Earlier this month, Professor
Ivan Gaskell gave an online lecture, “Museum Values and ‘the very form of matter’” in the Fellows Colloquium Series of the Lichtenberg-Kolleg (Advanced Study Institute in the Humanities and Social Sciences), Georg-August University, Göttingen.
Associate professor
Aaron Glass spoke about his 2019 Focus Project exhibition,
The Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt, and the Making of Anthropology, at
People: A Global Dialogue on Museums and Their Publics, an online conference organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Assistant professor
Freyja Hartzell’s (MA ‘05) book on German designer Richard Riemerschmid (1868–1957) was recently accepted for publication by MIT Press and will be released in fall 2022.
Jennifer Mass, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Cultural Heritage Science, contributed a chapter to the catalogue for
American Weathervanes: The Art of the Winds, now on view at the American Folk Art Museum.
Assistant professor
Michele Majer and associate curator Emma Cormack (MA ‘18) led an online session of “Curators on Curating,” BGC’s new series that goes behind the scenes of upcoming BGC exhibitions and offers attendees a window into the curatorial process of exhibition making. They discussed the fall 2022 exhibition they are co-curating along with Ilona Kos of Textilmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland.
Threads of Power will trace the development of lace from its sixteenth-century origins to the present, bringing more than 175 examples from Textilmuseum’s extensive collection to the US for the first time. Garments, accessories, portraits, photographs, and examples of cutting-edge lace in contemporary couture will illustrate a wide variety of hand- and machine-made lace techniques and demonstrate lace as a signifier of power and wealth throughout history.
In addition,
Majer has contributed three fashion history overviews for the decades
1700–09,
1710–19, and
1770–79, to the
Fashion History Timeline, an open-access source for fashion history research maintained by Fashion Institute of Technology.
Steven Holl: Making Architecture, a traveling exhibition curated by professor
Nina Stritzler-Levine, opened at the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław, Poland. According to
Archinect, the exhibition “explores Holl’s intricate and distinctive creative process of making architecture through eleven projects, featuring a collection of approximately one hundred models, sketches, and other related studies. [It] highlights the rapidly changing pace of architecture, specifically, the way ideas are formed and visualized as manual tasks fade in favor of digital approaches.” The installation includes Holl’s concept drawings and model for the Ostrava Concert Hall, slated to begin construction in the Czech Republic in 2023.
Princeton University Press recently announced a new series, ART/WORK, edited by BGC associate professor
Ittai Weinryb and Caroline Fowler (Clark Art Institute/Williams College). According to the press, books in the ART/WORK series will respond to the latest trends in art history, pairing art history with conservation science in order to engage questions about manufacture and materials on a global scale and provide innovative narratives that aim to change how art history as a discipline is imagined. Fowler and Weinryb will also contribute to select volumes. They explain, “We understand this series as a methodological model by which to rethink the discipline of art history, creating collaborative volumes in which art historians, conservators, scientists, and artists are in conversation about a single medium in a way that is accessible to a general public, and also intellectually provocative for art historians. In creating accessible introductions to a single material history—pigments, ceramics, weaving, plastics—we hope to engage diverse audiences, and to model a form of art history founded in collaboration, conversation, and an understanding of objects as formed through long histories of making, deterioration, care, conservation, and remaking.” The inaugural series volume will launch in September 2022 with a focus on the ceramic arts and pigment. It will feature an introduction and conclusion by Sequoia Miller (MA ‘13), chief curator at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto and a practicing ceramic artist.
Associate professor
Catherine Whalen presented “Revisiting Women Designers in the USA, 20 Years Later” at Yale University in April 2021.
