New faculty: Delia Solomons, Visiting Assistant Professor

The Newcomb Art Department welcomes Delia Solomons to the faculty as Visiting Assistant Professor of  Modern and Contemporary Global Art.

Prof. Solomons specializes in twentieth-century art of the Americas and Europe. Her research examines intersections of globalization, exhibition practices, visual culture, and politics. Her current project explores the sudden surge in exhibitions of Latin American art across the United States in the 1960s, the years directly following the Cuban Revolution; the project reveals how, as cold-war tensions escalated in the Americas, museums offered privileged spaces to stage both cultural diplomacy and dissent. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Humanities Initiative at New York University, the Institute of Fine Arts, and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art.

Solomons received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts in 2015. Prior to coming to Tulane, she taught at New York University and the City University of New York. She also co-curated the exhibition Sari Dienes at The Drawing Center in 2014 and has worked on curatorial projects for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Grey Art Gallery.

Solomons offers new courses to Tulane undergraduate and graduate students including Global Catalysts: Artists Respond to Disaster, Revolution, and Liberation , Art and Issues in Latin America After 1945, and Medium Matters in Contemporary Art: Dirt, Paint, Mirrors, and Lights. 

CAC's REVERB: Past, Present and Future

Levee Break Sculpture by Gene Koss, the Maxine and Ford Graham Chair in Fine Arts, is on view at REVERB: Past, Preset, Future, a juried group exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans. The exhibition explores the evolution of art and artistic practices in New Orleans and its surrounding region over the last decade since Katrina and will be on display August 1 to November 1, 2015. The show also includes works by faculty Aaron Collier and Adam Mysock, as well as alumnae Anita Cooke, Loren Schwerd, and Sidonie Villere.

New faculty: Leslie Geddes, Visiting Assistant Professor, Art History

The Newcomb Art Department welcomes Leslie Geddes to the faculty as Visiting Assistant Professor. Leslie Geddes specializes in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture. She received her Ph.D. in the history of art from Princeton University in 2014. Her research has been supported by a grant from the Kluge Foundation, a Donald and Mary Hyde Fellowship, and a Readership in Renaissance Studies at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti in Florence.

Prof. Geddes’s research focuses on how early modern architects and engineers studied and depicted the natural landscape, specifically attending to the use of drawing in the production of knowledge. Her first book project, Watermarks: Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance Mastery of Nature, analyzes the subject of water in art in conjunction with the practical undertakings of hydraulic engineering. She has recently published two articles, one on Leonardo’s geological studies and another on his drawings of mobile bridges, an ancient military technology. She is also writing an article on Renaissance descriptions of experiments that agitate natural phenomena, such as boiling water or lighting fires.

Prior to coming to Tulane, she was a curatorial research assistant at the Morgan Library & Museum and a bibliographer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Unusual inspirations make fascinating art

Discarded folded paper road maps, recycled food cans and other “found” objects that evoke memories — these are the inspirations for five artists featured in the “Expanded Media” exhibition on view now through Sept. 24 at the Carroll Gallery on the Tulane University uptown campus.

When curator Laura Richens started planning the exhibit at the gallery, which is in the exhibition space of the Newcomb Art Department in the Woldenberg Art Center, she searched for “something visually exciting” and found it in the works by artists Anita Cooke, Sadie Sheldon, Nikki Rosato, Mark Grote and Rontherin Ratliff.

“I want to challenge our students and audience to think outside the parameters of traditional artistic media, and to see that there is a wide range of media that can be used in visual art,” Richens said. 

Carroll Gallery hours are 9 a.m. – 4 p.m., Monday through Friday. 

[Carol Schlueter, Tulane New Wave, September 14, 2015] 

WHAT IS A COPY? a film series

New Faculty: Emily Hermant, Asisstant Professor, Sculpture

The Newcomb Art Department welcomes Emily Hermant to the faculty as Assistant Professor of Sculpture. Hermant is an interdisciplinary artist whose large-scale drawings, sculptures, and installations explore themes of communication, gender, labor, and the spatial experiences of the body. She received her BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University, Montréal, Québec, Canada in 2004 and her MFA as a Trustee Merit Scholar in Studio Art/Fiber & Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Ace Art in Winnipeg (2015), CIRCA Art Actuel in Montréal (2014), the Evanston Art Center (2012), The Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts (2012); and group exhibitions at Galerie Nicolas Robert in Montréal (2014), Virginia Commonwealth University (2011), Hyde Park Art Center (2010), Triennale di Milano Museum in Italy (2009), and the Museum of Arts & Design in New York (2008). Her work has been featured in LVL3 Media, ArtSlant, Espace Sculpture, The Washington Post, and TimeOut Chicago. Hermant has been awarded grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des Arts et Lettres du Québec as well as residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, Ox-Bow School of Art, The Ragdale Foundation, and the Nordic Artists’ Centre in Norway.

NEW CLASS Constructing Nature: The History and Theory of Landscape

ARHS 6814:

Constructing Nature: The History and Theory of Landscape (1450–1800) 

Prof. Leslie A. Geddes

lgeddes1@tulane.edu
Mondays 3:00–5:15 pm 
Woldenberg Art Center
Room 209

The ways in which our society figures in its relation to the natural environment has never been so urgent. This seminar studies the history of that relation, through an examination of the significance and meaning of "landscape" in art, literature, architecture, and landscape design.

This course studies how conceptions of landscape, evident in both physical forms and poetic and artistic representations shaped the ideological and natural terrain of Europe from Antiquity to the 18th century, with particular emphasis on the period of 1450–1800.
Particular attention will be paid to the socio-cultural dimensions of the landscape, both natural and man-made, and the ways in which the shaping of the landscape and the natural environment has impacted humanity’s experience of the world. Class meetings will focus on a range of issues, including ownership, memory, political and economic power, the status of the landscape architect or painter, the dissemination of knowledge and technology, and symbolic meaning.

Class topics address architectural and landscape design projects as well as literary and artistic approaches. Readings will range from close examinations of specific sites (Versailles) and typologies (Italian Renaissance villas, English gardens) to landscape paintings and prints, to broader engagements with themes that cut across time.

Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates

Register here: http://classschedule.tulane.edu