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Home > News & Events > Newsletters > Newsletter 2009 Vol. 10, n. 1 - February 2009 |
Matthew Baigell won a Liguria Study Center Grant to work in Bogliasco, Italy in October and November 2008. He has several new publications, including "The Landscapes," in Murray Zimiles: Recent Drawings and Paintings (Kent, Connecticut: Morrison Gallery, 2008), "Boris Sveshnikov," in Norton Dodge and Jane Sharp, eds., Painting for the Grave: The Early Works of Boris Sveshnikov (Zimmerli Art Museum, 2008), "Shifting the Center of Gravity of Jewish American Art," in The L.A. Story, (New York: Hebrew Union College, 2008), and the forthcoming Sweat Shop Scenes: History and Memory. Dr. Baigell gave talks on various Jewish subjects at Wayne State University, Michigan State University, and the University of Wisconsin in spring 2008. Other talks include "The Lower East Side," at Columbus at the Georgia Museum (March 2008), "Biblical Cycles by Jewish American Artists" at the Bar Ilan University Art History Symposium, Ramat Gan, Israel (June 2008), "Sweat Shops and Street Scenes: The Lower East Side" at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (Sept. 2008), and "George Segal's Biblical Imagery" at Montclair State University Museum’s Segal Symposium (Sept. 2008).
Tatiana Flores presented a lecture on women artists in post-revolutionary Mexico in conjunction with the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in February. She curated the exhibition “More Is More: Maximalist Painting” at the Byblos Art Gallery in Verona, Italy, which ran from May to August. Over the summer, she spent time in Caracas and Mexico City doing research. She was awarded the Grant Proposal Development Award by the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers. She contributed the article “Culture and Democracy in Post-Revolutionary Mexico and Bolivarian Venezuela” to the exhibition catalogue Carlos Motta: The Good Life, published by Art in General. Professor Flores has three forthcoming articles this fall: “Strategic Modernists: Women Artists in Post-Revolutionary Mexico” in Woman's Art Journal, “Culture in Caracas: The New Institutions of Bolivarian Venezuela” in ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, and “The Historical (Self) Consciousness of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer” in Art Nexus.
Angela Howard spent one week in July at the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin, studying the Buddhist murals from Kucha, Xinjiang as part of her ongoing research on Central Asian monastic communities. She presented the paper “Shandong Art and the Southern Style” at the international conference Chinese Buddhist Art, New Directions and Perspectives organized by the University of Sidney and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, August 29-30, 2008. She is the recipient of an ACLS fellowship to research the project “Beyond Chan Buddhism: A New Pantheon of Song Dynasty in Laitan, Sichuan.” She will spend fall 2009 in China. Her 2008 scholarly contributions include “Pluralism of Styles in Sixth-Century China, A Reaffirmation of Indian Models” Ars Orientalis vol. 35 (2008): 1-28; “The Role of Meditation Among the Monastic Communities of Kucha” The Arts of Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent, Anupa Pande editor, (New Delhi: National Museum Institute, 2008): 182-89; “Miracles and Visions Among the Monastic Communities of Kucha, Xinjiang,” Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology, vol. 2 (2007): 81-87. Dr. Howard wrote also two solicited reviews of important studies: Amy McNair, Donors of Longmen: Faith, Politics, and Patronage in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Sculpture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), CAA. reviews (April 2008), 5 pages, and Eugene Y. Wang, Shaping the Lotus Sutra, Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2005), History of Religions (May 2008): 333-336. To top such a busy schedule, Dr. Howard chaired the panel “Taste, Symbolism, and Cultural Context in Korean Art,” MAR/AAS Annual Conference, Rutgers University, October 2008.
After completing his dissertation and getting his degree in May 2008 Tarek Kahlaoui worked most of the summer in editing the second volume of Jerba Studies (to be published in the series of the Journal of Roman Archeology). Dr. Kahlaoui’s article "Towards reconstructing the Muqaddimah following Ibn Khaldun's reading of the Idrisian text and maps," which is taken partly from one of his dissertation chapters was published in September in The Journal of North African Studies (special issue on Ibn Khaldun, vol. 13, no. 3, 2008: pp. 293-307). In addition to teaching, he is a fellow in 2008-2009 in Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (RCHA). His paper on vernacular Islamic geographic and cartographic knowledge was presented and discussed in RCHA's series of seminars on "Vernacular Epistemologies" on December 2, 2008.
In the May and June of 2008, Professor John F. Kenfield directed the Ancient-Medieval portion of the Department of Art History’s Summer Study Abroad Program in Rome. Here is his view of the Piazza Navona taken from the terrace of his apartment. Following the “hand-off” of the direction of that program to Professor Marder, Professor Kenfield traveled first to Campania to study excavated Roman villas in that region outside Pompeii and Herculaneum, and finally drove to Castelseprio, to the northwest of Milano and just south of the Swiss border, to study at first hand the Byzantine frescoes in Santa Maria di Castelseprio. Professor Kenfield broke up that long drive with fruitful stops for study in Terracina in Lazio and Pistoia in Tuscany.
Joan Marter continues as editor of Woman’s Art Journal, which now has more than 1000 subscribers in 6 countries. The fall/winter issue of WAJ includes a cover article on Alice Aycock’s public sculpture, five articles, and a dozen reviews of feminist publications. Marter is also Editor in Chief of The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, which will be published in five volumes by Oxford University Press. During her sabbatical, Professor Marter has been commissioning new articles from scholars of African-American art, Asian-American art, and contemporary art. Marter’s recent publications include “Critical Writings on Feminist Topics,” in Blaze, Discourse on Art, Women and Feminism (Cambridge, 2008) and “Pop Art and After,” an introductory essay for Pop Art and After, Prints and Popular Culture (Zimmerli Art Museum, 2008). On campus Professor Marter co-organized the Pop Art exhibition with Marilyn Symmes, curator. Students enrolled in the Certificate Program in Curatorial Studies participated in a seminar on the topic, and wrote entries for the catalogue. Professor Marter was also instrumental in bringing an endowment to the department from Dr. Barbara Mitnick, our alumna. The Sydney Jacobs Lecture in American Art was funded by Dr. Mitnick as an annual event for the art history program. In February, 2008, the first Jacobs lecture featured Thomas Crow. Professor Marter presented a lecture “David Smith and Dorothy Dehner: Challenges of an Artistic Relationship,” at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is working on plans for an exhibition at the museum. At the annual conference of the College Art Association in February, 2009, Professor Marter is co-chairing a session, “Kitsch in the 1960s, Modernism’s Subversive Other.”
In 2008 Sarah Blake McHam finished the manuscript of her
book Pliny
and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance: The Legacy of the Natural
History and published the following articles and essays: “Tomba
come testamento: Il monumento funerario di Andrea Bregno,” Andrea
Bregno: Il senso della forma, ed. Claudio Strinati and Claudio
Crescentini, Rome: Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, 2008; “Reflections
of Pliny in Giovanni Bellini’s Woman with a Mirror,” Artibus
et Historiae, 58 (Winter 2008), “Oedipal Palimpsest,” Source. Notes
in the History of Art, 27, no. 4 (Summer 2008.
She gave the keynote addresses at the SECAC Conference in Kansas City in April (on Renaissance signature practices derived from Pliny) and at the Sixth Quadrennial Italian Renaissance Sculpture Conference in Memphis in October (on the reasons underlying the transfer of Donatello's Judith to the Palazzo della Signoria in 1495).
She presented papers on Judith at a conference on that theme at the New York Public Library in April (for which she also served on the advisory committee); on Pliny (“The Armchair Traveler’s Guide to the Ancient World: Renaissance Readers and Pliny’s Natural History,” as an invited speaker at a conference on “Travel, Trade, and Translation in Early Modern Europe,” at Wesleyan University, October 2008, and on the Cosimo I monument in relation to the urban design of the Piazza della Signoria, at the Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florence in November (for which she served on the planning committee). She published a review of Doris Carl's monograph on Benedetto da Maiano in CAA Reviews, and organized six sessions on Renaissance Rulers for the Renaissance Society's annual meetings in March.
In 2008 Benjamin Paul settled-in at Rutgers, where he enjoys it very much. Teaching was his main focus last year and it taught him just as much as his students. In addition, he managed to get some of his own work done. He gave talks in Chicago at the annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America; in Venice at the seminar on Tintoretto organized jointly by the Istituto Veneto and the Ècole du Louvre; and in Madrid at a conference on royal tombs. He also published an article in Venezia Cinquecento on the Venetian convent SS. Cosma e Damiano and a lengthy review on the 2006-2007 Tintoretto-exhibition at the Prado in Renaissance Studies. In addition, a couple of shorter reviews appeared in Springerin, Sehepunkte, and Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven.
Catherine Puglisi became chair of the Art History department in July 2008. She is co-curator of the exhibition, “Venetian Passion: Renaissance and Baroque Images of the Man of Sorrows,” (MoBia, Museum of Biblical Art, NY, 2011), and is currently preparing loan requests from Venetian and American institutions with the support of a Kress Planning Grant. Related to her research on the Venetian Man of Sorrows, her paper, “Fifteenth-Century Sacrament Tabernacles on Veneto Back Roads,” was delivered in May 2008 at the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI. She continues to conduct research and lecture on Caravaggio, as most recently in October 2008 on the occasion of the symposium, “Caravaggio and the Knights of Malta: a 400-Year Perspective,” in Washington, DC, where she presented, “Maltese Export/Florentine Import: Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid.” Her paper, “Caravaggio’s Soliloquies and narrative Modes in Early Baroque Rome,” will be delivered in the series of linked panels on Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions” at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Los Angeles in March 2009. She has recently joined the editorial advisory board of Studies in Iconography.
Associate Professor Jane Sharp spent a very busy spring 2008 semester as Undergraduate Director implementing a number of new SAS initiatives, as well as ushering in a new undergraduate symposium shared with Princeton University's art history department. Four students gave lectures in April at Princeton: Rachel Newman, Sarah Dziamba, Jana Gajdosova, and Grace Paik. Dr. Sharp is also active in the University Senate as a representative for the Graduate School. At the same time (spring 2008), her exhibition co-curated with Norton Dodge opened at the Zimmerli Art Museum: "Painting for the Grave: The Early Work of Boris Sveshnikov", with an accompanying catalogue. Other publications in preparation for several years finally appeared in print; they include an essay entitled "The Personal and Public Spaces of Dvizhenie (the Movement Group)" for the exhibition catalogue, Cold War Modern (London: The Victoria and Albert Museum, 2008), and a book chapter in Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008). In production is the Zimmerli Art Journal, which Dr. Sharp has edited this year. Although Dr. Sharp's book on Natalia Goncharova (Cambridge University Press, 2006) would appear to have laid certain questions to rest, she frequently has been asked to lecture on various aspects of the artist's oeuvre, especially on questions of orientalism and Goncharova's post-emigration work for Sergei Diagiliev's Ballets Russes. Challenging lecture venues this past year were Columbia University (New York), Tsukuba University (Tokyo, Japan), Amherst College (Amherst, Mass.). Dr. Sharp has also continued her research on recent art in Central Asia and the Caucasus by giving a paper at the International Congress of Art Historians in Melbourne, Australia (January 2008). Current projects include exhibition catalogue essays for the CoBrA Museum, Amsterdam (on contemporary art produced by the Georgian diaspora), and for a traveling installation/exhibition by Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina. She is currently working with Rutgers art history graduate students in this year's exhibition seminar on "Parallel Play: Moscow Conceptualism, 1970-1990" scheduled to open in September 2009 at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum.
Since Tanya Sheehan joined the faculty in January 2008, she has been busy getting acquainted with her new home at Rutgers. In February she collaborated with the folks at the Center for Race and Ethnicity when she was invited to speak in a public roundtable on the topic of “Race and Photography.” She has also been working closely with colleagues at the Center for Cultural Analysis, first by co-founding (with Andres Zervigon) a CCA working group devoted to the critical study and practice of photography, and second by participating as a faculty fellow in the 2008-2009 CCA seminar, “New Media Literacies.” In the latter she has been writing an essay on the cultural work of medical metaphors and models in digital photographic discourse, which will serve as the epilogue to her forthcoming book Doctor Photo: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (under contract with Penn State University Press). While completing this project, Dr. Sheehan has been conducting research for a second book on the subject of race and early photographic humor in American culture. She presented some of this material at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting in October 2008 and again in November at the Annual Faculty Symposium organized by graduate students in the department; the title of her paper was “‘Oh! Dat Water Melon’: Racist Caricature and the Origins of the Photographic Smile.”
Susan Sidlauskas took over as graduate director in July, and is grateful to Professor Joan Marter who will cover for her during the spring semester while she teaches in the Rutgers/Utrecht exchange program in Holland. Susan and her husband, Ken Safir of the Linguistics Department at Rutgers, will be teaching in their respective departments at the University of Utrecht and living in Amsterdam with their younger daughter, Miranda, until July (their older daughter Emma is a freshman at RISD). In addition to teaching, Susan will travel regularly to London to continue work on her photography project—the “before and after” paradigm in 19th and early 20th century medical photography and on her projected book about John Singer Sargent’s peculiarly modern representation of disintegrating class structures. Cézanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense is finally at the designer’s and will be published in the summer of 2009. Susan is very grateful for the research and organizational help of Olivia Gruber Florek in the final stages. One of last summer’s highlights was the teaching of the Paris program with Professor Laura Weigert and Florence Quideau, both of whom will be teaching the program next summer. We took nineteen students from a variety of schools all over Paris and its environs, from trips to Versailles, Chantilly, and Corbusier’s Villa Savoye to the new Musée du Quai Branly and the eccentric but fascinating Musée de la Chasse in Paris. Last October, Susan presented the early stages of the photography project at a conference on “Modernity and Madness,” at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, and also at Yale University, as a speaker at their 19th Century Studies Colloquium. She also gave a paper, “John Singer’s Sargent’s Figure and Ground,” at the College Art Association’s annual meeting in Dallas. In April, she was the keynote speaker at Arizona State University’s Graduate Symposium in Art History, giving a paper on Cézanne’s resistance to repetition.
Jocelyn Penny Small had a very busy February in which she gave three lectures in Texas: “The Birth of Illusionism”, Father Bader Lecture for the Archaeological Institute of America, San Antonio; “The Art of Etruscan Art”, Cinelli Lecture for the Archaeological Institute of America, Dallas; and “Giving the Etruscans Their Due” for a panel, Cultural Identity and Etruscan Art, organized by P. Gregory Warden, at the College Art Association Meetings. In addition she presented a paper in Rome in September: “Copies and Visual Memory: The Alexander Mosaic” for a panel organized by Carol Mattusch and Kenneth Lapatin, “Art on the Move” for the 17th International Congress of Classical Archaeology (AIAC). Her keynote address, “Visual Copies and Memory,” for the 7th International Conference on Orality and Literacy, University of Auckland, New Zealand appeared in August in the collected papers edited by Anne MacKay. In addition over the summer she did two book reviews and wrote an essay for the catalogue for the forthcoming blockbuster exhibition on Etruscan art to be held at the Meadows Art Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas beginning in January 2009.
Erik Thunø spent 2007-2008 on competitive leave sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and hosted by the University of Marburg in Germany and the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte) in Rome. Apart from continuing his research on the early medieval apse mosaic, Prof. Thunø delivered “The Early Medieval Apse Mosaic. Observations on Liturgy and Reception” at The Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, Germany, the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and the Delaware Valley Medieval Association at Princeton University. He also presented “Church Unity and the Reciprocal Gaze. The Early Medieval Apse Mosaic” at Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte), Rome, Italy, and “Inscriptions on Light and Splendor. From Saint Denis to Rome and Back” at the conference “Inscriptions in Liturgical Spaces,” The Norwegian Institute in Rome, Italy, November 28-30. In April his article: “Looking at Letters. ‘Living Writing’ in S. Sabina in Rome,” appeared in Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 34 (2007): 19-41.
Laura Weigert delivered papers in New York at the conference Seeing the Medieval: Realms of Faith/Visions for Today (“The Medievalist’s Place in a ‘Secular’ Institution”) and in Berlin at the conference Visualität und Theatralität in den Künsten der Frühen Neuzeit (“Medieval Theatricality in Tapestry”). She published an article, “Chambres d’Amour: Courtly Tapestries and the Texturing of Space,” Oxford Art Journal 31.3 (2008). She currently serves on the Pinkney prize committee of the French Historical Society, as Vice President of the Consortium for Teaching the Middle Ages (TEAMS), and as Director of Rutgers summer program in Paris.
Carla Yanni continued to enjoy her administrative role as assistant vice president for undergraduate academic affairs. She teaches one class each semester in art history, which keeps her connected to Rutgers’ most interesting and ambitious undergrads. The students in an SAS honors seminar helped her shape a research project on the historiography of American architecture, and she published a related article on the nineteenth-century critic Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer. On the personal side, Dr. Yanni married her long-time partner, bought a house in Highland Park, and had a baby boy in July. Joseph Angelo William Winfrey (pictured here) enjoys gurgling, sleeping, and sucking.
Joseph Angelo William Winfrey
Andres Zervigon has spent the last academic year bringing his book manuscript
to conclusion and publishing two articles on Weimar-era German visual culture.
His manuscript The Agitated Image: John Heartfield and Political Photomontage
in Germany, 1917-1929 discusses the origin of this photographic practice
in the hands of its most famous practitioner, the artist born Helmut Herzfeld.
Zervigon’s related essay “Postcards to the Front: John Heartfield,
George Grosz, and the Birth of Avant-Garde Photomontage” will appear
next year in Postcards. Ephemeral Histories of Modernity, an anthology of
essays edited by Jordana Mendelson and David Prochaska, and published by
Penn State University Press (2009). His other essay “’A Political
Struwwelpeter?’ John Heartfield’s Early Film Animation and the
Crisis of Photography” will appear in the 107th issue of New German
Critique this coming spring. As an additional tip of the Heartfield hat,
Zervigon will be publishing a review in Germany’s Fotografische
Rundschau of the landmark exhibition Hitler Blind – Stalin Lahm. Marinus – Heartfield.
Politische Fotomontagen der 1930er Jahre now on view at Cologne’s Ludwig
Museum. Zervigon has also found himself a loquacious deliverer of conference
papers. This September he spoke on “Looking Closely at Erna Lendvai-Dircksen’s
Face of the German Race” in the session “Close Looking” at
the Southeastern College Art Conference, New Orleans, LA, September 26, 2008.
His Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung and the Demands of Soviet
Propaganda will
be delivered in the session “Transnational Berlin 1850-1934,” at
the Modernist Studies Association Conference, Nashville, TN, November 16,
2008. His exploration of this pioneering journal The Worker’s Illustrated
Magazine will continue soon thereafter with his talk “Persuading with
the Unseen? Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, Photography, and German Communism’s
Iconophobia,” to be delivered on the panel “Seeing and/or Believing
the Photograph,” the College Art Association Conference, Los Angeles,
CA, February, 2009.
Department of Art History
Voorhees Hall
71 Hamilton Street
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Tel: 732-932-7041
Fax: 732-932-1261
Catherine Puglisi, Chairperson
Erik Thunø , Undergraduate Director
Susan Sidlauskas, Graduate Program Director
Cathy Pizzi, Department Administrator
Geralyn Colvil, Student Coordinator