 53 Washington Square South, Lecture Hall
6:00 pm: Keynote Gods from the Mud: The Discovery of Etruscan and Roman Bronze Statues at San Casciano dei Bagni (Italy) Jacopo Tabolli (Università per Stranieri di Siena)
In the summer of 2022, a team of archaeologists led by Jacopo Tabolli, uncovered dozens of bronze sculptures in a spectacular deposit at a healing cult in the hill town of San Casciano dei Bagni, just north of Orvieto, Italy. The discovery has been hailed as perhaps the most important archaeological find in Italy in a generation, even as important as the Riace Bronzes in southern Italy. This keynote lecture is the first presentation of the finds outside of Italy. Tabolli will speak about his team’s excavation of the site over the past several years, the discovery of the architecture of an Etruscan and Roman healing cult, and the remarkable uncovering of impressive and meaningful sculptures in bronze.
7:15 pm: ReceptionRSVP Friday, May 5 Columbia University, Schermerhorn Hall, Room 807
9:00-9:30 am: Coffee and Check-in
9:30-11:30 am: Roundtable
The Thermo-Mineral Sanctuary of Bagno Grande between the Etruscans and the Romans: Water before Context – Context before Artifacts. Jacopo Tabolli (Università per Stranieri di Siena)
Reflections: Claire Bubb (New York University/ISAW), Mary-Evelyn Farrior (Columbia University), Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Princeton University), Jean McIntosh Turfa (University of Pennsylvania), Ittai Weinryb (Bard Graduate Center)
11:30 am-12:00 pm: Coffee Break
12:00-1:00 pm: Open Discussion
1:00-2:00 pm: Lunch
2:00-5:30 pm: Panel on Mirrors, Gems and Sarcophagi
Self-Representation on Etruscan Gems? Nancy Th. De Grummond (Florida State University)
(3:00-3:30 pm: Coffee Break)
Mirrors and Monumentality: The Etruscans’ Grandiose Tang Mirrors in Context Alexandra A. Carpino (Northern Arizona University)
The Tetnies Sarcophagi from Vulci and the Etruscan Collection at MFA, Boston Phoebe Segal (MFA Boston) RSVP FOR FULL FRIDAY SCHEDULE Saturday, May 6 Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1 E. 78th Street
10:00-10:30 am: Welcome
10:30 am-12:00 pm: Celebration of the Life and Work of Larissa Bonfante
Formal Remarks: Michael Peachin, Francesco de Angelis, Nancy Th. De Grummond, Blair Fowlkes-Childs, Sophie Crawford-Brown
12:00-1:00 pm: ReceptionRSVPThis event is sponsored by the NYU Center for Ancient Studies, NYU Institute of Fine Arts, and Columbia University. With special thanks to the NYU Department of Classics and the NYU Department of Art History for their support.
Fields of Vision 