Information and updates on the Art History program at American University. We're also on twitter and blogging at auarthistory.wordpress.com.
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Meet Hannah!
Hannah is specializing in Japanese Art for her Masters degree in Art History. She chose to study at American University specifically for the Art History MA program. She gains inspiration from Frank Auerbach when producing her own artistry. She enjoys The Awning I By Auerbach as she finds the colors striking to her!
Happy First Day of Classes!
We hope everyone enjoyed their summer and are ready to get back to work!
Congratulations to our Art History graduates! We are very proud of your achievements and wish you all the best as you embark on your future endeavors!
We made it to the end of the semester!
Congratulations to everyone graduating, we are so proud of you! To our continuing students, we are so excited to see you again in the fall and to welcome our new students!
H.A.G.S.
New blog post!
Recap the 2024 Capstone Thesis Projects. We want to congratulate all of our 2nd Year Art History Master’s students on their hard work and dedication. We are so proud of you!!
Lia Burchianti, teaching assistant for Dr Allen's Washington DC Architecture class, is also an amazing photographer whose expressive and intimate images perfectly encapsulate our beautiful city. Thank you, Lia, for sharing your talent!
New blog post!
Check out the link in bio to recap the 2024 Career & Networking Night! Thank you again to everyone who participated!
Last Day of Classes!
Good luck to everyone on their finals and take some time to enjoy the beautiful weather!
🖼️: Berthe Morisot, Portrait of the artist’s daughter, Julie Manet, 1886
Claudia’s thesis explores Archibald Motley Jr’s After Fiesta, Remorse Siesta of 1959. The painting encompasses a dreamlike haze, somber undertone, and cast of inaccessible characters that Claudia examines against the popular understanding of Motley as a realist artist of the Harlem Renaissance Era. She instead situates the work through the lens of tourism based on Motley’s time in Mexico and argues that the painting reveals Motley’s relationship with surrealism and social commentary that grew out of this period.
Course Highlight: Medieval Art with Dr. Allen
Earlier this semester, Dr Allen’s Medieval Art class visited the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Students were amazed at the wide variety and of medieval objects on display, which included stained glass windows, reliquaries, sculptures, altarpieces, croziers, and even ivory mirror cases.
A. Renshaw’s capstone project focuses on Joan E. Biren’s (JEB) presentation Le***an Images in Photography: 1850-1984, colloquially called The D**e Show, that traveled the country in 1979-1984, with a revival performance in 2023. The D**e Show was a narrated slideshow presentation of historical and contemporary le***an photographs that was hosted in community spaces notably found outside museums. This project argues that the D**e Show was born from and ultimately contributed to the conversation of Le***an Visibility taking place in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Join us on Friday, April 19 from 6-7:30pm for Career Night! Remember to register for the event using the link in our bio!
Alumni joining us for the event include:
•Sarah Froonjian: Program Coordinator, AU Core Curriculum
•Carolyn Russo: Curator, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
•Laura Ryan: Adjunct Professor, American University
•Benjamin Feder: Assistant Director, Cheryl Numark Art Advisory
•Aly Schuman: Assistant Registrar, American University Art Museum
•Caroline Marsh: Administration, National Gallery of Art
•Shereka Mosley: Program Manager, Action Youth Media
•Rebecca Ljungren: Education Programs Manager, National Women’s History Museum
Faculty Spotlight: Laura Ryan
Adjunct Professor and alumni, Laura Ryan Co-Chaired the Association for Art History’s Annual Conference with Béatrice Cloutier-Trépanier. Ryan and her colleague are a PhD candidates at Queen’s University. The conference, NEW WAYS OF KNOWING FEMINIST ART HISTORES took place on April 3-5, 2024. This session examines feminist ways of knowing, including gossip, anecdote, intuition, autotheory, creative writing, imagination, and intuition, as answers to incomplete archives and sparse or biased literature, which continue to marginalize art histories of artists of color, women-identifying artists, and q***r artists. How do these anachronistic and/or non-traditional methods destabilize institutionalized feminist art history?
Lacey’s thesis focuses on the Cotton Sculptures created by artist and fashion designer Ruby Bailey. Each Cotton Sculpture is about 14 inches tall, made of cotton and glue, hand painted, and wears miniature fashion designs created by Bailey. Lacey works with a collection of nine Cotton Sculptures and Bailey’s autobiographical text “Cotton Sculpture - A First: ‘I Did it My Way,’” to argue that Bailey’s intentions with her Cotton Sculptures were to invent a new subgenre of sculpture that elevates fashion and textiles into the realm of high art, memorializes Black American history, and glorifies the Black woman. Lacey also explores Bailey’s theme for her Cotton Sculptures: “Fashion Highlights from The Gay Nineties to the Present,” to argue that Bailey has created an archive of twentieth century fashion that works to elevate Black fashion designs.
Save the date: Friday, April 19th, 2024
Join us for our annual Careers and Networking Night in Katzen 210! Meet with local alumni from the undergraduate and graduate Art History programs. Get to know what it’s like working at the Smithsonian, local galleries, and universities!
Check the link in bio to sign up. Everyone is invited!
Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Dujakovic
Dr. Dujakovic will be presenting her paper, “Learning Through Pictures: Diagrams as Thinking Tools in the Psalter of Robert De Lisle” at the 6th ARDIT International Congress presented by the Insitute for Research in Medieval Cultures at the University of Barcelona from May 15th to the 17th, 2024. The paper examines how diagrammatic images functioned as learning tools in the early-fourteenth-century English manuscript. By studying specific miniatures, the paper shows how diagrams help outline knowledge related to theology, but also reveal the process through which such learning is acquired.
This summer, Dr. Dujakovic will also be presenting at the SHARP Conference 2024: Global Book Cultures: Materialities, Collaborations, Access in the UK at the University of Reading in Berkshire from July 1st to the 5th. Her paper, “The Kalendrier des Bergiers and the Strategies of Reinvention,” explores early editions of the Shepherd’s Calendar, one of the most popular illustrated books in the first century of printing in France. By identifying different printing strategies, the paper reveals how printers experimented with the medium of illustrated books and adapted the title to the interest of different audiences.
🖼️: British Library, MS Arundel 83 II, folio 126.
🖼️: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, VELINS-518
Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Sadow
In 2022 during the Ann Ferren Conference at AU, Melissa Becher, Leslie Nellis, Taylor Morris, and Dr. Sam Sadow gave a presentation on the AU art history program’s digital capstone projects. That presentation morphed into a presentation by Becher and Dr. Sadow later that year at the Visual Resources Association’s National Conference, and that has now morphed into an article, published now in the winter issue of the VRA bulletin.
Come support our students at the 2024 Robyn Rafferty Mathias Student Research Conference this Saturday! Follow the link in our bio to register and see the full schedule!
Breakout Session II, 10.30-11.45am DMTI 119
•Giavanna Bambocci: “The Virgin Mary & Eve: “Underpinned by their Femininity:” An Analysis of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve”
•Jenna Mangis: “Mapping Difference and Power: Jacopo Ligozzi’s Pope Bonifacio VIII Receiving the Twelve Ambassadors (1592)”
•Jordan Delgado: “Liberation found in Andrea del Castagno’s Uomini Famosi”
•Lia Burchianti: “Hairy Mary: Female Prayer and Patronship in Fifteenth Century Italy”
•Lucy Phillips: “Reframing Tradition: Bisa Butler’s Radical Reinterpretation of Harriet Tubman in I Go to Prepare a Place For You”
Breakout Session III, 3pm-4.45pm, DMTI 115:
•Alexis Frorup: “Good Hair”
Milo’s capstone project focuses on the Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying Well), a manual on end-of-life care that originated in the 15th century. The book contains eleven woodcut images that illustrate the five temptations and accompanying inspirations one faces before death. Through analyzing the illustrations from the 15th-century editions, the interventions made by 16th-century printer Johann Weissenberger, and the intersection of print and mnemonics, the project argues for a deeper scholarly consideration of the Ars moriendi images and the ways in which they can inform audience interpretation and individual use.
Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Peng
Dr. Peng contributed her article “Gendered Blue: Women’s Jeans in Postwar Taiwan” to Threads of Globalization: Fashion, Textiles, and Gender in Asia in the Long Twentieth Century, an anthology authored by Melia Belli Rose. The book examines material culture throughout Asia and puts it in conversation with ideas of gender, production, and the preservation of tradition.
On February 5th, 2024, Dr. Peng gave a talk titled “Image of Women in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Art and Visual Culture” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the UK. This talk was a part of a course at the V&A Academy of The Arts of China and Korea which is one of the most extensive of its kind.
Juhianna’s capstone project explores Thornton Dial’s History Refused to Die of 2005. History Refuse to Die is a 8ft by 7ft freestanding assemblage sculpture that combines organic and inorganic material to present a commentary on labor and life in rural Alabama. Juhianna argues that the materials used in the sculpture are autobiographical in nature and represent Dial’s experiences in agriculture, heavy industry, and domestic labor. The piece also links Dial to the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend and Black vernacular yard artists—namely Mary Lee Bendolph and Lonnie Holly. In connecting the piece to Dial’s personal history of labor and other Black Alabama artists, Juhianna situates History Refused to Die into Dial’s oeuvre of works that engage with the complex histories of African American struggle and the theme of refusal, suggesting that Dial’s work manifests a history of endurance.
Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Butler
Dr. Butler’s new essay “Matters of the Flesh: Michelangelo’s Madonnas” was published in Mary, Mother of God: Devotion and Doctrine in the Visual Arts, 1450-1700, ed. B. Haeger, E. Wise, and J. Clifton (Brill, January 2024). Butler argues that Michelangelo was deeply engaged with Mary’s sacred carnality in his art, and calls for a more nuanced understanding of the long-held belief that he was concerned with masculine bodies and masculine line alone. Michelangelo’s Marian innovations in sculpture, painting, and drawing are contextualized here in relation to the more progressive Franciscan spirituality of Santa Croce, his home parish in Florence, rather than the conservative Dominican theology of Savonarola that predominates in current scholarship. In this reading, the artist’s insistence on the agency of Mary’s affective and immaculate maternal flesh offers a powerful co-redemptrix argument consistent with efforts to elevate her status in the Western Christian Church.
Together with other ongoing research on Michelangelo, Raphael, and Pollaiuolo, Dr. Butler is in the final stages of an essay on the importance of Sappho, the lone female intellectual represented in Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura; this is part of a larger re-reading of the Poetry (“Parnassus”) fresco and its broader importance in the room. She is also looking forward to participating in two conferences in Rome next fall, where she will present on the feminine Virtues and Justice in the Stanza della Segnatura and on sensorial gendered bodies in the lower wall frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.
Dr Pearson and Dr Allen will be attending the Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference in Chicago, 21-23 March 2024. Dr Pearson will present a paper entitled, “Archetypal Marriage in the Ghent Altarpiece,” and as the president of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender, she will preside over the annual society keynote and reception. Dr Allen will present a paper entitled “Devotion and Design in San Giovanni in Bragora in Venice” in a session she organized, called “Furnishing the Renaissance Church Interior: Materiality, Function, and Space.”
happy spring break 🌷
We hope everyone has a restful week off. Go see some art, be outside and enjoy the beautiful weather!
🖼️: Vincent van Gogh, Green Wheat Fields, Auvers, 1890, 72.39 x 91.44 cm, National Gallery of Art
new blog post! link in bio
Recap the 2024 Art History Spring Lecture with us. Dr. Rivers Ryan, curator of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, presented an upcoming exhibition she has been working on for over 5 years.
Middle Atlantic Symposium
2nd year MA student, Grace McCormick, represented AU at the Mid-Atlantic Symposium on Saturday at the National Gallery of Art. Grace worked closely with her thesis advisor, Dr. Elder to prepare for this prestigious event. She explores Mickalene Thomas’s installation A Moment’s Pleasure, commissioned by the Baltimore Museum of Art from November 2019 to May 2022.
Kaelee’s thesis examines intercultural relationships between Spain, the Netherlands, and Peru through a decorated musical instrument produced in the Spanish-controlled Netherlands by Hans Rucker in 1581. The Flemish double virginal features portrait medallions of the King and Queen of Spain—Philip II and Anne of Austria—as well as a Latin phrase which proclaims, “music makes labor sweet” and a painting which depicts a lavish garden party. The instrument was likely sent as a gift to the Viceroyalty of Spain stationed in Peru during the 16th century. Kaelee asserts that the virginal is a remnant of European expansion and colonization as it bears the residue of the Spanish Empire’s capitalization on the labor and goods of those less privileged. This is accomplished through examining the royal portrait medallions and their claim of authority, the implications of labor depicted in the garden party painting and inscription, and comparing them to the forced labor inflicted on the native people of Peru in the Spanish colonies.
📸: Hans Rucker, Double Virginal, c. 1581. Photos courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Join us Friday, February 23rd for our Spring Lecture in the Welcome Center lecture room (201)! The reception begins at 5:30pm and the lecture will follow at 6.
The Buffalo AKG Art Museum curator, Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan, will preview her upcoming exhibition. “Electric Op” explores the relationship between electronic art and culture. Learn how new technologies and aesthetics of the Information Age have been shaping the art world.
Check out our new blog post!!! link in bio
Recap the 2023 Feminist Art History Conference with us. If you didn’t get a chance to join us, this is a great opportunity to see what you missed!
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