Studio Art Student Art Awards

The Newcomb Art Department is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2021 Studio Art Awards.

The Class of 1914 Prize in Art: Eden Weinstein

The first thing that struck me about Eden was her positive attitude and her willingness to think outside the box. Eden was willing not only to finish the task at hand, but to create something with quality and distinction.  She took constructive criticism well and was also willing to take the time to give a thoughtful critique of the work of others. I was constantly impressed with her ability to think and produce with a perspective both interesting and different from those around her. I feel assured that the qualities which caused her to thrive in the Tulane Art Department will be invaluable for her future endeavors.  On another note, I would like to add that I feel it important to reference her personal qualities along with her academic qualifications.  All in all, Eden is a unique individual with an extraordinary capacity to rise to any challenge handed to her.

            

The Alberta “Rusty” Collier Memorial Award in 2D Art: Elana Bush

During her tenure at Tulane, Elana has been a fixture in the photography area. Elana is a powerhouse. She is incredibly smart, makes beautiful photographs, and works incredibly hard. Additionally, the bar Elana sets for herself is exceptionally high and inspires everyone around her to be better and work harder to create. On top of all of that, she is generous. She is always willing to help her peers with a shoot or sit down to talk about their ideas. During her tenure at Tulane, she has become tremendously skilled in both digital and traditional practices and used these skills to explore ideas around queerness, digital spaces, censorship, and isolation. Her BFA show, Crescent, is poignant and visually lush. For Crescent, she documented the empty poetic spaces of New Orleans with her medium format camera and shifted the colors to create dreamy images of New Orleans shabby chic spaces. The images beautifully capture her love of New Orleans and the quiet beauty of our beloved city empty. Elana Bush has a bright future ahead.  

The Alberta “Rusty” Collier Memorial Award in 3D Art: Leo Fine

Leo is a dedicated, hard-working and creative artist.  He uses clear glass optics and traditional glass working techniques to create sculptures that represent both prehistoric and modern lifeforms and show the biological mechanisms that connect life together.  Leo sees sculpting natural forms in clear glass akin to sculpting in light.  Leo’s work challenges us to think differently, and he is most deserving of the Alberta “Rusty” Collier award.

The Sandra “Sandy” Chism Memorial Award in Painting: Murell Levine

The Tulane Painting Department would like to acknowledge Murell Levine for her exceptional commitment to painting. For Murell, the relationship between painting and life seem inseparable, partly due to the amount of time she spends in studio; but one also gets the sense that she carries that curiosity and excitement from the studio into the outside world as well. We have enjoyed watching her paintings evolve into a body of work so informed, yet personal. We are excited to select Murell for this year’s Sandy Chism award and look forward to seeing her paintings continue to develop.  

The Senior Honors Scholar in Studio Art: Jimena Padilla Pineda

Jimena joined the photo area in her junior year and landed directly on her feet. After just one semester, she successfully applied to receive her BFA in studio art, and immediately she was a force in photography. She has spent the past two years honing her craft both in film and digital photography and using her skills to intelligently think through image-making. Her BFA show, Conversations with Gen Z, combines portrait sessions with interviews, found imagery, and scans beautifully composited together to create poignant portraits of her gen-z peers. Her BFA show is supported by a beautifully written honors thesis that smartly outlines and examines ideas around generational identity, zeroing in on the gen-z generation in the time of covid. Jimena has proven to be an intelligent, critical, visually literate, and culturally aware image-maker.  

Juanita Gonzales Memorial Award in Ceramics: Kay So 

Kay So has distinguished herself as a young ceramic artist of particular skill, invention and energy. Kay’s exceptional work is complemented by her dedication to learning about all aspects of the clay studio. She is devoted to developing a detailed understanding of the chemistry of materials used in her work as well as the contemporary discourse of the ceramic art field. Kay demonstrates a deep curiosity about the potentials of the ceramic art medium and the initiative to test and explore the possibilities on her own. Definitely a strong presence in the clay studio, Her work is characterized by a clarity of shape and form, and a rich use of glaze surfaces.

Nell Pomeroy O’Brien Award for a Sophomore in Studio Art: Zachary St. Pierre 

The Newcomb Art Department would like to acknowledge Zachary St. Pierre for his exceptional work in Painting and Drawing. Last year Zachary demonstrated outstanding rendering abilities in his introductory courses. His interest and knack for form, color, and mark-making has developed into a series of optically complex and exquisite landscape paintings. We are excited to see what comes about in this nascent stage of his work and commend his hard work and enthusiasm. 

Alexis Culotta awarded NEH summer stipend grant

Alexis Culotta, Professor of Practice in Art History, was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her project, Fare la Bella Figura: Mapping and Documenting the Vanishing Tradition of the Roman Frescoed Façade. The funding will support archival research and fieldwork to document sixteenth-century frescoed façades in Rome leading to the creation of an online database and article.

Black American Art and its Valorization, Effacement & Rupture in France

Please join the Newcomb Art Department and Tulane Africana Studies Program for the final lecture of the 2020-2021 lecture series Representation and Resistance: Scholarship Centering Race in Western Art, “Black American Art and its Valorization, Effacement & Rupture in France,” a lecture by Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History, Duke University.

This talk explores how modern French culture interfaced with numerous black American visual artists, among them mid-nineteenth century printmaker Jules Lion (1810-1866), fin de siècle impressionist Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), jazz age painter Archibald Motley (1891-1981), 1960s expressionist Bob Thompson (1936-1966), and contemporary photographer Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953).  These encounters between a celebrated European destination and several African American sojourners resulted in work that, while of major art historical significance, hardly registers within the French cultural context, underscoring both the critical rifts and, paradoxically, the aesthetic confidence and freedom that such Franco-American liaisons have engendered over time.
 
Representation and Resistance: Scholarship Centering Race in Western Art is a virtual lecture series organized by Mia L. Bagneris and Michelle Foa of the Newcomb Art Department and co-sponsored by the Africana Studies Program.

Zoom: https://tulane.zoom.us/j/96841589553?pwd=dGl1WGdaU012TEFCYjc2RnpUcUZ1QT09
Meeting ID: 968 4158 9553
Passcode: 428296

[image: Henry Ossawa Tanner, Daniel in the Lion's Den, Los Angeles County Museum of Art]

Posing Modernity: A Retrospective View and Implications for Art History - a lecture by Denise Murrell

Please join us for the 2021 Sandra Garrard Memorial Lecture, Posing Modernity: A Retrospective View and Implications for Art History, a lecture by Denise Murrell, Associate Curator of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Denise Murrell will present an overview of her 2018 exhibition, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, and its iterations at the Musée d’Orsay Paris and at the Mémorial ACTe, Guadeloupe. She will discuss the project’s representation of the Black presence in the artistic milieu of late nineteenth-century Paris as central to the development of modern art. She will explore the legacy of this iconographic lineage for successive generations of artists from the early twentieth-century modernists of the Harlem Renaissance and the School of Paris to the global contemporary art of today. She will conclude with observations on the project’s relevance for art history in the current moment of renewed focus on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion in art history.

Posing Modernity: A Retrospective View and Implications for Art History 

Thursday, March 18, 6:00 pm Central Time, Online

Zoom link https://tulane.zoom.us/j/92592796500?pwd=NjVEcjZxZDVzVWFEUXNuTEJGaCtEQT09
Passcode: 530332

This lecture is part of a year-long series Representation and Resistance: Scholarship Centering Race in Western Art organized by Mia L. Bagneris and Michelle Foa of the Newcomb Art Department and co-sponsored by the Africana Studies Program.

Study art history and more this summer in Rome!

 

Summer Abroad in Rome, Italy
May 31 - June 25, 2021

Yes, this is happening in 2021!

Price: $6,800
APPLICATION DEADLINE: March 15, 2021

Students will have the option to choose two (3-credit hour) courses in Education, Art History, and Psychology. Students from any major or classification (i.e., freshmen, seniors or graduates) are welcome to join this rewarding and inspiring abroad experience. All courses are taught in English.

About the Program: Students will spend one month in Rome, the capital city of Italy, home to the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and the Trevi Fountain, whose history spans 28 centuries. Students will have the option to choose two (3-credit hour) courses in Education, Art History, and/or Psychology. All courses are taught in English. This is Tulane’s ONLY approved summer Study Abroad for 2021. 
 

List of courses:
ARHS 3910: Art of Renaissance Italy


ARHS 3911: Special Topics (OR alternatively ARHS 6900 Special
Topics in Museum Studies): Museum Education: An International Perspective 

EDLA 3160: Children’s & Adolescent Literature


EDUC 6860: Special Topics - A look at Reggio Emilia’s Approach
to Education \

PSYCH 3210: Child Psychology 

PSYCH 3200: Educational Psychology
 

Included: Tuition, University & transcript fees, Accommodation, Opening & closing dinner, Class field trips, Field trip and some group meals, Pick up at airport and comprehensive medical & emergency insurance.

Program changes/alterations may occur due to COVID-19. Contact osa@tulane.edu with COVID-related questions or concerns.  Please direct any inquiries about Study in Rome to program director Dr. Shannon Blady at sblady@tulane.edu. 

For a full list of courses and to apply, please see global.tulane.edu. 

Garrard Lecture: Curator Talk by Thomas J. Lax

Please join the Newcomb Art Department for a Curator Talk by Thomas J. Lax, Curator of Media and Performance at the Museum of Modern Art. 

Thomas J. Lax is Curator of Media and Performance at MoMA (NY) where he is currently preparing the exhibition Just Above Midtown: 1974 to the Present with Linda Goode Bryant. He was the inaugural recipient of the Cisneros Research Grant, traveling to Brazil to meet artists and curators engaged in creating semi-autonomous spaces devoted to contemporary Black art. He also worked with colleagues across MoMA on a major rehang of the museum’s collection and organized Unfinished Conversations centered around John Akomfrah’s video portrait of the cultural theorist Stuart Hall. Previously, he worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem for seven years.

Thomas is on the boards of Danspace Project and the Jerome Foundation and teaches at Wesleyan University’s Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. A native New Yorker, he is on the advisory committees of local and diasporic organizations including Contemporary And, The Laundromat Project, Participant Inc., and Recess Assembly.  

Garrard Lecture: Curator Talk by Thomas J. Lax, Museum of Modern Art
Thursday, February 5, 6pm CST, Online
Zoom link: bit.ly/thomaslax

This event is supported by the Sandra Garrard Memorial Fund. 

Simmons Lecture in Art History - Acts of Translation: Black Artists and "The Song of Hiawatha"

 

2021 Terry K. Simmons Lecture in Art History

Acts of Translation: Black Artists and "The Song of Hiawatha"
Anna Arabindan-Kesson
Assistant Professor of Art and Archaeology & African American Studies, Princeton University

Tuesday, February 2, 7:30 pm via Zoom

An epic in its time, “The Song of Hiawatha” by Henry W. Longfellow had a long afterlife in visual art. This paper focuses on the work of Robert S. Duncanson, Robert Douglass, Jr., and Edmonia Lewis, three artists who included representations of Native Americans in their artistic production. Thinking of these works as sites of convergence, Dr. Arabindan-Kesson examines their intermediality - the ways these artists translated poetry into paint and marble - in their depiction of colonial encounters. In working through their acts of translation, she wants to ask how these artists negotiate acts of reading and looking and what their representations – troubling as they might appear to us now – reveal about constructions of freedom in the United States, not in relation to the state, but as it could be envisaged in cross-cultural encounters between African Americans and Native Americans in the pre- and post-Civil War years.

Zoom Link: https://tulane.zoom.us/j/95500128526?pwd=cC9BWGhFZ0NLczB6TUMxM3pzOEdZUT09
Password: ART

This lecture is part of a year-long series Representation and Resistance: Scholarship Centering Race in Western Art organized by Mia L. Bagneris and Michelle Foa of the Newcomb Art Department and co-sponsored by the Africana Studies Program.