Vol. 8, n. 1 - February 2007
Notes from the Chair
Faculty News
Graduate Student News
Visual Resources News
Historic Preservation
Alumni News
Student Awards
Snapshots from Rome and Paris
In the Summer of 2006, the Department launched a new Study Abroad Program in Rome, with twenty students accompanied by Professors Tod Marder and Erik Thunø. The students from all disciplines arrived in the Eternal City on July 1st and were lodged for five weeks in one of the most spectacular spots of the city: Piazza Navona. Awaiting them were five weeks of on-site teaching with Rome itself as the classroom for the study of art and architecture, from the ruins of antiquity to the medieval basilicas with their splendid mosaics to the papal monuments of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. We even touched on the creations of Fascist period architecture, as well as the most recent contributions to 
the city, like Richard Meier’s Ara Pacis building, which was not quite complete when we toured it. The 6 credit 300-level course was divided into two equal parts. The first, taught by Thunø, covered ancient and medieval Rome; and the second, led by Marder, dealt with the Renaissance through the modern periods. The course also included day trips outside of Rome to Ostia antica (the ancient port of Rome), Subiaco and its medieval monastery, the ancient villa of Hadrian and the Renaissance gardens of Villa D’Este in Tivoli, as well as the spectacular ancient sanctuary at Terracina and its medieval town center. On these trips we ate locally and occasionally found a convenient beach or pool to refresh ourselves in the heat.
Standing in front of the art and architecture of Rome, either on site or in the museum is, of course, a completely different experience than sitting in a classroom viewing slides thousands of miles from the objects. In front of the monuments the images become real and the threads of their artistic and historical context become palpable. Connections between monuments take on new meaning. And the Italian cultural context enriches the experience at every turn. We felt fortunate to have Piazza Navona, in the heart of the old city, as a base of operations surrounded as it is by historic palaces and churches, small shops and restaurants, bars and outdoor markets – in short the Rome rarely experienced by
tourists housed on the periphery or isolated by hotels with ultra modern comforts. It was a summer also punctuated by Italy’s victory at the world cup, a victory shared by our students with the hoards of “tifosi” (fans) gathered on the slopes of the ancient Circus Maximus. Both group leaders agreed that the students were an extraordinary group. They came from all sort of majors with various levels of experience in art history (from none to a good deal). And all were committed to staying together, making the most of the opportunities the trip afforded, and maximizing the chance to share their ideas and their friendship with one another. It was a brilliant example of the Rutgers spirit of openness, accommodation, and cooperation that contributes so profoundly to the learning experience, whether at home or abroad. Perhaps the best testimony of success is the enthusiasm of the students, from one of whom we quote verbatim:
" You cannot beat studying art history in Rome.First of all, there are endless great works of art and monumental buildings that we experienced just walking around the city.Second, we had the whole city to explore outside of class as well and found out what it was like to take part in Italian culture.It was interesting investigating how Rome evolved, as we walked around the Forum and other ruins, like Ostia Antica and Hadrian’s Villa.Witnessing the Sistine Chapel and a special tour through the Vatican Museum was amazing, but one of my favorite sites was the Villa Farnesina and especially Raphael’s Galatea.Another highlight was the Villa Borghese and getting to see the work of Caravaggio, both here and in the Cerasi Chapel.When we had a break from class, I really enjoyed dining at some of Rome’s great restaurants and then, of course, deciding from the endless flavors what type of gelato to get.We were lucky enough to witness the excitement of the World Cup and a Billy Joel concert.Even just the place we were living was amazing, walking out onto the bell tower balcony, looking down on the Four Rivers Fountain of Piazza Navona.Overall, it was such a wonderful experience getting to know new people and seeing all the sites Rome has to offer."
more photos of Study Abroad in Rome and Paris
Notes from the Acting Chair
During the spring of 2006, the Art History Department made two new, exciting hires: Laura Weigert, a Northwestern University Ph.D. and Northern Renaissance specialist who is coming to us after teaching several years at Reed College in Oregon, and Benjamin Paul, a recent Ph.D. from Harvard, who will enhance our already significant concentration in Italian Renaissance and Baroque studies. Laura, who was offered tenure by Rutgers on the strength of her scholarship and teaching, is a specialist in French tapestry, and is involved in the upcoming exhibition of tapestry masterpieces opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This year, she is officially on leave, supported by a fellowship from the American Philosophical Society. She will begin her teaching here at Rutgers in the fall of 2007. Benjamin Paul, who will join the faculty in the fall of 2007, is a specialist in Venetian Renaissance painting, and also has a strong interest in contemporary art, particularly in photography. This spring, he is a fellow in Rome at the German Historical Institute. We look forward to a very lively assembly at our department's "annex" at 60 College Avenue.
We are pleased (and relieved--during this current budget crisis) to be searching for a specialist in the "Art of the Americas" this year, an acknowledgement that the boundaries of American art have expanded and become more fluid. The search committee, chaired by Professor Joan Marter, will be interviewing at this year's annual College Art Meeting in New York. It’s time to resume the tradition of American art at Rutgers, which was exemplified by Professor Emeritus Matthew Baigell.
The debut of our summer program in Rome, directed by Tod Marder and Erik Thuno, was a resounding success, and will continue this year. See their comments on the program in this newsletter, as well as the accompanying photographs and quotes from students who spent an enjoyable and stimulating six weeks in Rome. Our summer program in Paris, directed for many years by Seth Gopin, enjoyed its largest enrollment ever, and gave students insights into the inner workings of the Louvre, as well as to the complexities of the urban history of Paris. We want to express our gratitude to Seth, who will be teaching his last summer there this year, having recently retired from Rutgers.
The University will be launching an ambitious capital campaign in the next year, and with the help of Sarah Brett-Smith, Erik Thuno and Angela Howard, our department submitted proposals for funding a "cluster hire" in Asian art (in which several faculty with related specializations are hired); a program in Islamic art and culture (for both faculty and post-doctoral fellows), and a study abroad center in Istanbul. We are also part of the "digital humanities" proposal submitted by Ann Fabian, our Dean of the Humanities, for the School of Arts and Sciences. Our faculty continued to be actively involved with the broader concerns of the university. Carla Yanni chaired the jury for the architectural competition to re-design the College Avenue campus, which received a great deal of media attention. The commission was ultimately awarded to a team led by Enrique Norten of the architectural firm TEN Architectos, working with Wallace Roberts & Tod. The competition had included the internationally known architectural firms Beyer Blinder Belle Architects of New York, working with Jean Nouvel of Paris; Eisenman Architects of New York; Morphosis of Santa Monica, Ca, , and Antoine Predock of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I was invited by Greg Trevor of media relations here to attend a lunch hosted by President Richard McCormick and Executive Vice-President Philip Furmanski for the editors and education reporters of the Star Ledger. The Star Ledger staff wanted to speak to faculty from a diverse array of departments, to better understand the nature of the work we do--a researchers, advisors and teachers. They were particularly interested in how our department's Visual Resources Collection, under the direction of Donald Beetham, manages to serve the digital needs of not only our own nearly two hundred art history majors, graduate students and faculty, but the entire Rutgers community, which participates in the Luna Insight program for digital imagery.
Jane Sharp, our specialist in Russian and 20th century European art, is spending the spring semester teaching at the University of Utrecht in Holland, the first of our faculty to take advantage of an exchange program--for both faculty and graduate students--between Rutgers and Utrecht, which has been negotiated for three departments of the university: Art History, Linguistics, and Women's Studies. In another fruitful exchange, this spring we are hosting a young art historian from Azerbaijan, Rayiha Mammadli, a Ph.D. student from the Azerbaijan State Academy of Science, who is auditing a number of our courses, which she hopes will help her shape an art history curriculum for the Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Arts.
Our faculty's scholarship continues to be recognized both nationally and internationally. Penny Small received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for her work on "Optics and Illusionism in Classical Art." Archer St. Clair Harvey is spending part of this year in Rome, having been awarded a multiple year Samuel H. Kress Foundation European Preservation Grant. Catherine Puglisi was the recipient of a J. Clawson Mills Art History Fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Erik Thunø has received a Humboldt Fellowship for the academic year 2007-2008, which he will spend in both Rome and Germany. Meredith and Michael Bzdak continue to support our undergraduate majors with a summer travel fellowship to Milan, and support from the Quigley family sustains a program of support for both our graduate students and undergraduates.
Over the past year, we have welcomed guest lecturers Jeffrey Hamburger from Harvard, "Representations of Reading -- Reading Representations: The Female Reader from the Hedwig Codex to Châtillon’s Léopoldine au Livre d’Heures" Anna Chave, from Queens College, who spoke on “Figuring the Origins of the Modern at the Fin de Siècle: The Trope of the Pathetic Male,” Nan Rosenthal, Senior Consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Robert Rauschenberg: Combines Show at the Met,” Paulo Varela Gomes, “Centrally and not so centrally planned churches in Portuguese architecture, 16th and 17th centuries” as well as a lecture that was co-sponsored by the Computer Science department, David Stork, Ricoh Innovations, Computer Scientist, “Did the Great Masters cheat using optics?” In an informal colloquium, Gerhard Wolf, Director of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, shared his experiences and research, and had valuable suggestions for our students in Italian Studies. Our Ph.D. student Katie Poole spent last year in Florence at the "Kunst", as the Institute is affectionately known.
Collaborations with the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum included our participation in a symposium in conjunction with the exhibition Breaking the Mold: Sculpture in Paris from Daumier to Rodin, curated by Dennis Cate, who recently retired as the Zimmerli's Director; and a symposium dedicated to the Hungarian avant-garde of the early twentieth century, in honor of the exhibition on artist Moholy-Nagy. Next year, our Ph.D. student Florence Quideau will curate an exhibition at the Zimmerli on the prints and caricatural sculptures of Daumier, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of his birth. We are looking forward to another year of vital activity within Rutgers, excited by the recent hirings of dynamic faculty, and looking toward the new hiring in the Art of the Americas. Our graduate students are giving papers at symposia across the country, and our undergraduates are producing a roster of intriguing senior theses (with the help of graduate students Lisa West and Patrick Coleman). Budget crises notwithstanding, the department continues to flourish. Archer St. Clair Harvey will return as the chair of the department on July 1.
Faculty
Archer St.Clair Harvey is on competetive leave for 2006-2007, under the auspices of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. She spent much of the Fall semester in Rome, undertaking research in Ostia Antica and in Rome itself for her project on the programmatic overpainting of frescoes in Late Antiquity.
Angela Howard traveled to Xinjiang, China to complete her research on the monastic communities of the ancient Kingdom of Kucha during May and June of 2006. The trip was sponsored by a grant from the Asian Cultural Council. On July 5th she presented the outcome of her fieldwork at the Institut fur Indologie und Iranistik in Munich, Germany. Chinese Sculpture, part of the series The Culture and Civilization of China (New Heaven, London, and Beijing: Yale University Press and Foreign Language Press) was published in February 2006. Chinese Sculpture is the result of ten years collaboration between Dr. Howard and the Chinese scholars Wu Hung (now residing in the US), Li Song and Yang Hong. Dr. Howard began serving as Undergraduate Advisor in the fall of 2006.
Sarah Blake McHam published three essays reflecting her interests in Italian Renaissance sculpture and painting and the influence of Pliny’s Natural History. One, a new interpretation of the interior decoration of the Palazzo della Signoria (Palazzo Vecchio) in Florence, appeared in Renaissance Florence:Social History, published by Cambridge University Press. Another, dealing with the influence of contemporary theoretical discussions on the sculpture of the Lombardo dynasty, was part of a volume published by Marsilio for IUAV, the architectural school of the University of Venice. The third, which decodes the illuminations commissioned by Pico della Mirandola for his personal manuscript of Pliny’s Natural History, was published by Ashgate for AVISTA, an organization devoted to the interdisciplinary study of science, technology and art. Dr. McHam also presented several papers in 2006. At the Renaissance Society’s annual meetings in San Francisco she presented on the intellectual politics of Renaissance manuscript decoration. She also gave papers on different topics related to Tullio Lombardo and Venetian funerary monuments at the University of Georgia and the Cini Foundation in Venice. She also organized and will chair two sessions on funerary rhetoric, ritual and monuments for the Renaissance Society meetings in Miami this March. During the summer she wrote two essays. The first develops her ideas about the triad of tombs honoring the Mocenigo family in the Venetian church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo for a volume to be published by the Cini Foundation. In the second, written for a volume organized by the Victoria & Albert Museum, she proposes new directions for research on fifteenth-century relief sculpture. She continued to work on her book manuscript about the influence of Pliny’s Natural History throughout the summer and fall semester while she was on leave. Her most important work for the department was the successful completion of her duties as chair of the Italian Renaissance search committee. Her ongoing commitments outside the university include service as discipline representative for the Renaissance Society and as reader of Fulbright grant applications for the Institute of International Education in New York.
Tod Marder presented a lecture in February 2006, at the conference entitled "Sankt Peter in Rom 1506-2006: Internationaler Kongress, Kunsthistorisches Institut der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn. The title of his talk was, “A Finger Bath in Rosewater: Cracks in Bernini’s Reputation .” In March 2006 his review of books by N. Courtright (The Papacy and the Art of Reform in 16th Century Rome) and T. Ehrlich (Landscape and Identity in Early Modern Rome: Villa Culture at Frascati in the Borghese Era) appeared in the Art Bulletin.In July and early August,he joined Erik Thunø in teaching the first edition of our Rome Summer School.The high points for his half of the course included a personal tour behind the scenes at the Vatican Museums and the Vatican Palace, as well as a visit to ICCROM (International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage).And surviving the heat.In the Fall 2006, Prof. Marder served as Respondant at a symposium (October 15, 2006) in Princeton entitled "Virgin Saints and the Early Christian Revival" which was held in conjunction with the exhibition "Pietro da Cortona's Saint Martina Refuses to Adore the Idols-- a Painting in Context."On January 25, 2007 he spoke on Bernini and the dome of St. Peter's in a talk entitled "A Fingerbath in Rose Water: Cracks in Bernini's Reputation."
Joan Marter has recently publishedAbstract Expressionism, The International Context as editor(Rutgers University Press).book considers post-war abstraction on four continents and includes essays by David Anfam, Dore Ashton, Serge Guilbaut, Ann Gibson, Ellen Landau, and Stephen Polcari,others. Dr. Marter contributed a chapter to Ethics and the Visual Arts, edited by Elaine King and Gail Levin (Allworth Press).April 2007 Professor Marter will participate in a symposium on Lee Krasner and Abstract Expressionism at the Stonybrook University Manhattan campus, and in July she will present a paper at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton.. Marter continues as chair of the Exhibitions Committee of the College Art Association, and a member of the Board of Directors.is editor of Woman’s Art Journal, and has now published two issues of the journal under the sponsorship of Rutgers University.
Catherine Puglisi completed her year-long J. Clawson Mills Fellowship in European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in August 2006. While at the Met she conducted research for a collaborative book on the image of Christ as Man of Sorrows in Venetian art. She presented papers related to this research in March 2006 at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in San Francisco and in April 2006 at the Fellows Colloquia of the Metropolitan Museum.
After scouring museums and monasteries in Crete for Veneto-Cretan icons on a summer study trip, she spent fall semester on sabbatical. In November she traveled to Düsseldorf, Germany where she was a guest at the Caravaggio Colloquium held at the Museum Kunst Palast. In the same month she gave a talk entitled “Divine Rapture and Baroque Drama in Pietro da Cortona’s St Martina” in conjunction with an exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum. She will deliver a public lecture, “The Legacies of Caravaggio and Rembrandt,” at the Phoenix Art Museum In early February 2007. Two publications appeared in 2006: “The Beginnings of the Cristo passo in Venetian Art,” co-authored with William Barcham, in the festschrift, ‘Cose Nuove e Cose Antiche’: Scritti per Monsignor Antonio Niero e Don Bruno Bertoli, (Biblioteca Marciana, Collana di Studi, X, Venice, 2006); and “Caravaggio’s Life and Lives over Four Centuries,” in Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception, ed. Genevieve Warwick (Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 2006). Forthcoming in 2007 in Artibus et Historiae is “Bernardino da Feltre, the Monte di Pietà, and the Man of Sorrows: Activist, Microcredit and Logo,” coauthored with William Barcham.
Susan Sidlauskas has just finished her book, Cezanne's Significant Other: The Portraits of Hortense, forthcoming from the University of California Press.She chaired a session at CAA last February called "What Can We Say Now About Cezanne?" and also spoke about Degas at a session on feminist pedagogy and "the canon" chaired by Norma Broude and Mary Garrard.She contributed an Afterword to an exhibition catalogue called “Skin and Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture”, curated by Brooke Hodge at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in November. There will be a related symposium at FIT this April.A great pleasure of this year has been participation in the faculty and graduate student seminar at Rutgers' Institute for Research on Women, where the theme is "Bodies and Health."The seminar project is "Before and After: Picturing the Rest Cure," a study of pairs of black and white photographs that show young women prior to their treatment (skeletally anorexic) and after their doctor's intervention (the "cure" depended upon enforced isolation and a diet of "fat and blood.")Being Acting Chair for this year has been highly educational, if not always easy, and a great debt is owed not only to fellow faculty and supportive graduate students, but to Cathy Pizzi and Geralyn Colvil, who run the departmental office.They have been indispensable.
Jocelyn Penny Small was invited to give the keynote address at the 7th International Conference on Orality and Literacy in July, 2006. The title of her talk was “Visual Copies and Memory,” and it will be published in the conference proceedings. In addition, Dr. Small gave ten lectures at the five major universities in New Zealand: the Victoria University in Wellington, the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, the University of Otago in Dunedin, the Massey University in Palmerston North, and the University of Auckland in Auckland. These lectures addressed three topics, of which two are part of her current project on optics and illusionism in classical art for which she has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for this academic year. The third topic, on Etruscan portraits, was an informal lecture given to classes and was based on the lecture she gives in her own courses on Etruscan art. She also lectured at Smith College on “The Birth of Illusionism” in October. She published one article (“Was Alexander the Great Left-Handed?,” Laterality 11 (2006): 562-565, companion piece to “The Modern Mythology of the Left-Handedness of Alexander the Great” by I. C. McManus, and two book reviews (Donatella Mazzoleni and Umberto Pappalardo, Domus. Wall Painting in the Roman House (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2004), Journal of Roman Archaeology 18 (2005): 604-606; and Jenifer Neils, editor, The Parthenon. From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, 2006), New England Classical Journal 33 (2006) 311-313.
Erik Thunø delivered papers at the College Art Association meeting in Boston, the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, Harvard University, and the Medieval Conference in Kalamazoo. His co-edited book, Decorating the Lord's Table: On the Dynamics between Image and Altar in the Middle Ages (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006) appeared in July. Dr. Thunø contributed the article "The Golden Altar of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan: Image and Materiality" to this book. Dr. Thunø also won a one-year competitive research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and will in his fellowship year be hosted by the Department of Art History of the University of Marburg, Germany, and the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max-Planck-Institut) in Rome, Italy.
Laura Weigert is currently on leave with grants from the American Philosophical Society and Rutgers Competitive Fellowship Leave Program for her book project: “Images in Action: the Theatricality of Franco-Flemish Art.” She has given several talks related to this topic. Last spring, while a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, she presented a paper, “Diptychs of Violence: Pictures and Plays of the Vengeance of Our Lord,” to the School of Historical Studies. In the fall, she presented “Entre messe et mystère: les tapisseries de la Chaise Dieu,” at a conference devoted to the tapestries at the Chaise Dieu. While conducting research in France she delivered a paper, “Theatralität in Bildwerken und Schauspielen des Spätmittelalters und der Renaissance,” at Saarbrücken University and at the Ruprecht Karls University, Heidelberg. She will present a version of this paper to the Medieval/Renaissance forum at Yale in March. In May, she will present a paper, “Visualizing the Rhythm of Urban Drama in the Late Middle Ages” at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, where she is also respondent to a session on biblical illustration. With Tanja Michalsky (University of Frankfurt), she organized the art history session entitled “Art and the Production of Space,” for a joint Humboldt and APS sponsored interdisciplinary symposium, German-American Frontiers in the Humanities, for which she was also one of the conference organizers. She has been elected vice president of TEAMS: the Consortium for the Teaching of Medieval Studies.
Carla Yanni is currently on sabbatical in Washington, DC, where she is conducting research for a project on architectural criticism and publishing in the 1880s.was the jury chair for the College Avenue architectural competition, and she was pleased with the outcome: architect Enrique Norten and landscape architect Ignacio Bunster-Ossa were selected as the team leaders for this important project.continues to serve on the board of the Society of Architectural Historians. Two short essays appeared in print: “Beyond the Hospital: The Clubhouse Architectural Model for Psychiatric Patients,” a chapter in Cor Waagener, ed. The Architecture of Hospitals (Amsterdam: NAi Publishers, , 2006) and “Learning from the History and Sociology of Science: Interrogating the Spaces of Knowledge,” an invited essay in a series of methodological articles for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, December 2005. Dr. Yanni contributed to scholarly conferences by chairing two sessions: “The Tourist as City Builder” at the Vernacular Architecture Forum, New York City, June 2006, and “The Architecture of Pedagogy,” American Studies Association, Washington DC, November 2005. Dr. Yanni's book, The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States will be published by University of Minnesota in May 2007.
Andres Zervigon has been on research leave in Berlin to complete his book The Unsettled Image: John Heartfield, Photomontage and the German Avant-Garde, 1917-1929. While scouring through archives and scribing chapters, he has also been co-organizing symposia and presenting papers. In October he and art historian Oliver Botar staged the symposium “Detours of Technology: Insights into the Hungarian and Weimar German Oeuvres of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.” The event was held at the Zimmerli in conjunction with the museum’s Moholy-Nagy exhibition, curated by Botar. Dr. Zervigon’s contribution was entitled “A New Way of Seeing or Blinded by Science? Laszlo-Moholy Nagy, John Heartfield and the Battle over Weimar-Era Photography.” Dr. Zervigon is also co-chairing the session “Subject: Photography” at this year’s College Art Association conference in New York. In October he presented a paper on John Heartfield’s film work at a Walter Benjamin conference in Berlin, and in January he delivered a paper on Weimar-era worker photography at a conference covering methodologies of image analysis held in Konstanz, Germany. Last summer Dr. Zervigon’s exhibition “Agitated Images: John Heartfield and German Photomontage,– 1938” closed at the Getty Research Institute. In conjunction with the show and shortly before its end, Zervigon co-organized the symposium “Radical Politics/Radical Aesthetics,” also at the Getty Research Institute.
Graduate News
Amy Bryzgel presented the following papers: "Afrika’s 'Stalker III'” at The Mass Media in Post-Soviet Russia Conference, University of Surrey, Guildford, England (April 2006), and “New Avant-Gardes in East-Central Europe and Russia” at The British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies’ Annual Conference at Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge, England (April 2006). She is currently a contributing writer to "The Baltic Guide," an English-language monthly newspaper in Riga, Latvia, and writes a monthly art column for "Riga Now!" an English-language monthly magazine published in Riga, Latvia.
Jeremy Canwell was a Baltic Summer Studies Institute Fellow at Indiana University, funded by the Lithuanian Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. He also received a Special Opportunity grant from the Graduate School, New Brunswick.published "System, Terminus and Time: The Mystical Art of Raul Meel" in the Zimmerli Journal (Fall 2006), and is now curating a Zimmerli exhibition on printmaking in the Soviet Baltic Republics.
Kim Curtiss was awarded a 2006-2007 ACLS/Luce Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. In October she presented a paper at SECAC entitled "Making White Skin Red: Playing Indian in George Catlin’s Portrait of his Nephew Theodore Burr Catlin," and in November presented "The Meaning of ‘Amalgamation:’ Visual Constructions of Racial Mixture in 1830s America” at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory.
Lisandra Estevez will be presenting a paper, "17th-Century Spanish Signatures," on a panel sponsored by the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies (ASHAHS) at the annual conference of the College Art Association on February 16, 2007. She and her husband, George M. Isaac, are also pleased to announce the birth of their son, Adam George, on August 10, 2006.
Adam George Isaac
This past year, Christine Filippone was the managing curator for the exhibition Memorials of Identity: New Media from the Rubell Family Collection held at the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University. She also wrote the brochure essay for the world premier of Eve Sussman’s new video Rape of the Sabine Women for the Nasher Museum.the summer, Christine co-led a group of students from Peace College on a trip through southern Spain.Finally,presented the paper Technology and Feminist Utopias in the Work of Martha Rosler and Carolee Schneemann at the annual conference of The Society for the History of Technology.
Ann M. Keen was able to visit both the Munich and Rome Olympic sites during her March 2006 residency at the International Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, in support of her dissertation Redefining Modernism: Monumentality and Expressionism in Architecture of the Olympic Summer Games, 1960-1976. Aided by a travel grant from the art history department, she toured Montreal’s Olympic Park and went through relevant holdings at Canada’s National Archives in Ottawa in July. Ann also traveled to Mexico City and Tokyo in 2006, completing her tours of the five sites to be discussed in her dissertation.
Ann Keen
Karen Lloyd was awarded a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Institutional Fellowship to be held at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome (2006-2008). In Rome Karen will conduct research for her dissertation entitled “Altieri Patronage and Adoption in Early Modern Rome (1670-1710).” Karen also received an International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship from the Social Sciences Research Council, which allows her to explore dissertation-related resources in museums and libraries across Europe, and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship. She was also the winner of a departmental Olga Berendsen Baroque Prize, honoring outstanding work on a Baroque topic.
Ljubomir Milanovic become a member of the Institute for Balkan Studies, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in August. In October he presented a paper on “Mirroring Reality: Mosaic Program in the Narthex of the Katholikon of Hosios Loukas Monastery” at the Southern College Art Conference, Vanderbilt University in Nashville TN. In November he presented a paper entitled “Displaying the Relics and Shaping the Sacred Topography: The Shrine of King Stefan Decanski in the Church of Christ the Savior” at the 39th National Convention of the American Association for the Advance of Slavic Studies in Washington D.C. Additionally, he was awarded a Studenica Foundation scholarship for the 2006-2007 academic year.
Alison Poe chaired a joint Archaeological Institute of America / American Philological Association panel entitled "Christian Culture and Pagan Underpinnings" at the AIA/APA annual meeting in Montreal in January. She gave a talk entitled "Banqueting in the Catacombs: A Reconsideration" at the WAPACC conference "Constructions of Death, Mourning, and Memory" in New Jersey in October. Alison was an adjunct instructor at Drew University again this year and will team-teach a Humanities course on Classical Antiquity there in the fall of 2007.
Sascha Scott is a pre-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum for 2006-2007. She recently published a review of Barbra Buhler Lynes, Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), in Woman’s Art Journal 27:2 (Fall/Winter 2006). In February, 2007 she will deliver a paper entitled “Will the Real John Sloan Please Stand Up?” in the session “Robert Henri and “The Eight:” A Pre-centennial Reassessment” at the College Art Association Annual Conference.
Mary Tinti will present her paper, “Alice Aycock’s Star Sifter” at the Philadelphia Symposium on the History of Art, March 17, 2007. In June 2006, she completed a pre-doctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and presented her research as part of the museum’s ongoing “Works in Progress” lecture series. Mary is currently a Research Associate at NASM, where she is in residence for the remainder of the academic year.
Carman Vendelin has been Assistant Curator at the La Salle University Art Museum since April. She also co-curated and wrote a catalogue essay for the Zimmerli Art Museum's exhibition“Toulouse-Lautrec and The French Imprint: Fin-De-Siècle Posters in Paris, Brussels and Barcelona,”which traveled to England and Scotland in 2006.
Visual Resources Collection
The Greater New York Chapter of the Visual Resources Association met at Voorhees Hall on October 6, 2006. The session was entitled “Journey from Simple Automation of Slide Labels to Core 4.0 Compatible at Rutgers toward Goal of Sharing Metadata”. The collection’s database grew out of the slide database begun in 1985 and has seen numerous transformations to meet changing standards and needs. During those 21 years over 300 student workers have contributed to the contents and structure.
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| Presenters Chad Mills, Rutgers Libraries, Kevin Ford and Don Beetham |
Kevin Ford returned to speak about his programming to export data from the Rutgers database to xml coding compatible with newly formulated VRA standards. The xml programming was one of the many automation projects that Kevin had done for the department during his tenure in the Visual Resources Collection. A presentation on fitting the department’s complex database into Luna Insight was given by Chad Mills of the Rutgers Libraries Systems Department. Chad’s talk was a continuation of the close collaboration between the Department of Art History and the RU Libraries on the Luna Insight project. A summary of the history of the database and and a discussion about the issues raised in modifying the database to reflect the new VRA standards was given by Don Beetham. Slide Curators Gretchen Burch, Olivia Gruber and Stephen Alsa assisted in the preparations for the meeting and the numerous details needed to make the event run smoothly.
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Don Beetham flanked by alumni Kevin Ford and Dr. Ching-jung Chen |
Report from a Historic Preservation Student
Emily L. Hodecker-Ferrara
I first became interested in architectural history when I co-curated an exhibition at Brookdale Community College. The exhibition was to memorialize the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States. The exhibition, titled "Memorials, Monuments and Memories: Monmouth County's Artistic Response to September 11, 2001," exhibited the efforts of many to build memorials and monuments to remember the Monmouth County residents who were victims of the attack. My job was to conduct research on the planned or successfully constructed monuments or installations in Monmouth County. It made me think seriously about the value that is placed on monuments and architectural spaces in American society. Later, in architectural history classes at Rutgers, I came to realize how important it is to preserve the physical manifestations of all aspects of American culture, whether they are positive or negative. 
Emily L. Hodecker-Ferrara
My mother was a Union leader and my father a politically vocal and exceptionally literary person, so I wanted find a way to combine my love of architecture with my family’s dedication to social change. Enrolling in the Historic Preservation Certificate to accompany my Art History major turned out to be the best decision I have ever made as an undergraduate. The curriculum has consistently proved to be enriching and the flexibility of the elective requirements allowed me to explore the wider world of architectural history.
The historic preservation certificate requires that students undertake some kind of field work. Instead of an internship, I applied to the Field School for Architectural Restoration at Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest in Virginia. I was very excited when I received my acceptance letter and the packet jammed with preparatory reading and instructions.
The reading was intimidating; we read Thomas Jefferson’s own words about his buildings, we read about Palladian architecture, and we also read essays on the theory of architectural preservation written by the program's director, Travis McDonald. After I plowed through that reading I hopped into my truck and took off on the 7 hour drive to Virginia; my head was swimming with geometry, masonry materials and the Founding Fathers as I drove through our nation’s capital and into western Virginia, along back country roads in hues of gold and green.
It is easy for me to wax poetic about Virginia last summer. The trip inspired in me a kind of patriotism and connection to American history that I had never experienced before. The Field School started with an "ice-breaking" picnic on the lawn of the east portico of Poplar Forest, My fellow 10 students were a diverse group. They had traveled to Virginia from all over the country, each seeking something different. The group included undergraduates studying architectural history like me, architecture students, professional architects and landscape architects, the director of the historic preservation department in a county in Maryland, a preservation lawyer, and a paint conservationist from Jefferson's other great masterpiece, Monticello. At the opening picnic I realized that I would learn some of the most important lessons from my fellow students.
Our assignment as a group was to produce a Historic Structures Report for a house in southwestern Virginia that had recently and sadly been scheduled for demolition. We started with three days of detailed lectures and tours of Poplar Forest to introduce us to the architectural history of the site and the significance of Jeffersonian architecture. By using the example of the well documented and successful restoration project at Poplar Forest, the director created a concrete (or maybe brick and lime mortar!) foundation for our daily road trips to other sites in Virginia.
The days were long, but the engaging material outweighed the intensive schedule, oppressive climate, and abundance of gnats! We would visit a house that we knew nothing about, and divide into groups to investigate a specific level or part of the house. Following this exercise we would discuss our conclusions, which were either accepted or rejected. Travis would then reveal the actual history of the house in a detailed walkthrough. We had a particularly exciting tour of Monticello; we also visited the Wickam House, the John Marshall House and the White House of the Confederacy in Richmond. At all four of these sites, we were given an opportunity discuss the pros and cons of the house museum phenomenon. At the Gaston and Wyatt Millwork Shop, Price Masonry/Virginia Limeworks and the carpentry shop at Poplar Forest we were educated on the use of authentic materials in restoration projects. All it took for me to understand the great skill that is required to produce an authentic Jeffersonian molding was a run-in with a 100-year-old planer!
The sum of these experiences resulted in a great deal of group confidence on that day when we traveled to Charlotte County to investigate what we had come to think of "our house." It was a very early morning, and my truckload of fellow students napped throughout the first half of our 2 hour journey. As the sun rose and I drove deeper into southwestern Virginia, the tension in my truck started to grow. Our surroundings became more and more arborous. When Travis pulled his car over to tell us that this would be our last opportunity to use a restroom that did not have poison ivy in it, we all of us had a moment of "fight or flight." From that point it was another half hour, 15 minutes of which was on a dirt road. With a bumpy right turn up a slight ravine and through the overgrown bushes, we met our challenge, a modest vernacular house in terrible disrepair.
Partially disassembled, the skeleton exposed to the south and west, the Baldwin House (as we eventually named it) stared back at us, daring us to unravel the secrets of its past. Armed with bug spray, measuring tape, plastic Ziploc bags, scalpels and clipboards we split into our assigned groups and began. We observed, sketched, measured, took paint, mortar and plaster samples. We found the weights from the former triple-sash windows in the woods, and reassembled a staircase to determine the origin of the unusual ghost We determined that the front door survived – it was the Baldwin House's original door, dating to around 1840. Needless to say, we got our hands dirty and I will proudly admit that I enjoyed every minute of it.
Following a session of lab work to analyze our samples, we spent the next two days making sense of our findings. On our final day, we turned in portions of the report to Travis and sadly said our goodbyes, but only after receiving our diploma-- a print of Thomas Jefferson’s original drawing of Poplar Forest.
As I drove back home to what seemed to be the doldrums of New Jersey, I was exhilarated. I have never felt so inspired by an educational experience. When I received the complete formal Historic Structures Report on the Baldwin House in early August, I was gratified to see my words included in such an important document. The most powerful lesson that I learned at the Field School is that every contribution, no matter how small, can positively affect this world. The Baldwin House is much more than an old house hidden in the forest of Virginia. The Baldwin House represents a patch of land that was cultivated in order to provide contributions to our country. It was a place of rest for the family that built it and for the family that tried their very hardest to preserve it for all of those years. The Baldwin House is a representation of not just a pocket of time, like a house museum, but rather it represents something much bigger -- the American ideal of agriculture and community. The Baldwin House now exists only in words and photographs in our report, but at least it has been permanently documented. It was impossible for the owners of the Baldwin House to save it from demolition, but the house will not be forgotten. There are hundreds more houses in hundreds of other forests, and no matter how modest, they all have stories to tell, and they all communicate powerful American truths.
Alumni News
Christopher Atkins (Ph.D. 2006) successfully defended his dissertation in April and graduated in May. While at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, he assisted with the organization of the exhibition "Five Centuries of European Portraiture," shown this past fall at the Nagoya-Boston Museum of Fine Arts in Japan, and contributed to the accompanying catalogue. He also published a review of Margaret Klinge and Dietmar Lüdke, "David Teniers der Jüngere 1610-1690. Alltag und Vergnügen in Flanderen" in Sehepunkte 6 (2006), Nr. 9.Beginning in January 2007, he will serve as Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Northwestern University.
Gretchen Burch (MA 2006) received her Master’s degree in May of 2006. Gretchen is currently working at Sotheby's as a cataloguer in the American Painting department.
Michael Bzdak (Ph.D. 2001) presented a paper entitled "Are Corporate Art Collections an American Innovation? Why are Most Corporate Art Collections Located in the US?" at the International Conference on the Arts in Society held at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, in August, 2006.
Aliza Edelman, Prof. Joan Marter and Caitlan Davis
Caitlin Davis (Ph.D. 2005) received her Ph.D. in October of 2005. She and her husband moved back to New York City from upstate New York in the summer of 2006.She now works at the Frick Collection as Assistant to the Director, Anne Poulet.is a newly created position, which she describes as a post-doc for how to run a museum. She works as Poulet’s right hand, conducting art historical research and dealing with members of the Board and visiting dignitaries, and works closely with the Development Department.Anne appointed her as the head of the Young Fellows of the Frick Collection, which is one of her largest projects.
In February she will be giving a talk at CAA entitled "The (Sur)reality of War: Lee Miller's Photographic Interpretations of World War II." She will also give a talk on Fragonard's "Progress of Love" series to the Young Fellows of the Frick Collection in February.March she will give a talk at NYU on the career of Lee Miller, on whom she wrote her doctoral dissertation.
Craig Eliason (Ph.D. 2002) published “Theo van Doesburg: Italian Futurist?” in The Low Countries: Crossroads of Cultures, edited Ton Broos, Margriet Bruyn Lacy, and Thomas F. Shannon (Munster: Nodus, 2006): 47-56.
Frima Fox Hofrichter, (Ph.D. 1979), Professor and Chair of the History of Art and Design Department at the Pratt Institute, is one of the authors of the new (7th) edition of Janson’s History of Art (2006). She wrote the Baroque and Rococo chapters. In November, Dr. Hofrichter gave a talk at the Johann David Passavasnt-Colloquium on The Masterpiece-Guilds, Corporations and Artistic Training in Northern Europe prior to 1800 in Frankfurt. She spoke on Judith Leyster’s Self-Portrait as her Master’s Piece for the Guild.
Joanna Gardner-Huggett, (Ph.D. 1997)Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at Depaul University. In October 2006 she co-chaired the conference “Constructions of Death, Mourning and Memory” in Woodcliff Lake, NJ, with Lilian Zirpolo. The conference was sponsored by Aurora: the Journal of the History of Art. She also co-edited the seventh volume of Aurora. Additionally, she curated the exhibition "Julia Thecla: Undiscovered Worlds" at the DePaul Art Museum during the fall of 2006, which was accompanied by an exhibition catalogue, and was selected as one of the top ten museum shows by Time Out Chicago.
Caroline Goeser (Ph.D. 2000) was awarded tenure in the School of Art at the University of Houston last spring. Her book, Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity, has just come out in the Culture America series edited by Karal Ann Marling and Erika Doss for the University Press of Kansas.
Andrew Graciano (RC, BA 1995) got engaged in May 2006 to Holly Haroff, who is a photographer, and will be married in March of 2007. He is both editing and contributing to a book of essays on art and science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that will appear in 2008 from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. He is also editing and annotating The Memoirs of Benjamin Wilson, FRS: Portrait Painter and Electrical Scientist, which will be published in 2012 by the Walpole Society. His manuscript for a book on Joseph Wright of Derby is under review. He is currently Assistant Professor and Head of Art History Area in the Department of Art at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC.
Dustin Hannah (UC, BA 2006) drafted and designed the façade for the Liberty Harbor North sales center on the corner of Grand and Jersey Street in Jersey City, NJ. He was the project manager for that project in the spring, summer and fall of 2006. The photograph of the showcase building, which was inspired by Monticello, shows the lintels over the windows that were salvaged and cast from a nineteenth-century building on Madison Ave in New York City.
John Hanson (MA 1993) delivered the paper "Boys on the Box: Queer Desire in the Mythological Ivory Boxes from Byzantium" at the College Art Association conference in Boston last February. In August he was hired at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, DC as the Exhibition Associate for the Byzantine Collection. This involves, among many other things, working on the reinstallation of the Byzantine Galleries following the current renovations as well as researching and writing about the collection for museum publications and the collections database.
Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio (Ph.D. 2000) published "The chief and perhaps only antiquarian in Spain: Pompeo Leoni and his collection in Madrid," in the Journal of the History of Collections 18 (2006): 137-167. She recently signed a contract with Ashgate for a book, expanded from her dissertation, called Leone Leoni and the Status of the Artist in the Late Renaissance. She is also about 5 months pregnant with her second child and will soon be off to Milan to do archival research.
(MA 1997) reports that 2006 was indeed a great year. In April, at the Metropolitan Club in New York, she was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize in Historic Preservation from the American Academy in Rome. Her 11-month study is a preservation assessment of the Aqua Vergine, a still-functioning 2000 year old aqueduct (see http://www.caup.umich.edu/archdoc/romeprizepr406.pdf for the press release). She was also awarded the German Chancellor Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to perform a comparative analysis of preservation legislation in New York and Berlin, which she declined in order to accept the Rome Prize. In June she presented a paper entitled "Croton Waterworks: The Manhattan Landmarks" at the Conference on New York State History at Columbia University. In August, she took a leave of absence from her position as Senior Preservationist at the Landmarks Commission to go to Rome after completing a number of successful projects. These projects included the restorationthe Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fifth Avenue façade, the restoration program at the Cloisters Museum, and the re-opening of the Top of the Rock Observation Deck at Rockefeller Center, which had been closed for over 20 years. These projects won numerous preservation awards from the Municipal Art Society, the Landmarks Conservancy, and the Friends of the Upper East Side.
Patricia Kiernan and Mike Johnson
Patricia C. Kiernan (MA, 2003) married Michael Johnson (MCIS, Rutgers, 2000) on December 9, 2006 in Dumont, NJ. Patricia is currently the Development & Marketing Associate for New Jersey Opera Theater in Princeton, NJ.
Ilana Krug (MA, 1999) received a second master's degree in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto in 2000 and graduated in June 2006 with a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies with an emphasis on history. She is currently a professor of history at Villa Julie College in Baltimore, MD.
Stephanie Leone (Ph.D. 2001) participated in the curatorial team that organized the exhibition "Secular/Sacred: 11th–16th Century Works from the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts," which was on view at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College from February to May of 2006. She also published the essay “In vogue in fifteenth-century Florence: the material culture of marriage” in the exhibition catalogue.
Tom Loughman (Ph.D. 2003) is Curator of European Art at the Phoenix Art Museum. He recently acquired for the museum a glazed terracotta Bust of an Aged Apostle (Saint Mark?) by Andrea della Robbia, c. 1490, from Salander-O'Reilly Galleries in New York. It is the first Italian Renaissance sculpture in the region. He also realized the following exhibitions: The Phoenix Art Museum’s presentation of "Collecting the Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute" (Jan.-Mar., 2006); "Fierce Reality: Italian Masters from Seventeenth Century Naples" (Dec., 2006-Mar., 2007), including a catalogue published with Skira, Milan; the Phoenix Art Museum presentation of "Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art: Treasures from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam" (Jan.-May 2007). His first child, Anna Gray Loughman, was born on October 6, 2005.
Olin serves as Principal Investigator for a General Program Support Award from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts (2006-2009) to the Margery Somers Foster Center. The funding supports work that identifies New Jersey repositories holding primary source documents on women artists active in NJ since 1945 as well as programming at various NJ museums where the exhibition “How American Women Artists Invented Postmodernism, 1970-1975” is on view. The former area of research expands work already done on the Getty-funded “WAAND: Women Artists Archives National Directory” (http://waand.rutgers.edu) of which Olin is Co-Project Director. She also received a Rutgers Research Council grant that underwrote research for an exhibition, website and catalog being planned for 2011. Olin also currently administers The Feminist Art Project (TFAP) (http://feministartproject.rutgers.edu), a national initiative that celebrates the Feminist Art Movement and women’s aesthetic and intellectual contributions to the visual arts, past and present. In July, the University President appointed her (along with Judith K. Brodsky) to head the newly established Institute for Women and Art (IWA) (http://iwa.rutgers.edu). The IWA brings together Rutgers faculty, curators, researchers and artists to promote the study of women and art. During CAA 2007, TFAP and the IWA will be sponsoring the Distinguished Scholar Session on Linda Nochlin, a series of sessions scheduled for all day Saturday, February 17 related to feminist art, and two exhibitions, one at AIR Gallery and the other at Ceres Gallery. Lastly, Ferris Olin was promoted to Librarian 1 on July 1, 2006.
Judith Pineiro (MA 2001) left Christie's to become Manager of Upper Level Memberships at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York in 2006.
Susan Pinto Madigan and daughter Cressida
Susan Pinto Madigan’s (MA, Art History, class of '75)Brian Madigan’s (MA, Art History, class of '75) daughter, Cressida Madigan, is in the Ph.D. Microbiology program at Harvard Medical School.
Roberta Mayer (BA 1993) is Visual Arts Area Head in the Department of the Arts at Bucks County Community College and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006. Her book, Lockwood de Forest: Furnishing the Gilded Age with a Passion for India, was accepted for publication by the University of Delaware Press. The project was recently awarded a $7,000 grant from Furthermore, a Program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.
She gave two invited museum lectures this past year. "Lockwood de Forest's Vision of India in Gilded Age Baltimore" was given at the Baltimore Museum of Art in Baltimore, Maryland in April, 2006. "Unraveling Louis Comfort Tiffany's Early Businesses" was given at the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum in Winter Park, Florida in March of 2006.
Barbara Mitnick (Ph.D. 1983) publisheda book on commission from New Jersey's Hyde and Watson Foundation entitled The Hyde and Watson Foundation: A History in May, 2006. She relates that it was a fascinating project dealing with the story of two foundations that consolidated in 1984. These foundations have supported the capital projects of many of the region's most important hospitals, schools, cultural institutions, and others.wasto American art history except for the inclusion of portrait illustrations of some of the nation's leaders in philanthropy, a subject she became interested in when she wrote the biography of Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge a few years ago for the Dodge Foundation.
spring, Barbara and her husband areto move to Philadelphia.plans to semi-retire, and she hopes tocontinue to teach her graduate seminar in American History Painting and work on some new American history painting projects. The book New Jersey in the American Revolution, for which she served as general editor and contributed the fine and decorative arts essay,published by Rutgers University Press in 2005 and will be coming out in a new paperback edition.
Victoria Reed (Ph.D. 2002) published "Walter Westfeld (1889-1943?), Art Dealer in Nazi Germany," in Vitalizing Memory: International Perspectives in Provenance Research (Washington, DC: American Association of Museums, 2005): 154-59. She gave the following lectures and conference presentations: "Puzzling Out Provenance," at the Houston Seminar at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston on October 30, 2006; "Art with a Past: World War II Provenance Research and the Museum Community,” at the Claremont, Southwest Harbor, ME on July 27, 2006; "Nazi-Era Provenance Research in the 21st Century" (co-chair and presenter), American Association of Museums Annual Meeting, Boston, MA on April 28, 2006; "Puzzling Out Provenance" (with George Shackelford), as part of the Sunday Lecture Series at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on March 19, 2006; "Decapitation, Desire, and Devotion in Luini's Salome," at the College Art Association 94th Annual Conference, in Boston on February 24, 2006.
Diane Reilly (BA 1990) published the book The Art of Reform in Eleventh-Century Flanders: Gerard of Cambrai, Richard of Saint-Vanne and the Saint-Vaast Bible, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, v. 128 (Leiden: Brill, 2006).
Marice Rose, (Ph.D. 2001)Assistant Professor of Art History at Fairfield University, published an article entitled “The Trier Ceiling: Power and Status on Display in Late Antiquity” in the April issue of the Journal Greece and Rome, and presented the following conference papers: “Early Christian Funerary Portraits” at the 15th Biennial New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies” in Sarasota, Florida, and "Late Antique Images of Slaves in Domestic and Funerary Contexts" at the 107th Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Montreal, Quebec.
John Beldon Scott (Ph.D. 1982) has stepped down as Interim Director of the School of Art & Art History at the University of Iowa. For the spring 2007 term, he will be Robert Janson-La Palme Visiting Professor in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University.
Amanda Smith (BA 2006) began working at Rago Arts and Auction Center in Lambertville, NJ in July of 2006. David Rago can be seen regularly on Antiques Roadshow, and their auction house specializes in Arts and Crafts decorative arts and furniture as well as Modern decorative arts and design. They also have a fine art department and an estate department, which also deals in fine and antique jewelry and silver. Amanda is the cataloguer for the Estates Department, and is responsible for helping to create the auction catalogues, and is the client contact for contracts and consigning. She also researches items that come in for auction. She reports that it is a great place to work, and that she has a wide range of responsibilities and has been able to learn about a wide range of items. The first sale she was responsible for, the Great Estates auction, allowed her to learn a great deal about Asian antiques, which came from a single owner estate, and had the largest jewelry silver selection Rago's has ever had. adds that it has certainly been a learning experience –there is a lot of money circulating around the antiques industry and she is glad to learn about its process. is not sure it is something she could see herself doing the rest of her life, so she is considering going back to school to study Cultural and Historic Preservation.
William Stargard (BA 1979) gave a paper entitled "Charity, Repression, and Reform in the 18th-Century Savoyard State" at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Montreal in March 2006.
Jennifer Tonkovich (Ph.D. 2002) was a contributing author to the catalogue for two exhibits at the Pierpont Morgan Library: Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings and Leonardo to Pollock: Master Drawings from the Morgan Library. She published "A New Album of Theater Drawings by Claude Gillot," in Master Drawings 44, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 56-75. She worked on the exhibitions “Fragonard and the French Tradition and From Rembrandt to van Gogh: Dutch Drawings from the Morgan Library,” both at the Pierpont Morgan Library.
Dorothy Verkerk (Ph.D. 1992) published Art of the Middle Ages, 2nd ed., with J. Snyder and H. Luttikhuizen (Prentice Hall, 2006). She gave the following lectures: “God’s Right Hand: Ambiguity on the Crosses at Clonmacnois and Monasterboice” at the “Medieval Art: Those Slippery Images” SECAC/MACAA conference in Nashville, TN in October; “The Southern Cross is a Celtic Cross: Funerary Monuments of North Carolina” at the Celticity Conference “21st Century Celts,” Truro and Cornwall in September; “The Blessing Hand: Liturgical Stations in Early Medieval Sculpture” at the Art, Liturgy and Religious Cult in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages Research Workshop of the Israel Science Foundation at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel, in June. She also received the W.N. Reynold's Competitive Leave Award.
Aileen Wang (Ph.D. 2005)has been working in the Client Advisory Group at Christie's since March 2006. She is an in-house art advisor for Christie's top clients, and is in charge of developing business with Asian clients. She reports that her knowledge of both Italian and Chinese has come in handy in this job. Judith Pineiro, another Rutgers alum who used to work at Christie's until recently, introduced her to hiring managers within the company.
Elizabeth Weinfield (BA, Hon.'02) graduated with a Master's degree in Music from Oxford University in July 2006 and now works at the Yale University Collection of Musical Instruments.the summer she taught an art history class for the Oxford study abroad program in Paris, something she hopes to do again this summer.
Midori Yoshimoto among others performing George Maciunas' " In Memoriam to Adriano Olivetti" at Fukui, Japan on March 11.
Midori Yoshimoto (Ph.D. 2002) has served as the chair of the Committee on Women in the Arts of CAA since February, 2006. In collaboration with the Feminist Art Project and Women's Caucus for Art, she is currently preparing for the Annual Recognition Awards Ceremony to acknowledge seven women in the arts on Saturday, February 17, 2007. In March, she was invited to participate in Fluxus performances orchestrated by Ay-O during his retrospective exhibition at Fukui Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan. In April, she organized a major exhibition entitled "For My People: The Art of Elizabeth Catlett" at New Jersey City University Gallery with a grant received from NJ State Council on the Arts. During the summer, her article, "Women Artists in the Japanese Postwar Avant-Garde" appeared in Woman's Art Journal, and she presented a paper, "Between Art and Crime: Performance That Pushed the Envelope of Japanese Art" at the Performance Studies International 12th Conference at University of London.
Lilian H. Zirpolo (Ph.D. 1994) was commissioned by Scarecrow Press to write the Historical Dictionary of Renaissance Art as part of the A to Z Series to be published in 2007. She also organized and hosted, with Joanna Gardner-Huggett, the “Constructions of Death, Mourning, and Memory Conference” at the Woodcliff Lake Hilton, Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey in October, 2006, and edited the conference abstracts and proceedings. She published two book reviews: Juan van der Hamen y León & the Court of Madrid by William B. Jordan (Yale University Press, 2005) in the Renaissance Quarterly 59/4 (2006) and Gender, Politics, and Allegory in the Art of Rubens by Lisa Rosenthal (Cambridge University Press, 2005) in the Woman’s Art Journal XXVII/1 (2006). Her review of Raphael and the Beautiful Banker by D. A. Brown and J. van Nimmen (Yale University Press, 2005) will be published this year in Art History, as will the 25 dictionary entries she wrote for the Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press). She continues to co-edit and co-publish Aurora, The Journal of the History of Art with Joanna. On a personal note, she became a grandmother for the second time. Ella Louise was born on November 20th, 2006 weighing 7.5 lbs. and measuring 20 inches.
Student Awards
Congratulations to the Winners of 2006
Graduate School New Brunswick Awards
Patricia Zalamea, winner of a Bevier Fellowship
Patricia Zalamea, winner of the Dissertation Teaching Award
Quigley Awards
The Art History Department extends its deepest gratitude to the family of Patrick J. Quigley RC, ‘82, a victim of the tragic events of September 11, 2001; an award in Patrick’s memory provides financial assistance to senior art history majors who are pursuing a college degree while working to support themselves.
| The Quigley Awards in 2006 went to: Anna Khachiyan and Kerensa Sanford Wood |
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2006 Undergraduate Honors in Art History
Noelle Marchetta, adviser Dr. McHam
Jamie Sanecki, adviser Dr. Thuno
Amanda Lauren Smith, adviser Dr. Marter
Candice Yates, adviser Dr. Zervigon
| Michael Bzdak, Daniel Palmer and Meredith Bzdak |
2006 Bzdak Award winner Daniel Palmer in Milan |
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May 31, 2006: Dan Palmer at Achille Castiglioni’s Piazza Castello residence/studio, sitting in 40/80 Armchair designed by Achille Castiglioni in 1999. Photo taken by Giovanna Castiglioni, daughter of the designer.
