News of the BGC Community
Emily Banas (MA ’15) was promoted to associate curator of decorative arts and design at the RISD Museum, where she has worked since 2015. Congratulations Emily!
Professor Jeffrey Collins contributed two chapters to the six-volume Cultural History of Furniture, edited by former BGC research fellow Christina M. Anderson and published by Bloomsbury Press. Spanning 4,500 years and involving 70 expert scholars, the series charts the changing cultural frameworks within which furniture was designed, produced, and used in Western Europe, asking what social, religious, political, and economic factors have shaped its form and functions and how furniture demonstrates transformations in private and public life. For the volume on the “Age of Exploration” (fifteenth through seventeenth centuries), Collins’s chapter addressed “Visual Representations of Furniture” in a variety of media, ranging from design drawings and pattern books to frescoes; for the volume on the “Age of Enlightenment” (eighteenth century), he explored furniture in “The Public Setting,” including churches and synagogues, libraries, museums, shops, schools, taverns, coffee houses, and restaurants, among others.
Anna Mikaela Ekstrand (MA ’17) co-curated the second edition of the Immigrant Artist Biennial, Contact Zone, which will take place across nine venues in New York and New Jersey between September 2023 and January 2024. A roundtable discussion, Undocumented Artists: The Politics of Visibility, will take place at the Brooklyn Museum on October 7. All programming is free and open to the public. Well done Anna!
Brian Gallagher (MA ‘98, MPhil ‘12), senior curator of decorative arts at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, organized the special exhibition, Walter Scott Lenox and American Belleek, which opens on September 23, 2023, and will be on view through January 21, 2024. Best wishes Brian!
Borscht Belt Museum’s pop-up exhibition Vacationland! was featured in Smithsonian Magazine. The article included quotes from assistant curator, Mackensie Griffin (MA ‘24). Congratulations to Mackensie and curatorial interns Bob Hewis and Rachel Salem-Wiseman, also members of the MA class of 2024, for their work on the exhibition and all of the positive attention it has garnered.
Hadley Jensen (MA ’13, PhD ’18) curated Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles with Rapheal Begay. It is on view at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe through June 2, 2024. Well done Hadley!
Associate professor Deborah L. Krohn has been much in the news. She was featured on the podcast Around the Table produced by the Recipes Project. She spoke about her recent BGC Focus Exhibition, Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800, and its catalogue.
Both the exhibition and the catalogue have continued to accrue praise. The New Criterion’s weekly newsletter called the exhibition “a tempting show” and highlighted its “savory catalogue.”
The catalogue was also featured in The World of Fine Wine. The glowing review raved, “Deborah Krohn is an eloquent and trustworthy guide. The book has been beautifully produced, with a rich hoard of visual materials gracing virtually every page. Variously shaped knives have never looked so fascinating.” Writer Stuart Walton went on to praise the catalogue’s design by BGC senior designer Jocelyn Lau: “Textual flourishes such as the old-fashioned ligature connecting an ‘s’ or a ‘c’ to characters with ascenders, or the setting of quoted passages in large red italics with billowing or dwindling symmetrical justification at each side, add to the book’s charm and are an exemplary way of showing that an academic text need not be a dry scroll. A work on visual ostentation and the all-but-vanished history of performative table service demanded nothing less.” Bravi Deborah and Jocelyn!
Assistant professor Meredith B. Linn was quoted in a recent New York Times article Once a Force in Harlem, the Oldest Black Church in New York Hangs On by Mia Jackson.
Associate professor Ittai Weinryb will give the keynote lecture at Princeton University’s conference “Black Sea Migrations in the Long Thirteenth Century: Bodies, Things, Ideas,” September 22–23.
