Apollo magazine named three BGC alumnae, Roisin Inglesby (MA ’12), Emma Scully (MA ’14), and Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy (MA ’16) to its 40 Under 40 Craft List.
Mini-BGC communities are popping up all over! Brooklyn Museum’s reinstallation of its American art galleries benefited from the work of three BGC alumni: Grace Billingslea (MA ’20) curatorial assistant, arts of the Americas and Europe; Liz St. George (MA ’11) assistant curator of decorative arts and design, and Dare Turner (MA ’17), curator of Indigenous art. This past summer, current MA student Vega Shah completed an internship at the Brooklyn Museum under St. George’s direction.
Another such mini-community exists at Gurr Johns, where Anna Crowley (MA ’25) recently began working as a research associate alongside director of decorative arts and senior specialist Patrick Sheehan (MA ’02). Their team manages a wide variety of appraisal projects including high-level estates, institutional donations, and insurance. Ana Gutierrez-Folch (MA ’14), director of appraisals for the Americas region, issues Gurr Johns appraisals.
This past summer, BGC alumni and current students came together for the Borscht Belt Museum’s exhibition “And Such Small Portions!”: Food and Comedy in the Catskills Resort Era. Debra Schmidt Bach (PhD ’15) and Mackensie Griffin (MA ’24) curated the exhibition (Bach’s grandparents operated a Borscht Belt resort from 1920 until 1970), and current MA student Janelle Williams served as an intern and helped with installation. Griffin, a food historian, also organized a dinner inspired by a 1968 hotel menu to kick off the museum’s annual Borscht Belt Fest.
Three BGC alums, including Crenshaw, Allison Donoghue, and Luli Zou, all members of the MA class of 2024, recently participated in a panel entitled “Breaking Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Views in the Museum Field from Emerging Scholars” at the annual New England Museums Association conference in Newport, Rhode Island. Crenshaw spoke about her exhibition at the RISD Museum, Zou shared research on imitation Chinese lacquer panels at the Newport Restoration Foundation’s Vernon House, and Donoghue presented on her research into multiple narratives of thimbles in the colonial Northeast at sites of cross-cultural contact, including settler colonial and Native American perspectives.
The new journal, Material Matters, published MA student Elana Neher’s review of MA ’11 alumna Rebecca Klassen’s exhibition at New-York Historical Society, Beatrice Glow: When Our Rivers Meet.
Laura J. Allen (MA ’20), curator of Native American art at the Montclair Art Museum, orchestrated a reimagined installation of the museum’s collection of Indigenous art, in collaboration with Indigenous curators, artists, and scholars. Hyperallergic commented that Allen and her collaborators “achieved a sorely needed curatorial feat: an institutional display of Indigenous art that courses with vitality.”
Debra Schmidt Bach (PhD ’15) was recently appointed director of exhibitions at the Mystic Seaport Museum.
Julie Bellemare (PhD ’21) curated Sensorium: Stories of Glass and Fragrance, now on view at the Corning Museum of Glass and recently featured in the New York Times. The show explores the millennia-long relationships between glass, perfumery, and the storage of scent. The boutique-inspired setting provides visitors with intimate views of historical and modern glass objects related to scent, including perfume bottles by leading modern designers and contemporary artists. The exhibition showcases this evolution while telling larger stories about science, power, and luxury.
Corinne Brandt (MA ’14) curated the exhibit On Tour: Lafayette, America’s Revolutionary Rock Star at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. Commemorating the two-hundredth anniversary of the Marquis de Lafayette’s 1824–25 “Farewell Tour” of the United States, the exhibition explores Lafayette’s incredible impact on the young nation through a fascinating selection of Winterthur memorabilia and objects honoring the Revolutionary War hero.
In October, professor Jeffrey Collins delivered the keynote lecture, “Experts, Eyes, and Expert Eyes: A View from the Decorative Arts,” at the international conference El ojo experto: método, límites, y la disciplina de la Historia del Arte held in Madrid.
As part of her summer internship with British and Irish Furniture Makers Online, Furniture History Society, and Raby Castle, MA student Daniela Díaz Blancarte developed a website that reimagines the dining hall at Cleveland House in St. James Square as it would have appeared in the mid-nineteenth century.
Anna Mikaela Ekstrand (MA ’17) organized Clairvoyant at Ceysson & Bénétière. The show was subsequently featured in Vogue Scandinavia.
Professor Ivan Gaskell’s most recent book, Mindprints: Thoreau’s Material Worlds (University of Chicago Press), was published last month. To mark its publication, he gave a lecture, “Thoreau’s Sounds,” at BGC on November 6, and a “Forum” public conversation with Thoreau scholar David Wood at the Concord Museum in Thoreau’s hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, on November 14.
Professor Aaron Glass is featured in a new film, So Surreal: Behind the Masks, about Surrealist interest in and collecting of Indigenous masks from the Northwest Coast and Arctic.
Mackensie Griffin (MA ’24) spent the fall working as a research assistant at Barnes Foundation, focusing on its collection of metalwork.
Bob Hewis (MA ’24) is now the visitor experience and house manager for the David Parr House in Cambridge.
Maeve Hogan (MA ’14) has been named a Smithsonian American Art Museum predoctoral fellow in American craft. She will work on research related to a dissertation project titled “Between Utility and Art: Recovering Fiber-Based Craft Histories of the 1950s and 1960s.” In February, Hogan will present her paper, “Craft and Fiber Art of the 1950s and 1960s in the Collection of Helen Louise Allen” on a panel about women collectors at the College Art Association conference.
Drawing from her dissertation, Michelle Jackson-Beckett (PhD ’22) published Vienna and the New Wohnkultur, 1918–1938 (Oxford University Press).
This past summer, Hadley Welch Jensen (MA ’13, PhD ’18) was appointed curator of the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe. Recently, she cocurated (with Rapheal Begay) Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. Jensen and Begay collaborated with several of the artists featured in the 2023 BGC exhibition, Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest, including Lynda Teller Pete, Kevin Aspaas, Larissa Nez, Tyrrell Tapaha, and Darby Raymond-Overstreet. The Museum of New Mexico also published Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles, edited by Jensen.
Brooklyn Lace Guild’s first-ever exhibition, Little Lace: The Work of Brooklyn Lace Guild featured the work of PhD student Elena Kanagy-Loux, MA student Ev Christie, and Emma Cormack (MA ’18).
This fall, Kanagy-Loux also presented papers at two conferences. She delivered “‘Muy Curiosa y Muy Diestra’: Bobbin Lace Making in 18th-Century Mexico” at the Textile Society of America virtual conference. She developed the paper in Mei Mei Rado’s course, Towards a Global Art History, and it was nominated for the Founding President’s Award. Later in the semester, she presented “The Labor of Lace: Mapping the Increase of Time and Complexity Through Reconstruction” at the Sorbonne Nouvelle conference, Crafting Fashion in the Longue Durée.
Professor Deborah Krohn’s book, Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800, was shortlisted for and awarded an honorable mention by Kitchen Arts and Letters’ inaugural Nach Waxman Prize in Food and Beverage Scholarship. Krohn was also quoted in a Wall Street Journal article about the popularity and origins of savory pastries.
Berit Lavender (MA ’11) was recently named executive director of MIT’s Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.
In November, PhD candidate Kenna Libes had a packed house for her presentation (with Abby Cox) at the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg symposium on historical dress: “Fleshing Out the Canon: Size Inclusivity in Collections of Dress.”
Associate professor Meredith Linn, in collaboration with Barnard professor Gergely Baics and colleagues Leah Meisterlin and Myles Zhang, launched Envisioning Seneca Village this past summer on Juneteenth. The website imagines the free African American community that was destroyed to make way for Central Park as it would have appeared on a late spring day in 1855, complete with homes, churches, a school, trees, streams, and details down to chickens and toys that children there would have had.
In October, Linn spoke in the Wednesdays@BGC series about her latest publication, Irish Fever: An Archaeology of Illness, Injury, and Healing in New York City, 1845–1875. She drew upon extensive archaeological remains, folklore records, and historical documents to present what she terms a “visceral historical archaeology”—a perspective rooted in historical archaeology and medical anthropology—to illuminate the experiences of nineteenth-century Irish immigrants, and the history of American reception of immigrants more broadly.
In November, PhD student Joshua Massey (MA ’23) presented his paper, “Assemblage Logics: Towards a Grounded Material Culture Studies,” as part of a material culture methods panel at the American Studies Association conference in Baltimore, Maryland.
Jackie Mazzone (MA ’20), assistant curator of historic interiors at Colonial Williamsburg, spent part of her summer as a fellow at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts. Her fellowship was supported by the William C. and Susan S. Mariner Fellowship for Emerging Museum Professionals, sponsored by the Decorative Arts Trust. Her research on nineteenth-century samplers created by Lucinda Ish of Loudoun County, Virginia, is featured in the Decorative Arts Trust’s most recent newsletter.
Professor Caspar Meyer’s new edited volume, Situating Eurasia in Antiquity: Nomadic Material Culture in the First Millennium BCE, is now available in open access format.
Artforum contributing editor James Meyer named Sonia Delaunay: Living Art, curated by Laura Microulis (MA ’97, PhD ’16) and Waleria Dorogova, one of the top ten exhibitions of 2024.
Caroline O’Connell (MA ’16) recently started a new position as exhibitions curator at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.
Sarah Pickman (MA ’15) has written a chapter on the material culture of early twentieth-century mountaineering expeditions titled “The Benefit of Chocolate and Cold Tea: Equipping Early British Everest Expeditions” for the edited volume Other Everests: One Mountain, Many Worlds, just released by University of Manchester Press.
Anna Riley (MA ’23) presented a portion of her qualifying paper research at the History of Science Society’s centennial conference in early November as part of a panel on craft knowledge.
In October, Jorge Rivas (PhD ’18) began a new position as the inaugural Emily Rauh Pulitzer Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM). In this newly created position, he oversees the museum’s curatorial, collection, and exhibition departments.
Rachael Schwabe (MA ’20) has launched Artful Practices for Well-Being, a free online MoMA course available on Coursera. The course uses the museum’s collection as a springboard for ideas, practices, and activities that you might carry into your daily lives to support your well-being, whatever that means to you.
It was a busy summer and fall for PhD candidate Kate Sekules, who delivered her paper, “The Hand in the Traces: Interrogating Textile Mend,” at the thirty-sixth Congrès du Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art in Lyon, France; guest lectured at the Gressenhall Museum Textile Takeover Day; has work on view through January 5 in the exhibition Transformations: Contemporary Artists at Wintherthur; and was a guest on Dr. Isabella Rosner’s Sew What podcast.
In September, PhD candidate Courtney Stewart gave a talk, “A Cut Above: Diamond Faceting at the Mughal Court,” based on her dissertation, for the Dunhuang Foundation.
In November, a new book by professor emeritus Paul Stirton was published by Letterform Archive. It is a facsimile of Dutch designer Piet Zwart’s 1928 NKF Catalogue. Stirton spoke about the book in an online salon about Zwart in conversation with Elizabeth Meggs, daughter of the late Philip Meggs, doyen of US graphic design historians.
Dare Turner (MA ’17) recently spoke to BGC students about her work at Brooklyn Museum and Baltimore Museum of Art, where she launched Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum, a project that seeks to begin addressing the historical erasure of Indigenous culture by arts institutions while creating new practices for museums. The project includes nine exhibitions, a catalogue, public programs, an audio guide, staff training, and new interpretive texts for artworks throughout the museum.
Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy (MA ’16) cocurated R & Company’s triennial exhibition, Objects USA: 2024 and coedited its catalogue. She also gave a tour for her fellow alums and the BGC community on December 12. In addition, her book, New Women’s Work (Smith Street Books), was published in October. According to Vizcarrondo-Laboy, “women’s work” has historically been relegated to the domestic—absent from galleries and discussions of “art.” From cross-stitching and quilts to baskets and decorative ceramics, women have spent centuries creating masterful crafts without recognition from the historians and institutions that determine whose names are remembered and whose work is celebrated. Her new book explores these art forms, focusing on ten areas traditionally labelled as “feminine” and featuring thirty-eight artists from around the world. Through stories of family, migration, gender, and what it means to be a craftsperson, New Women’s Work considers the future of the feminine in the arts.
In the new year, Madeline Warner (MA ’20) will begin a new role as associate director of development for the American Academy in Rome.
This past summer, associate professor Ittai Weinryb participated in the thirty-sixth Congress of the International Committee of the History of Arts in Lyon, France, where he represented BGC’s journals, West 86th and Source, at a meeting and workshop for editors of art history journals that included editors of journals from Argentina, Chile, China, Turkey, Croatia, UK, Belgium, France, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Greece, and Spain. He said, “I am happy to report that our journals have global outreach and are appreciated for the quality of essays as well as the high production value.”
In October, Weinryb spoke at the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute Visual and Material Culture Seminar and at NYU’s The Materials of Magic: Between Coexistence and Resistance workshop organized as part of the Silsila program by 2014 Iris Award recipient Finbarr Barry Flood.
