Ivan Gaskell participated, for the twenty-third consecutive year, as a keurmeester (vetting member) of the Old Master Paintings Committee at TEFAF Maastricht (the European Fine Art Fair) in March. He also gave the plenary keynote address, “Works of Art and Mere Real Things—Again,” at the annual meeting of the Verband Deutscher Kunsthistoriker (Association of Art Historians of Germany) held in Göttingen, Germany.

Aaron Glass gave a presentation on Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology at an event, Re-Mediate the Mediation: Indigenous Knowledge in Exhibition and Artistic Practices: Ethical and Ontological Issues, held April 30 at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson. His April 11 interview with Leonard Lopate on WBAI Radio can be heard here.

Freya Hartzell has completed three peer-reviewed articles that will be published soon. In relation to her longstanding interest in the German concept of Sachlichkeit, or straightforwardness (a topic on which she co-taught a BGC course with Dean Peter N. Miller this spring), an article entitled “Delight in Sachlichkeit: Object as Subject in German Design, Architecture, and Art” will appear in a special visual-arts themed issue of German Quarterly. In conjunction with the 2019 Bauhaus centenary, her article, “Bauhaus Made Miniature: Material Politics in German Design, 1919-1939,” will be published in the Journal of Modern Craft. Finally, as a result of her ongoing book research on modern glass design and transparency, she has contributed a chapter entitled “The Emperor’s New Glass: Transparency as Substance and Symbol in Interwar Design” to Bloomsbury Press’s forthcoming New Challenges to Conventions: Innovative Visual and Material Work in the Weimar Republic, edited by Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Maria Makela. Hartzell also recently served as a juror on the selection committee for the 92nd Street Y’s third annual Jewelry Artist in Residence Program.

Andrew Morrall has contributed a chapter, “Renaissance Craft and Technology,” co-authored with Pamela O. Long, to The Oxford Illustrated History of the Renaissance, edited by Gordon Campbell (Oxford University Press). His 2002 monograph, Jörg Breu the Elder: Art, Culture and Belief in Reformation Augsburg, (Routledge) was recently reissued in paperback and e-book editions. On April 12, at Bard Graduate Center, he hosted the symposium: Prudence, Techne and the Practice of Governance in the Early Modern Kunstkammer, the first of three envisaged such events, co-organized with Mark A. Meadow (University of California at Santa Barbara), and presented a paper entitled, “For practical utility [and] noble meditations: Craft, Techne, and the Pursuit of Virtue in the Early Modern Kunstkammer.”

Paul Stirton spoke on “The Unwritten Histories of Art and Design Careers,” at the conference Artists and Designers: Realities and Imaginations in Labor and Business History at FIT in New York City on April 12. He spoke on Jan Tschichold and the New Typography at SUNY Purchase on April 16, and was recently filmed in connection with the exhibition for the online business and current affairs magazine Quartz.