Stephanie Porras awarded grants and fellowships for research and publication

Assistant Professor Stephanie Porras' forthcoming book Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination (Penn State University Press, 2016) proposes a new understanding of Bruegel as an artist deeply concerned with history. For this work Dr. Porras has received a Millard Meiss Publication Award from the College Art Association, a Kress publication grant from the Renaissance Society of America, as well as a Historians of Netherlandish Art Fellowship award. 

Dr. Porras has also been awarded a short term fellowship at the New York Public Library this May, where she will be conducting research on her next book project, Maerten de Vos: a Renaissance Life in between. This project is a micro history of an understudied yet ubiquitous early modern artist, considering the impact of travel, the wars of religion and the dawn of globalization on artistic identity and visual culture.

[Peasant Dance, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna, Austria]

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.

Unorthodox: Morris Hirshfield and Modern Art in the 1940s

Unorthodox: Morris Hirshfield and Modern Art in the 1940s
A lecture by Richard Meyer, Stanford University
Thursday, April 9 at 6:30pm
Stone Auditorium, Room 210, Woldenberg Art Center, Uptown Campus

Please join us for a lecture by Richard Meyer, Professor of Art History at Stanford University, who will speak on Morris Hirshfield and Modern Art in the 1940s. The lecture is free and open to the public and will be followed by a reception.

A tailor, slipper manufacturer, and Orthodox Jew, the self-taught artist Morris Hirshfield created a series of female nudes and animal paintings  that were exhibited in a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943.  Widely ridiculed by critics, the Hirshfield exhibition contributed to the firing of Alfred Barr as the museum’s director that same year.

This paper considers the strange visual logic of Hirshfield’s paintings and the critical scorn they attracted when shown at MOMA.  Hirshfield was referred to as “The Master of the Two Left Feet” in the press because of his penchant for depicting the female body in that fashion.  In his lecture, Meyer will suggest that several forms of confusion (between right and left, back and front, fantasy and reality, figuration and decoration) structured both Hirshfield’s paintings and their critical reception in the 1940s.

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.

Jane Cassidy (MFA 2014) exhibition at the Work Gallery, Ann Arbor

Jane Cassidy:
Fits of Easy Reflexion
March 14–April 5 | Work Gallery | 306 S. State St.

An exhibition of three visual music installations by Jane Cassidy is on view at the Work Gallery in association with the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Square Ball and Purple Tinged Pearl Buttoned Bangled-Billy are works for stereo sound, video projector, and fog machine; They Upped Their Game After The Oranges employs stereo sound and projection mapping onto a corner.

Originally from from Galway, Ireland, Jane Cassidy studied music composition and animation, earning her Masters in Music and Media Technologies from Trinity College Dublin in 2008 and and an MFA in Digital Art from Tulane University. Her work explores visual music, live visuals, electro-acoustic composition and multi-channel video.

Tulane Glass welcomes visiting artist Mick Meilahn

Dave Hickey leads group critique for MFA students

Dave Hickey brought his unique brand of art criticism and writing to New Orleans at the invitation of members of The Front, a cooperative gallery on St. Claude Avenue, with support from Tulane University, and Press Street.  While in town in mid-March, he led a group critique with Tulane's studio art graduate students.  Quotations from that critique include, "Don't wear dorky clothes!" as well as, "You have to make a lot of work," and "Look people in the eye" along with solid technical advice, and suggestions for selling one's work.  Mr. Hickey was very generous with his time and his unfiltered opinions, as his followers have come to expect.