Alexandra Casser (MA 2014) spent the past summer as a public relations intern at the Museum of Arts & Design (MAD). In mid-August she relocated to Dallas, Texas, where she is working as a development assistant at Dallas Heritage Village.Maeve Hogan (MA 2014) has had an abstract called “Stitching Together a National Identity” accepted for a symposium to be held next March at Colonial Williamsburg. It is a version of her Qualifying Paper, entitled “Printed Patchwork: Industry and Identity.”
Christine Griffiths (MA 2013, PhD student) received an Isaiah Thomas Stipend awarded by the American Antiquarian Society to participate in the 2014 Summer Seminar in the History of the Book. She was among five graduate students who attended with professors and librarians from across the country.
Sequoia Miller (MA 2013), Quillan Rosen (MA 2011), Brandy Culp (MA 2004), Alexis Mucha (MA 2007), and Genevieve Cortinovis (MA 2010) participated in the prestigious 2014 Attingham Summer School. Established in 1952, the program offers academics, curators, and design professionals the opportunity to study the architectural and social history of historic houses in Great Britain dating back to the thirteenth century. BGC alumni represented ten percent of this year’s class.
Sophie Pitman (MA 2013) and Katie Tycz (MA 2013), both PhD students at Cambridge University, are conveners of the university’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) seminar series. The talks are available as podcasts. With Meredyth Winter (MA 2013), a PhD student at Harvard, they visited Granada, Córdoba, and Barcelona, Spain, this summer.
Eva Labson (MA 2008) participated in a ten-day excursion course to Madrid, Spain, this summer. It was organized by the University of Bern in conjunction with curatorial staff of the Patrimonio Nacional. Highlights included visits to the Monasterio de Sta. María la Real de Las Huelgas, a medieval royal burial site exhibiting a unique collection of excavated medieval textiles displayed in close proximity to their original funerary context; the Real Sitio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, designed in the second half of the sixteenth century for King Felipe II, which houses an impressive collection of ecclesiastical textiles and a set of tapestries after cartoons by Goya; and the royal palace Palacio Real de La Granja de San Ildefonso, featuring a new installation of the Patrimonio’s important tapestry collection.
Jennifer Klos (MA 2007), who has been at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OKCMOA) for the past seven years, was promoted from associate curator to curator last year. She curated a photography exhibition, Herb Ritts: Beauty and Celebrity, and also a contemporary site-specific installation called Come on Down by New York sculptor Lisa Hoke. She worked with Michelle Hargrave (MA 2004), curator at the American Federation of Arts, in bringing the exhibit entitled Gods and Heroes to OKCMOA this past summer. Jennifer looks forward to several new exhibitions and research projects in the coming year. She also participated in two Attingham Trust courses in the past year: the Study Programme of the Norfolk House in September 2013 and the London House Course in April 2014.
Freyja Hartzell (MA 2005), who received her PhD from Yale in 2012, is assistant professor of material and visual culture at Parsons The New School for Design, where she has been teaching both part-time and as a postdoctoral fellow since 2009. Her position includes coordinating and developing the Integrative Seminar, a new course that bridges academic and studio curriculum for first-year students. This summer she traveled to Munich, Dresden, and Berlin, Germany, to gather final research for her book, Designs on the Body: The Modern Art of Richard Riemerschmid. The first English-language work on influential German designer Richard Riemerschmid (1868-1957), the project uses his work as a case study through which to reevaluate long-held beliefs about modernism in design, with a special focus on the concept of Sachlichkeit. Her article, “A Renovated Renaissance: Richard Riemerschmid’s Modern Interiors for the Thieme House in Munich,” appeared in the March 2014 issue of Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture (Bloomsbury). Freyja is also involved in two new research projects focusing on relationships between materiality and meaning. The first will debut at an interdisciplinary panel she is moderating at the German Studies Association annual conference in September 2014. Examining historical and mythical uses of wood in Germany from the middle ages through today, along with their social, cultural, and political implications, it is entitled “German Wood: from Forest to Fireside and Beyond.” The second project explores the phenomenon and concept of “transparency” or “emptiness” in modern design in order to determine whether it represented liberation or violation (or both) in human experience. She will be addressing this question in October in a paper for the SECAC annual conference entitled, “Bauhaus Made Miniature: Material Politics in German Design, 1919-1939.”
Rebecca Tilles (MA 2006) reports that after almost eight years at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, she has decided to pursue her PhD at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England.
Julie Muniz (MA 2003) is a curator at the newly established Foster Art and Wilderness Foundation in Palo Alto, California. This summer she traveled to Cornwall, England, to sort through the photo archives of British plein air artist Tony Foster, who is known for his series of watercolor diaries created in the world’s great wildernesses.
Malcolm MacNeil (MA 1997) celebrated his ten-year anniversary on June 1 with Doyle New York, where he is vice president of furniture & decorations and director of the Belle Époque auctions, which are held three times annually and offer furniture and decorative arts primarily dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He continues to teach a survey class on American and European art glass at New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies. In June, he was appointed a fellow of the Corning Museum of Glass and was selected by the Appraiser’s Association of America to contribute an article on appraisal guidelines for glass, which was published in Appraising Art: The Definitive Guide to Appraising the Fine and Decorative Arts in 2013.
