Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers

PUBLICATION ALERT: Art History alum Zoe Ariyama (BA, 2022) recently published an article in the Brooklyn Rail on the New Orleans Museum of Art's current exhibition “Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers.”

Art History alum Rebecca Villalpando (MA, 2022) contributed to this exhibition during her time as a graduate curatorial intern at NOMA.

Read the article here: https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/artseen/Called-to-the-Camera-Black-American-Studio-Photographers

[James Presley Ball, Alexander S. Thomas, ca. late 1850s. Quarter plate daguerreotype. Courtesy Cincinnati Art Museum]

Dutch Americas Symposium

On December 9-10, 2022, the Newcomb Art Department will host a symposium marking the end of the first iteration of the Dutch Americas humanities lab, co-taught by Stephanie Porras at Tulane and Aaron Hyman at Johns Hopkins. On Friday, December 9th, Professor Carrie Anderson will deliver a keynote address on the topic of the Dutch West India Company’s presence in the Atlantic world. 

Material Matters in the Dutch Atlantic World: Albert Eckhout’s Paintings of an African Man and Woman

lecture by Carrie Anderson, Middlebury College

Friday, December 9 2022 at 5:30 PM 

Stone Auditorium, Woldenberg Art Center

download symposium program (pdf)

 

The following day, graduate students from Johns Hopkins and Tulane will be presenting their final projects - object-based research on the visual and material culture of the Dutch West India Company (WIC). The WIC, founded in 1621, traded across the Atlantic, with footholds in regions of New York, Curaçao, Guyana, Brazil, Suriname, Ghana and Benin – dealing primarily in fur, tobacco, sugar, gold and enslaved Africans. Modeled on laboratory courses in the sciences, the seminar saw teams comprising of students from both schools working on a specific geography (New Netherland/New York, the Caribbean, West Africa, Brazil) working together in order to identify, research, catalog, and publish relevant items in a web-based database. This symposium celebrates and reflects on this groundbreaking foundational research in an emerging field of art historical scholarship, the assembly of a corpus of objects, sites, and materials related to the Dutch trading companies present in the Americas. 

The Dutch Americas Symposium is supported by Johns Hopkins and the Newcomb College Institute’s Dorothy Beckemeyer Skau Art and Music Fund.

Objects in Focus: Clothes by Betsy Packard, MFA 1978

Join us for this month’s Objects in Focus gallery talk, which will focus on work of Betsy Packard (MFA, 1978).
 

Friday, November 4, 12 pm

Newcomb Art Museum

This talk will be led by Alex Landry, Curatorial Assistant at the Newcomb Art Museum and a 2nd-year Art History MA student.

This event is free and open to all.

New Publications by Art History Alumni and Graduate Students

Victoria I. Lyall (MA Tulane, PhD UCLA), the Mayer Curator of Pre-Columbian Art at the Denver Art Museum, co-edited a recently published book titled ReVisión: A New Look at Art in the Americas.

“ReVisión” collects essays from scholars of Latin American art history to help others understand the region’s nuanced history of creation, destruction, and renewal. In addition to essays, ReVisión showcases work from artists such as Alexander Apóstol, Juan Enrique Bedoya, Johanna Calle, and Ronny Quevedo in order to help visualize the questions of identity, exploitation of natural resources, and displacement from both before and after the conquest.” - University of Chicago Press

The book is also accompanied by an upcoming exhibition at the Denver Art Museum (dates TBA).

Lily Filson (BA Tulane, MA Syracuse, PhD, Ca'Foscari) published an article titled "Reformation England and the Performance of Wonder: Automata Technology and the Transfer of Power from Church to State" in Society and Politics vol. 13, no. 2.

Lucia Momoh (MA Tulane) published an article titled “The Art of Erasure” in The Iron Lattice, an art and culture print magazine based in New Orleans.

Two of our Art History and Latin American Studies PhD candidates have just recently published Smarthistory essays, "The History of Mexico: Diego Rivera’s Murals at the National Palace" by Megan Flattley and "Painting Aztec History" by Hayley Woodward. This was part of a special COVID-era program to support emerging art history scholars, sponsored by the Kress Foundation. 

Megan Flattley awarded Fulbright-Hays Fellowship

The Newcomb Art Department is thrilled to announce that Megan Flattley, PhD candidate in Art History and Latin American Studies at Tulane, has been awarded a Fulbright-Hays DDRA (Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad) 12-month grant. She plans to conduct research in Mexico City June 2021 to May 2022. Her dissertation, “Out of the Fragments, New Worlds: Perspective and Spatiality in the Work of Diego Rivera, 1913-1933” analyzes how Rivera responded to Cubism’s break with linear perspective in his transition from easel painting to mural work. Her research foregrounds Rivera’s place in an international network of avant-garde artists concerned with modernist theories of space and revolutionary politics. Congratulations, Megan!!! 

Image: Rivera’s mural in the Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.

Up next @TulaneArt

Open NOW in the Carroll Gallery, Vacancy, an MFA Thesis Exhibition by Jarrod Jackson. The exhibition is on view Feb. 20 – March 4, 2020  (*closed on 2/24 and 2/25). A reception will be held on  Friday, February 28, from 5:30 – 7:30 pm, with a walkthrough by the artist at 6:00 pm. Carroll Gallery hours:  M – F, 9 am – 4 pm. Gallery closed on official Tulane holidays, including Lundi Gras and Mardi Gras (Feb. 24 and Feb. 25).

Please join the Newcomb Art Department for the 2020 Art History Graduate Student Association Lecture, "The Apocalypse of the Duc de Berry and the Apocalyptic Great Schism," by Richard K. Emmerson, Visiting Distinguished Professor, Florida State University, on Thursday, February 27th at 6 pm in Stone Auditorium. This lecture is supported by the Terry K. Simmons Fund.

On Friday, February 28th we will be screening "Unveiled Views: Muslim Women Artists Speak Out," a film by Alba Sotorra, at 5:30pm in Stone Auditorium. The Middle East Film Nights at Tulane series is sponsored by Newcomb Art Department, Newcomb Intitute, and CELT (Center for Engaged Learning and Teaching). This is a FREE screening and refreshments will be served.

Alumni News: Marjorie Rawle

Marjorie Rawle, a 2019 M.A. graduate, has joined the Fitchburg Art Museum in Fitchburg, MA, as a Terrana Curatorial Fellow through summer 2020. The Terrana Curatorial Fellowship, a 13-month, full-time appointment for a recent M.A./Ph.D. graduate in museum studies/art history, is designed to launch emerging curators into substantial museum careers by providing an immersive educational experience. 

Marjorie completed her M.A. thesis on the creative relationship between AbEx painter Grace Hartigan and New York school poet Frank O'Hara, and she completed a graduate internship at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Alumni News: Adriana Obiols-Roca

2019 Art History M.A. graduate Adriana Obiols-Roca was recently awarded the Stone Center for Latin American Studies' Donald Robertson Prize for best paper in the Humanities by a Latin American Studies Graduate Student. This award honors Donald Robertson, a professor of Art History at Tulane for more than 25 years and a pioneer in the field of Latin American art history. He authored the groundbreaking Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan Schools, and motivated a generation of budding Art Historians and Ethnohistorians.

Adriana's award-winning paper, "The Battle of the Whale: Bataillean Aesthetics in El Techo de la Ballena," analyzed the 1960s Venezuelan artistic and literary group El Techo de la Ballena, in relation to the dissident surrealism of French writer Georges Bataille. While El Techo has been the focus of sustained analysis on the part of literary critics, the group’s artistic production has received comparatively less attention. Their artistic production has previously been understood as part of a continuation of postwar gestural abstraction, and as a rejection of the geometric abstract art and modernist architecture that characterized the developmentalist state in 1950s-70s Venezuela. However, Adriana’s paper convincingly argues that El Techo’s practice should not be understood as a belated modernist project, but as quintessentially of its time, as a particularly Venezuelan take on the 1960s neo-avant-garde strategies of entropy, base materiality, and assemblage.

Alumni news: Shannah Rose named Kress fellow

Shannah Rose (MA, Art History, 2019) was named a 2019 recipient of the Samuel H. Kress Fellowship in Italian at the Middlebury Language Schools. As a Kress Fellow, she will enroll in Middlebury’s intensive 7-week language immersion program held this summer at Mills College in Oakland, California. In fall 2019, Shannah will continue her research in medieval and early modern Italian art history as a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

Ph.D. candidate Patricia Lagarde named a Fulbright-Hays fellow

As a 2019 Fulbright-Hays fellow, Patricia Alexander Lagarde, a doctoral candidate in art history and Latin American studies, will conduct research in Peru for seven months at Chavín de Huántar, a ceremonial center in the Andes mountains that dates to 1200-500 BCE. She will focus on a group of anthropomorphic stone sculptures known as the tenon heads that were installed on the exterior walls of the temple architecture. Her project will explore the variety in style, the assortment in material, and the overall viewer experience of the sculptures. Lagarde will be an affiliate with the Chavín International Research Center (Centro Internacional de Investigación de Chavín) where she will work with archeologists to examine what the sculptures’ roles were in the ceremonial and religious traditions at the time. While only one sculpture is still installed at the site, more than 100 existed, varying in shape and size. This fellowship will support Lagarde’s goal to create a comprehensive catalog of the tenon heads at Chavín de Huántar.  Studying their materiality, Lagarde hopes to gain a greater understanding of the Ancient Andean peoples’ perspective of the natural landscape as animate—she’s interested in how specific stones were chosen, potentially representing specific regions, communities, or ancestors.

Lucia Abramovich named Associate Curator of Latin American Art

The San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) announced this week that it has hired Lucia Abramovich as its new Associate Curator of Latin American Art. Over her career, Ms. Abramovich has spent time working in various institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection of Harvard University, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, where she served as a curatorial fellow from 2013 to 2016. During this period, Ms. Abramovich worked with the institution’s collection of Spanish Colonial art and objects. She is expected to graduate in April of 2019 with a PhD from Tulane University, and will start her position at SAMA in June.

read more ... Glasstire {Texas visual art}  SAMA Hires Curator of Latin American Art

Call for applications: funded MA in Art History

Mia L. Bagneris and Mickalene Thomas speak at Mickalene Thomas: Waiting on a Prime-Time Star exhibition opening at Newcomb Art Museum. Wednesday, January 18, 2017. (photo: Josh Brasted)

The Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University in New Orleans is accepting applications in Art History. The application deadline is February 1, 2019. Further information and application guidelines can be found here. The application process can be completed online here. 

The Master of Arts in Art History at the Newcomb Art Department of Tulane University allows students to work closely with dedicated faculty who specialize in a wide range of artistic practices and historical contexts – from Pre-Columbian to Contemporary Art. Students also benefit from affiliate faculty in Tulane’s Department of Classical Studies and the Stone Center for Latin American Studies, opportunities to study and conduct research abroad in the summer and from close links with Newcomb Art Department’s MFA program. The department is particularly strong in the study of the art of Latin America and of the early modern period, and students may draw on the rich interdisciplinary faculty and resources at Tulane in these areas. Each semester, the Department brings a number of visiting artists, scholars, curators and critics to campus for lectures and workshops, introducing students to artists and thinkers shaping the future of the discipline.

Completed over two years, the Art History MA promotes critical inquiry and independent research via small, dynamic seminar courses, culminating in the writing of a thesis. Recent alumni of the MA in Art History have gone on to top PhD programs in the discipline, including those Columbia, Bard, CUNY, and to pursue careers in museums and galleries, as well as arts administration and arts education. All admitted MA students are offered tuition wavers and are typically fully funded via research and teaching fellowships (approximately $18,130 per year). In addition, the department offers research and travel funding to support students’ thesis research and participation in disciplinary conferences and workshops.

Located in New Orleans, a vibrant and culturally rich city in the Gulf South, the Newcomb Art Department draws from a diverse and exciting range of artistic and cultural production. Local resources include The New Orleans Museum of Art, Prospect New Orleans, an international art Biennial, the newly established Joan Mitchell Center, The Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and Pelican Bomb, a leading arts criticism organization.

Art History Faculty: Adrian Anagnost, Mia Bagneris, Elizabeth Boone, Michelle Foa, Holly Flora, Leslie Geddes, Michael Plante, Stephanie Porras

Recent visiting art historians, curators, critics and artists include:Zarouhie Abdalian, Carol Armstrong, Tania Bruguera, Mel Chin, Darby English, Theaster Gates, Miranda Lash, Yukio Lippit, Maurie McInnis, Richard Meyer, Helen Molesworth, Jeffrey Moser, Alexander Nagel, Trevor Paglen, Joanne Pilsbury, Debora Silverman, Arlene Shechet, Jenni Sorkin, Mickalene Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, Marvin Trachtenberg and Lisa Yuskavage.

Application deadline: February 1, 2019

Tulane University

Newcomb Art Department 

202 Woldenberg Art Center 

New Orleans, Louisiana 70118

United States 

Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference

by Shannah Rose, MA Student in Art History,  Wednesday, April 18, 2018

The Renaissance Society of America (RSA) held its 64th Annual Conference on March 22nd – 24th, 2018, hosted by Hilton New Orleans Riverside and sponsored by Tulane’s Latin American Library, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and SEL Studies in English Literature. The largest international society dedicated to the study of the era 1300-1700, RSA is a prestigious platform for scholars of various disciplines in the liberal arts to present current research projects and new directions for their respective fields.

RSA 2018 commenced on March 21st with a concert at the Immaculate Conception Church and receptions at the Latin American Library and the New Orleans Museum of Art. The exhibit featured at the Library included items from its world-renown collection, including original Mesoamerican painted manuscripts as well as some of the earliest products of sixteenth-century Spanish American presses. The conference itself featured a full program of nearly 600 formal papers, roundtable discussions, and plenary sessions delivered by distinguished, junior, and independent scholars, museum professionals, and doctoral students from various countries, institutions, and disciplines.

Notable topics ranged from panels on music and devotional paintings in medieval Ethiopia, to “sacred geographies” in Aztec Mexico; from roundtables on interdisciplinary research on the global Renaissance, to ideas on incorporating the oft overlooked south of Italy in teaching methods. Faculty from Tulane’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) program in particular was well represented: Professor Holly Flora delivered a paper on gender and emotion in a Trecento illuminated manuscript, and Professor Stephanie Porras organized a session on knowledge production in early modern print culture. Doctoral students’ papers were also accepted to the conference: Lucia Abramovich presented on collecting Spanish colonial art at the New Orleans Museum of Art, and Jennifer Saracino presented on cosmography and cartography in colonial Mexico City.

Each year RSA provides a platform for students and scholars alike to share their research and create exciting new connections with colleagues that cross disciplinary, linguistic, and international borders. We are most fortunate to have had the opportunity to welcome the conference in New Orleans, particularly given the city’s cross-cultural and multilingual heritage.

The Renaissance Society of America’s 65th Annual Conference will take place spring 2019 in Toronto, ON.

Debora Silverman: 'The Great Forgetting' and the Never Seen

On Monday March 19th, the Newcomb Art Department and the Art History Graduate Association present: 

“‘The Great Forgetting’ and the Never Seen: Violence, Modernism, and the Visual Unconscious of Belgian Colonialism at the Tervuren Royal Museum for Central Africa, 1897-2017”

a talk by by Debora Silverman, Distinguished Professor of History and Art History at UCLA and the University of California Presidential Chair in Modern European History, Art and Culture.

The lecture will analyze the relationship between Belgian Art Nouveau and the country’s violent colonial rule in the Congo Free State.

Monday, March 19th at 6:30pm
Stone Auditorium, 210 Woldenberg Art Center 
Tulane University

Erin McCutcheon awarded a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship

Erin McCutcheon, PhD candidate in Art History/Latin American Studies has been awarded a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies. The fellowship supports the final year of dissertation writing for PhD candidates in the humanities and social sciences whose work addresses women’s and gendered issues in interdisciplinary and original ways. 

Ms. McCutcheon talks about the points of personal passion that have sustained her research:

I began my academic career at the age of 18 with aspirations of becoming a painter. Fortunately, I quickly realized I wasn’t going to hack it in that profession, yet my love for art endured. I had always been interested in art made by women, and was struck that in all of my undergraduate courses, women, and especially those from outside a Euro-American center, were absent from our discussions. Where they were included, their work was treated one-dimensionally, usually in terms of biographical details, and not given the critical analysis afforded to their male contemporaries. During this same time, I was in the middle of my own discovery of feminist theory, which gave me the vocabulary I desperately needed to voice my frustrations. I resolved to devote myself to not simply unearthing the histories of forgotten or overlooked women artists, but to forging new strategies of representation that might disrupt the structures and processes that kept these marginal histories from view.

To my amazement, roughly 15 years after beginning my academic journey, I remain on the same path. Not enough seems to have changed; however, it is encouraging to see more projects under way that resist repeating the mistakes of art history. Most recently, I was a part of one such project: the first retrospective exhibition of an artist at the center of my dissertation research, Mónica Mayer. The exhibition’s format resisted traditional tropes and mechanisms that have historically worked to exclude women artists, and instead functions as a “retrocollective.” This simple shift more accurately reflects Mayer’s own commitment to the feminist movement and numerous collaborations over the course of her career. The exhibition, “Si tiene dudas… pregunte: Una exposición retrocolectiva de Mónica Mayer” will run through July 2016 at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City – a great reason to take a trip to Mexico this year!

Ms. McCutcheon’s dissertation title is Strategic Dispositions: Women, Art and Tradition in Mexico, 1975–1990.

http://woodrow.org/news/perspectives/meet-the-fellows-2016-womens-studies-fellow-erin-mccutcheon

Sonya Wohletz receives Fulbright-Hays award

Sonya Wohletz, a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American Studies and Art History at Tulane University, is a 2015-16 recipient of the Fulbright-Hays award to perform dissertation research in Quito, Ecuador.

Sonya received her undergraduate degree at the University of Oregon where she studied Spanish and art history. Having grown up in Northern New Mexico, Sonya was always fascinated by colonial art and architecture and was furthermore inspired to pursue research on the subject after living in Argentina and Chile during her undergraduate studies.

A student of Dr. Elizabeth Boone, Sonya's research centers on seventeenth-century devotional art from the city of Quito in modern-day Ecuador. Her dissertation, entitled "Lilies and Ash: Crisis and Artistic Production in Late Seventeenth-Century Quito," explores how miraculous images functioned during times of upheaval, drought, plague, and economic decline in the Andes. 

Her research in Quito will consist of extensive archival work in the city's various repositories. She will also analyze myriad paintings and sculptures housed within the city's historic convents, churches, and houses.

Emily Floyd awarded John Carter Brown Fellowship

Emily Floyd, PhD candidate in Art History/Latin American Studies, was awarded a four month John Carter Brown Library Associates Fellowship. 

Emily is currently at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University conducting research for her dissertation, “Matrices of Devotion: Lima's Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Devotional Prints and Local Religion in the Viceroyalty of Peru.”

Allison Caplan joins the Getty Graduate Internship Program

Allison Caplan, a Ph.D. student in Art History and Latin American Studies, will be joining the Getty Graduate Internship Program for 2015-2016. She will be conducting research for the upcoming Pre-Columbian art exhibition, “Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas,” and its accompanying catalogue. The exhibition is part of the Getty’s initiative, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, and will show at the Getty and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017. Allison’s research for the exhibition builds on her work for her Ph.D. dissertation on central Mexican indigenous aesthetics and materiality.

Erin McCutcheon awarded grants to research feminist art in Mexico City

Erin L. McCutcheon, PhD Candidate in Art History and Latin American Studies, has recently been awarded research grants from both the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund and the Organization for Research on Women in Communication in support of her dissertation project, “Strategic Dis-Positions: Feminist Art in Mexico City, 1975–90.”  

The Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund was established in 1991 in honor of the anthropologist Ruth Schlossberg Landes, and provides support for interdisciplinary research on subjects including gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, minority populations, culture and education. 

The Organization for Research on Women and Communication provides grants to assist feminist scholars in completing research projects that privilege and advance an understanding of the intersectionalities and complexities that define women’s lives.  

Erin is currently completing her fieldwork in Mexico City.  She is conducting an oral history project with feminist artists residing there, and has been assisting in planning the upcoming retrospective exhibition for the artist Mónica Mayer, to be held at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in 2016.

Jennifer Saracino named Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellow

Jennifer Saracino, a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Latin American Studies, has been appointed as a Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies for the academic year of 2015-2016. 

As a fellow, she will be pursuing research for her Ph.D. dissertation project entitled, "Shifting Landscape: Depictions of Environmental & Cultural Disruption in the Mapa Uppsala." The Mapa Uppsala is one of the earliest maps of post-Conquest Mexico City painted by indigenous hands. By combining studies of Mesoamerican and European cartography with a formal analysis of the Mapa Uppsala, she plans to demonstrate how the Mapa Uppsala is a testament to the lived experience of early colonial artists living in Mexico-Tenochtitlan.​