Kate Fox (MA 2011), a freelance contractor for
Smithsonian Gardens in Washington DC, is the curator of Patios, Pools, & the
Invention of the American Backyard, a travelling exhibition scheduled
for spring 2015. She has also launched a website called Community of Gardens for
crowdsourcing personal histories of gardening in America—her first foray into
the digital humanities.
Berit Hoff (MA 2011) is
the director of exhibitions at the Center for Architecture in New York City.
Brooke Penaloza (MA
2011) is in the doctoral program in the history department at the University of
Vienna. A 2014-2017 fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, she is working
on her dissertation entitled “Instituting Anthropology: The Circulation of
Scientists and Ethnographic Materials Between North America, Germany and
Austria, 1883-1933.” In 2013, she participated in the Smithsonian’s Summer Institute in Museum
Anthropology and received a Collection Study Grant from the American
Museum of Natural History. She is organizing a panel entitled “Communicating
Things, Things Communicating: New Perspectives in Material Culture and
Indigenous Studies” for the 35th American Indian
Workshop, at the University of Leiden in May. She and her
husband are also freelance
editors and translators.
Kimberly Sorensen (MA
2011) is a cataloguer at Rago Auctions in Lambertville, NJ, where she sees and
handles many fascinating objects, in particular the creations of New Hope
modernists like George Nakashima and Paul Evans, whose studios were only a few
miles away and whose pieces still reside in many local homes. This winter
she published an article in NY Food Story, the journal of the
Culinary Historians of New York, on carving a cake board and experimenting with
historical recipes.
Luke Baker (MA 2010)
has undertaken a number of projects at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)— from
opening the permanent exhibition, Designing Modern
Women 1890–1990, to pursuing acquisitions and conducting research,
participating in the courier training program, and escorting MoMA collections
on trips to other institutions. Recently he has been working with Paola
Antonelli on contemporary design exhibitions and projects and is participating
in MoMA’s Media Working Group to develop best practices for collecting,
archiving, exhibiting, and conserving digital works such as fonts, video games,
and apps. He has received a Robert V. Storr Research and Travel Grant,
which will allow him to study athletic footwear designs by Tinker Hatfield (of
Nike, Inc.) and to travel to the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, where he will
discuss aspects of footwear collection and conservation with their curators and
conservators. In addition, he is working on a permanent exhibition on the
theme of music and design, scheduled for fall 2014. In July, he will represent
MoMA as a judge at the annual Design Tokyo fair in Japan.
Luke continues to write for a number of publications.
Over the past two years, he has contributed a column about the design
auction market to Modern magazine, reviewed an exhibition for Studio
Potter,authored reviews, dispatches and features for Metalsmith magazine,
and written about popular visual and material culture for Outpost Journal and Art Papers, including a recent review
of an exhibition of GIF art.
Grace Chuang (MA 2010) is working on her
doctorate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she is
writing a dissertation tentatively titled “Bernard II Vanrisamburgh,
Master Cabinetmaker in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” under the supervision of
Thomas Crow. She curated the exhibition Italian
Renaissance and Baroque Bronze Sculpture from the Robert Lehman Collection at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was a 2012-13 curatorial studies
resident. Grace is currently a fellow at the Deutsches Forum für
Kunstgeschichte, Paris. For the academic years of 2014-2016, she will be
the Samuel H. Kress Fellow at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art,
Paris.
Anna Kaplan (MA 2010)
recently launched a commercial art gallery, BT&C Gallery, in Buffalo, which
has been featured in local press, including the Buffalo
News. With its inaugural exhibition recently ended in a temporary
space, she will be exhibiting artist Julian Montague’s work in a
permanent location in June. Anna is expecting a child in April. The new
arrival will join her family, which includes two lovely stepchildren.
Alexis Romano (MA 2010)
is working on her PhD in dress history at the Courtauld Institute of Art in
London under the supervision of Rebecca Arnold. Alexis also co-organizes
the Fashion Research
Network, which promotes and shares the work of early career and PhD
researchers in fashion and dress.
Courtney Stewart (MA
2010) is in the department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, where she has been mainly focusing on the exhibition Art
of India’s Deccan Sultans, ca. 1500-1750, scheduled for the spring of
2015. She gave a paper last fall at the National Institute of Design in
Ahmedabad, India. For the past two years, she has been teaching a class
on Islamic art history at the University of Toronto.
Genny Cortinovis (MA
2009) is a researcher in the decorative arts and design department
of the Saint Louis Art Museum, where she is working on an exhibition on
modernism in St. Louis scheduled for fall 2015. Her artisanal clothing
line, Dipped & Dyed, was
featured last year at St. Louis Fashion Week. In July, Genny will attend Attingham Summer
School in England. Last September, she was married in Provence,
France. BGC alumni Ajiri Aki(MA 2009) and Melanie
Clifton-Harvey (MA 2009) were in attendance.
Doug Clouse (MA 2007)
heads the graphic design company The
Graphics Office and is an adjunct faculty member at the Fashion
Institute of Technology, where he teaches graphic design and history. He is on
the board of the Type Directors Club and is president of the New York chapter
of the American Printing History Association.
Amy Osborn (MA 2007),
who lives in Brooklyn, is a project manager and application developer for the
Environmental Protection Agency.
Emily Zilber (MA 2007)
is the Ronald L. and Anita C. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts
at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She works on collections building and
display and developing special exhibitions. Emily was married last October.
Rita Jules (MA 2006) is
a senior book designer at Miko McGinty Inc. in Brooklyn, which designed the
BGC’s History of Design:
Decorative Arts and Material Culture, 1400–2000. Other recent
titles include The Houses of Louis Kahn for Yale University
Press; Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia,
5th to 8th Century for the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Take It
or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology for the Hammer Museum; and Treasures
from Korea: Arts and Culture of the Joseon Dynasty, 1392–1910 for the
Philadelphia Museum of Art. Rita enjoys combining craftsmanship with an
intellectual engagement in diverse works, often authored by experts in their
fields. “I am happy to contribute in my own way to the scholarly community and
to promote the pleasure and knowledge gained from the pairing of text and
image,” she says.
Jackie Killian (MA
2006) will complete a second master’s degree in May at the Winterthur Program
in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. She recently delivered
a lecture for the Winterthur Furniture Forum, entitled “Finding
Philadelphia Furniture in the Gulf South,” based on a field study
fellowship completed last summer with the Classical Institute of the South. At
Furniture Forum, she co-hosted a gallery workshop on early furniture made in
Philadelphia. In the past year Jackie has been awarded two scholarships from
the Decorative Arts Trust for thesis research travel and to attend the Trust’s
upcoming symposium in Bermuda in March.
Emily Klug (MA 2006) is
a senior registrar at the Pace Gallery in New York City, where her focus is on
collections management, exhibitions, contracts, and courier work. In October
2013, she married Jonathan Leach (Bard College 2002), who is a producer at CBS
news.
Freyja Hartzell (MA
2005) received her PhD from Yale in in 2012. She is currently a
postdoctoral fellow in material and visual culture at Parsons The New School
for Design, where she will be an assistant professor in fall 2014. Freyja has
continued work on her book about the German designer Richard Riemerschmid
(1868-1957) and spoke on him at the 2014 CAA Conference in Chicago. For the
German Studies Association Conference to be held in Kansas City, MO, in
September, she is organizing a series of panels on “German Wood: Material
and Metaphor from Forest to Fireside and Beyond,” which explore the
material and symbolic implications of “wood” in a diachronic and
interdisciplinary context. Between 2010 and 2013, she and her husband
added two children to their family—Bjorn and Brynja—who, she says, make the
scholarly life significantly more challenging but infinitely more rewarding.
Jennifer Scanlan (MA
2004) is curating Illuminate: Design
in Light, which opened April 2 at Urban Glass in Brooklyn.
