Ajiri Aki (MA ’09), founder of Madame de la Maison, a company that sells French antiques and table linens, contributed an article to CNBC in June about the French art of small talk.
Antonia Behan (MA ’14, PhD ’21) organized the final research symposium of Bard Graduate Center’s fall semester, entitled Global Legacies of Arts and Crafts. She will deliver the introduction, “As It Is and As It Might Be: Historiography and Future Directions of Global Arts and Crafts.” BGC professor emeritus and editor in chief of West 86th, Paul Stirton, will discuss the Arts and Crafts in Central Europe, 1880–1930, and current PhD student Amanda Thompson will give a talk entitled, “‘It is better to help them help themselves’: Craft Development Projects with the Florida Seminole, 1930s–1960s.”
On December 20, Julia Carabatsos (MA ’22) will present “Restoring Medieval Fashion: Viollet-le-Duc at Pierrefonds” as part of a joint Columbia / McGill seminar taught by Barry Bergdoll and Martin Bressani, curators of BGC’s upcoming exhibition, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79): Drawing Worlds, which will open in fall 2025.
Professor Jeffrey Collins contributed to the book Forgery Beyond Deceit: Value, Fabrication, and the Desire for Ancient Rome, recently published by Oxford University Press. Edited by John N. Hopkins (art history, NYU) and Scott McGill (classical studies, Rice), the project assembled scholars of many specialties and fields to study both literal and material forgery in and of ancient Rome, from antiquity to the late twentieth century. Collins’s concluding chapter, entitled “Beyond Deceit and Beyond: Situating Scholarship on Forgery,” seeks to set these contributions in historical and historiographical context and to reaffirm the potential of forgery studies as a transdisciplinary practice.
Emma Cormack (MA ’18) moderated a talk at Le Salon Suisse at Miami Art Week / Art Basel Miami 2023. The discussion, “Preserving Craftsmanship in Contemporary Fashion,” included panelists Aurora James, founder and creative director of Brother Vellies and originator of the Fifteen Percent Pledge, and Florence Tetier, creative director of Jean Paul Gaultier.
Billy DeGregorio (MA ’12, PhD ’21) delivered the Alumni Spotlight lecture at BGC earlier this month. He spoke about his research for the recently published two-volume monograph on Percival D. Griffiths, who formed what is today considered to be one of the finest collections of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century English furniture and needlework amassed in the twentieth century, and explored Griffiths’s pivotal role in transforming the popular opinion of seventeenth-century needlework from “grotesque” embarrassment to a “glorious” source of national pride.
PhD student Caroline Elenowitz-Hess’s article, “‘Something really very odd and singularly appropriate’: The Fashionable Swastika in the US Before 1939,” was published in the current issue of Journal of Design History.
Andrew Gardner (MA ’15) has recently become the manager of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s arts and design team, where he will oversee large-scale public art commissions for the MTA, including subway and commuter rail stations.
In November, Professor Ivan Gaskell gave a paper, “Reconstruction after Conflict: Heritage versus History,” at the annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics in Arlington, Virginia.
Professor Aaron Glass presented at the Native American Art Studies Association conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in October. His paper, “Genealogy of a Bookplate: A Boasian Mashup of Museum Collections, Photography, and World’s Fairs” was part of a panel in honor of Ira Jacknis.
Associate professor Freyja Hartzell (MA ’05) was a guest on the podcast Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness for an episode entitled, “Why Do We Play with Dolls?”
Panorama: The Journal of Historians of American Art recently published a review of Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest, an exhibition curated by Hadley Jensen (MA ’13, PhD ’19) that was on view at BGC Gallery in spring 2023.
Rick Kinsel (MA ’00), president of the Vilcek Foundation, has played an integral role in Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery, an exhibition curated by the Pueblo Pottery Collective, a group that comprises members of twenty-two Pueblo communities in the Southwest and focuses on centering the voices of Native American people in the curation and display of their art. The exhibition, organized by the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe and the Vilcek Foundation, is on view in dual presentations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Foundation’s offices at 21 East 70th Street in New York City, until June 4, 2024. It will subsequently travel to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the St. Louis Art Museum. The Wall Street Journal called the exhibition “enchanting” and “transcendent.”
British GQ recently tapped Jennifer Klos (MA ’07), founder of the boutique advisory firm Collector House, for advice on buying and collecting art.
On November 3, Deborah L. Krohn, associate professor and chair of academic programs, gave a paper at Celebrations at Court: Ephemeral Objects, Materials, and Machineries in the Early Modern Period. The conference was organized by the University of Copenhagen and took place at Kronborg Castle. Later that month, in London, Krohn attended the joint meeting of ARIAH (Association of Research Institutes in Art History) and RIHA, the organization’s European branch, as BGC’s delegate.
This fall, PhD student Kenna Libes presented “The Dress and Commercial Image of the American ‘Fat Lady,’ 1850–1920” at the Association of Dress Historians’ 2023 international’s conference, “‘Ad-Dressing Margins’: Historically Underrepresented Fashion and Style” at Drexel University. She also spoke about corsetry and period dress for movies with Sharon Lin, host of RTI Radio Taiwan International’s podcast That’s Debatable!
In late November, assistant professor Meredith Linn presented a talk about the Seneca Village Project and collaborative archaeology to the Public Humanities University Seminar at Columbia University. The theme of the meeting was the ethics of public archaeology.
On October 12, Josh Massey (MA ’23, PhD student) traveled to Richmond, Virginia, to present “Thornton Dial’s Tributes: Assemblage as Historiography” on a panel about artistic friendships at the Southeastern College Art Conference. Later this fall, he gave a paper titled, “Lonnie Holley’s Wordsmithing: Finding Solidarity in Words and Objects,” that builds on his work as co-editor of Wordsmithing: The Spoken Art of Lonnie Holley, an in-progress collection of spoken performances by the artist.
In November, assistant professor Mei Mei Rado (PhD ’18) spoke about her forthcoming book at Harvard University in a talk entitled, “European Tapestries at the Qing Court: Global Textiles and A Cross-Cultural Medium.” She has recently published three articles, including “Le rideau tiré : Interior Drapery, Architectural Space, and Desire in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Textile in Architecture: From the Middle Ages to Modernism, edited by Basile Baudez, Didem Ekici, and Patricia Blessing; “Botanical Fantasy in Silk: Transformations of a Rococo Floral Design from England to China,” in Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility and Change edited by Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek (forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2024); and “The Court,” the introductory essay on nineteenth-century Qing court arts and culture in the exhibition catalogue for the British Museum’s exhibition, China’s Hidden Century, 1796–1912, edited by Jessica Harrison-Hall and Julia Lovell. Rado is also co-organizing a symposium entitled Unfolding the Coromandel Screen: Visual Mobility, Inscribed Objecthood, and Global Lives set to take place in Hong Kong in November 2024.
The October issue of Harper’s Bazaar India listed Dare Turner (MA ’17), curator of Indigenous art at the Brooklyn Museum, among the “indomitable changemakers and pioneering groundbreakers who are defining the culture” of the twenty-first century.
Associate professor Ittai Weinryb recently conversed with Adachiara Zevi on “Art and Memory in Ancient and Modern Synagogues” at the Center for Italian Modern Art; convened the conference, The Golden Horde: Art, Material Culture, and Architecture, at the Max Planck for the History of Science in Berlin; and spoke at the Hildesheim Cathedral Museum on his recent book Die Hildesheimer Avantgarde: Kunst und Kolonialismus im mittelalterlichen Deutschland.
