Earlier this week, associate professor Aaron Glass gave an online talk with Andy Evans, a contemporary Indigenous artist born in Comox, British Columbia, whose artworks are greatly influenced by his Comox and Kwakwaka’wakw ancestries. Glass spoke about his recent book, Writing the Hamat’sa, and together he and Evans traced the attempted prohibition, intercultural mediation, and ultimate survival of the Hamat’sa (often known as the Cannibal Dance) one of Canada’s most iconic Indigenous ceremonies. The talk was presented as part of UBC Press’s “Learning with Syeyutsus” speaker series.
In June, Professor Ivan Gaskell will be a visiting fellow to the Centre for Advanced Study of the Ludwig-Maximilian-University, Munich, in June. This will be a remote fellowship, and the symposium will include a recording via Zoom of his paper, “The Joys and Sorrows of Museum Storage.”
Assistant professor Freyja Hartzell’s book, Richard Riemerschmid’s Extraordinary Living Things, will be released by MIT Press in October. She is presently engaged in research for her next book, Doll Parts: Designing Likeness. Over the summer, she will do preliminary work at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY. In the fall, she will conduct interdisciplinary, public-facing research that will bring a variety of experts to interact with the BGC community, hopefully to include a dollmaker who creates unique dolls for children with physical differences, a maker of fantasy “reborn” baby dolls, and a robotics expert. These efforts will ultimately lead to a related BGC Gallery exhibition, Welcome to the Dolls’ House, in spring 2025. Students will collaborate with Hartzell on the conception of the exhibition and the design of its online companion.
On June 5, assistant professor Michele Majer and associate curator Emma Cormack (BGC MA ‘18) will present a preview of BGC’s upcoming exhibition, Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen, to the International Organization of Lace. Along with Ilona Kos of the Textilmuseum, Majer and Cormack are curating the exhibition, which opens in September and will be the first large-scale exhibition of historical lace in New York in 40 years, offering visitors the chance to view some of the world’s finest examples of both hand- and machine-made lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland. Featuring needle and bobbin lace as worn in Habsburg Spain, Bourbon France, and the eighteenth-century Spanish colonies in the Americas; nineteenth- and twentieth-century Swiss chemical lace; and contemporary innovations including laser-cut lace and 3D-printed silicone lace, more than 150 pieces of lace from the Textilmuseum’s renowned collection will be on view in the US for the first time, supplemented by more than 50 additional objects including garments, painted portraits, and pattern books from US-based lenders.
Annissa Malvoisin, BGC/Brooklyn Museum Postdoctoral Fellow in the Arts of Africa, recently spoke at the College Art Association conference. Her lecture, “At the Edge of the Sahara: Decorative Style between Egypt, Nubia, and West African Regions” was part of the Art Institute of Chicago’s panel. In addition, she recently gave a talk entitled, “Daisies at the Hinterland: Trans-Saharan Decoration from Meroitic Nubia” for the American Research Center in Egypt, Vancouver Chapter.
Jennifer Mass, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Conservation Science, appeared on the podcast The Art Elevator. In the episode titled “Art Forensics: Behind the Scenes,” Mass offered a peek inside the work of a cultural heritage scientist, including the identification of clues left in materials and the forensic process used to determine fakes and forgeries. In February, Mass gave a seminar for the Portland State Department of Chemistry called “Things Fall Apart: The Surprising Photochemical Instability of Cultural Heritage.” She is collaborating with the conservation department at the Guggenheim on understanding the degradation mechanisms occurring in Eva Hesse’s Expanded Expansion (1969) for an upcoming exhibition, and with the Barnes Foundation on its upcoming Amedeo Modigliani catalogue and exhibit of the artist’s sculptures and paintings, as well as a publication about the conservation and art market histories of its collection of Ptolemaic Egyptian bronzes. Finally, Mass has begun work on the conservation of the Nevelson Chapel in St. Peter’s Church, specifically on some unique paint degradation issues occurring in this iconic mid-century installation.
Professor Andrew Morrall will spend the months May, June, and July as a visiting research fellow at Trinity Hall and associate scholar at the Centre for Visual Culture, both at Cambridge University. During his stay, he will give a lecture entitled, “The Nuremberg Craftsman and the ‘Mathematising of Nature.’”
Nina Stritzler-Levine, professor of curatorial practice, accepted the 2022 Society for Architectural Historians (SAH) Exhibition Catalogue Award for Eileen Gray. The committee stated, “A combination of curatorial exuberance, meticulous historical research, and innovative book design makes Eileen Gray a stunning and singular exhibition catalogue. As an architect, artist, and furniture designer accustomed to working across media, Eileen Gray (1878–1976) produced a body of work that is difficult to capture in any one monograph. This catalogue was published as a companion to an exhibition that opened briefly at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in October 2020, an extension of a major retrospective on Gray held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2013. Designed by Irma Boom, the book is a beautifully crafted, idiosyncratic object that fulsomely documents Gray’s prolific and dynamic career as well as the shows to which she is connected. The book provides a synoptic view of her work and engages with broader historical issues, including what it meant to be a woman architect in the twentieth century.” Stritzler-Levine co-edited the catalogue and co-curated the exhibition with Cloé Pitiot of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
Drew Thompson, associate professor, was featured in the March 2022 issue of Art and Education. In the interview he discussed his teaching philosophy and educational background, essential readings, interdisciplinarity at BGC, changes he would like to see in art education, and the gallery as an extension of the classroom.
Student News
Martina D’Amato (PhD candidate) contributed an article, “‘Il passa les Alpes avec ses trésors’: Louis Carrand and Florence,” to a new volume, Florence, ville d’art, et les Français: La création d’un mythe, under the direction of Anne Lepoittevin, Emmanual Lurin, and Alain Mérot of the Sorbonne University. D’Amato will also participate as an appraiser in the 2022 season of Antiques Roadshow.
PhD candidate Colin Fanning (MA ‘13) gave a paper titled “The Language of Objects: Product Semantics and Industrial Design at the Cranbrook Academy of Art” at the 2022 IFA-Frick Symposium on the History of Art.
PhD candidate Kate Sekules will give a paper titled “Dress Repair as Artifact: A Taxonomy of Mends in Museums” at the Costume Society of America (CSA) national annual symposium on May 26. The theme of this year’s symposium held in Bloomington, Minnesota, is “Land of 10,000 Ideas: Innovation through Dress.”
PhD candidate Amanda Thompson (MA ‘16) co-authored “‘As We Have Always Done: Decolonizing the Tomaquag Museum’s Collections Management Policy” with the Tomaquag Museum’s Executive Director, Lorén M. Spears (Narragansett-Niantic). The article was featured in the special thematic issue, “Indigenous Collections: Belongings, Decolonization, Contextualization,” of the peer-reviewed Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archive Professionals. This article follows Amanda’s 2020 piece, “A Sustaining Cherokee Basket: Colonial Inscription and Indigenous Resistance,” published in Sequitur. Both articles bring to light the colonial practices embedded in the language of museum collection cataloging.
Alumni News
Laura J. Allen (MA ‘20), curator of Native American art at the Montclair Art Museum (MAM), moderated a virtual tour on April 16 for the The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum series “Rug and Textile Appreciation Mornings.” The program titled “Color Riot! How Color Changed Navajo Textiles” included pieces from Color Riot! developed by the Heard Museum in Phoenix and displayed at MAM in 2021. Speakers include Velma Kee Craig, assistant curator of the Heard Museum and one of the three Diné curators of the original exhibition, and Larissa Nez, contributing curator for the Montclair installation.
Antiques and the Arts Weekly reviewed John Stuart Gordon’s (MA ‘04) exhibition, Gold in America: Artistry, Memory, Power, on view at Yale University Art Gallery where Gordon is the Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Curator of American Decorative Arts. Gordon gave a talk on April 20 for the Victorian Society of New York discussing many objects featured in the exhibition, which is on view through July 10.
Congratulations to alumna Anna Kaplan (MA ‘11), who is now the executive director of Graycliff, the summer home of Darwin and Isabelle Martin. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1927, Graycliff is located off the shores of Lake Erie in Derby, NY.
Daniella Ohad (PhD ‘06) recently led a ten-session program for Christie’s Education, “Interior Design: The Legends.” Ohad also curated the exhibition The Female Voice in Modern Design, 1950–2000 at Carpenters Workshop Gallery New York, on view through July 3.
Nicole Pulichene (MA ‘13) edited and published The Boethius Diptych: New Findings in Technical Art History, Iconography, and Paleography alongside Catharina Blänsdorf and Esther Wipfler in collaboration with Francesca Morandini. The book features examinations of the Boethius diptych carried out by an international team of conservators, art historians, and historians in 2019 and 2020.
On March 19 Alexis Griffith Winton (MA ‘03), manager of content and curriculum at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, discussed weaver Dorothy Liebes with Susan Brown, Cooper Hewitt’s acting head of textiles. The conversation titled “Dorothy Liebes, Coast to Coast” was presented by the Textile Arts Council.
Staff News
Earl Martin, associate curator at Bard Graduate Center Gallery, presented a lecture at the Walters Art Museum on March 26, as part of the celebrations for the opening of Majolica Mania there. His lecture highlighted the US production of majolica and explored the products and histories of two Baltimore firms, D. F. Haynes & Co.’s Chesapeake Pottery and Edward Bennett Pottery.
