06/15/2023
The Krane Art History Guest Residency Program (Fall 2023)
The Department of Art History and Architectural Studies at Connecticut College is pleased to announce that Lucy Sante and Natalie M. Curley have been selected for the Krane Art History Guest Residency Program in fall 2023. Supported with a generous gift from Connecticut College Trustee Jonathan Krane '90, this will be the inaugural year of the Residency Program.
“We are excited to welcome Lucy Sante and Natalie Curley as the first participants in the Krane Art History Guest Residency Program,” said Christopher Steiner, Lucy C. McDannel ‘22 Professor of Art History and Anthropology. “By introducing our students to such innovative scholars and experts in their field, it is our hope that students will recognize the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to learning, and especially the significance of material culture and inherited artifacts in the social construction of knowledge and history.”
Lucy Sante is an award-winning author, a chronicler of early twentieth-century America, a historian of photography, and a peerless critic of visual culture. Her book Folk Photography, a landmark study of American photo postcards, established the importance of vernacular photography “as a significant and underrecognized body of amateur folk art.” Sante has been acclaimed as one of the “handful of living masters of the American language, as well as a singular historian and philosopher of the American experience.” Natalie Curley is an internationally-recognized collector of vintage amateur photography and Americana. Her collection focuses on the themes of identity, dignity, freedom, integration, isolation, community and safety in the earliest decades of the 20th century. Both Sante and Curley will work with students in Professor Steiner’s "AHI 250: Perspectives on Photography" to interpret and curate an exhibition of 19th- and early 20th-century photographs and associated ephemera.*
Lucy Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium, in 1954. Her books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, The Other Paris, Folk Photography, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and Nineteen Reservoirs. She is the recipient of a Whiting Award, Guggenheim and Cullman fellowships, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), and an Infinity Award for Writing from the International Center of Photography. Sante has contributed to the New York Review of Books
since 1981 and to many other publications. She is recently retired from teaching the history of photography and writing at Bard College, and lives in Ulster County, New York.
Natalie M. Curley is an independent social historian and photo reference dealer based in a historic coal valley outside of Pittsburgh. Trained in the folk art and antique markets she treats images as primary source material, prizing ethnographic insights and poignancy above more traditional art-historical aesthetics. For the past two decades, Curley has aided archives in (re)writing a more inclusive American history by consulting and supplying images that document the experiences of the working poor, female, migrant, immigrant and minority labor populations from the alternative vantage point of their unique lived experience.
*The exhibition is scheduled to open in the Charles E. Shain Library on Wednesday, November 8, with a public lecture by Lucy Sante at 4:30pm in the Charles Chu Asian Art Reading Room. The exhibition closes on Friday, December 15, 2023.
For additional information or questions, please contact Christopher Steiner ([email protected]).
