Art History

Yale University Press Congratulates its 2024 CAA Prizewinners

Kobena Mercer, winner of the 2024 Frank Jeett Mather Award for Art Criticism and the author of
Alain Locke and the Visual Arts.

“Mercer’s sumptuously illustrated study . . . succeeds in positioning Locke as an important philosophical voice in the ‘not yet finalized story of Afro-modern art and culture.’”—Douglas Field, Times Literary Supplement

Tuesday, December 6th, the Art History and Visual Culture Program held its annual Senior Poster Session and Alum Night in RKC Lobby.
Class of 2023 seniors displayed visual and textual accounts of their Senior Project research to date. Faculty and guests were invited to
ask questions and discuss topics.

In addition, two alum Martha Hart ‘5, Museum Registrar at CCS Bard Hessel Museum and Alec Petty ’16 founder of King’s Leap Gallery in NYC,
spoke of their journeys since graduating Bard with degrees in Art History and Visual Culture. There was a Q and A session afterwards.

Art & Education
September 23, 2022

MA in Art History
Hunter College

Robert Longo, American Bridge Project, 2017. Installation view, Hunter College. Courtesy of the Hunter College Art Galleries. Photo: Daniel Pérez.

Spring semester deadline: October 1
Fall semester deadline: February 1

Hunter College Art & Art History Department
Main Campus
695 Park Avenue 11th Floor North Building
New York, NY 10065
USA

hunter.cuny.edu
Hunter College is now accepting applications for the MA in Art History. The Master’s Program in Art History at Hunter College provides rigorous training in the history and theory of art.  Located on the Upper East Side, Hunter is an easy walk to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Asia Society, and the Frick Collection.  The program is the largest and most comprehensive in the City University of New York system, with an internationally recognized faculty whose dynamic classes take full advantage of the extraordinary resources and research opportunities the city provides. Hunter prides itself as New York City’s public university for the arts, and is committed to maintaining tuition affordability and offering a flexible schedule for working professionals. Find our program description here.

At Hunter, MA students have the opportunity to pursue advanced research in a wide range of art historical periods and cultures, as Hunter’s Art History faculty publish and teach in fields spanning from the ancient Mediterranean, East Asia and the Islamic world, to the Modern and Contemporary Art of Europe, the Americas, and the African Diaspora.  Significant concentrations include Medieval and Early Modern Europe, the Global 18th Century, and Postcolonial Latin American Art, as well as 20th and 21st Century art, both worldwide and locally—faculty share a strong engagement with New York’s art world, its institutions, and its histories. Explore our faculty pages.

Hunter’s Art Historians are committed to curatorial practice as an important facet of scholarly art historical research, and regularly offer classes in conjunction with the exhibition program at the Hunter College Art Galleries.  Students in the MA program may elect to pursue the Advanced Certificate in Curatorial Studies, which offers both a theoretical and historical grounding in curatorial practices and practical experience in exhibition research, organization, and installation.  Recent Curatorial Certificate exhibitions include Acts of Art and Rebuttal in 1971, Framing Community: Magnum Photographs, 1947-Present, and Night Shades and Phantoms: An Exhibition of Works by Robert Rauschenberg, researched in collaboration with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and installed in its building downtown. Find details here and here.

Many Hunter MA students work in New York’s art world: in museums, galleries, art organizations, and publishing houses. All our courses are scheduled the late afternoon or in the evening, enabling students to continue to work or hold internships while earning their degrees.  Hunter’s Art History network is strong, and the program’s alumni hold prominent positions in arts institutions and foundations in the city, nationally, and internationally.  Hunter MA graduates who have chosen to continue their academic careers in pursuit of the PhD have also been successful, and are working in or have completed doctoral programs nationwide.

Thanks to our supporters in New York’s arts community, we are able to offer scholarship support to strong students in all fields, especially in Latin American Art and the art of the African Diaspora, and, through the new Renate, Hans, and Maria Hofmann Trust scholarships, to incoming students intending to research and write on modernism and 20th-century painting in New York.

Join us for a prospective student information session on Zoom:
September 28, October 26, or November 30, 6–7pm EST. Sign up here.

Tuition affordability: In 2022-23, the cost of the complete degree (30cr) is 14,500 USD for in-state students and 26,000 USD for out of state.

Application deadlines: October 1, 2022 and February 1, 2022. Qualified applicants may be considered past the application deadline.

$3.2 Million Given to Bard College Endowing Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism in Perpetuity
Untitled wall drawing, circa 1981, Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation.

Endowment Coincides with CCS Bard’s Permanent Reinstallation of Keith Haring Wall Drawing Created During 1981 Visit to Bard College

Egyptian Author Haytham el-Wardany Appointed 2022-23 Fellow
Bard College announced today it has received $3.2 million to endow in perpetuity the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism, an annual faculty position that brings a prominent scholar, activist, or practicing artist to teach and conduct research within the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) graduate program and the undergraduate Human Rights Program. The endowment is made possible by a grant of$800,000 from the Keith Haring Foundation and matching funds from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation and benefactor George Soros. First launched in 2014, the fellowship embodies the shared commitment of Bard and the Keith Haring Foundation to imaginatively explore the complex connections between sociopolitical engagement and artistic practice. It also speaks to the historic relationship between the college and Keith Haring, which is further honored with CCS Bard’s permanent reinstallation of a wall drawing the artist created in an act of spontaneity while visiting the campus in 1981.

Untitled wall drawing, circa 1981, Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation.

In conjunction with the gift and reinstallation, Bard simultaneously announced that writer Haytham el-Wardany has been named the 2022-23 recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship and will be in-residence on campus during the spring semester to teach and conduct research. El-Wardany brings to Bard students a deep knowledge of philosophy, critical theory, aesthetics, history, and literature with a focus on social movements in the Middle East and around the globe. Using collective reading as a vehicle for cultural research and debate, his teaching will bring a richly literary and global dimension to CCS Bard and the Human Rights Program’s curricula, advancing Bard College’s mission of cultivating critical thinking and creative action through deeper understandings of human history, society, and the arts.

“The Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism has been an enormous source of pride for the Keith Haring Foundation for the last eight years. It is a nod to the spirit and belief of Keith Haring that both art and activism can complement one another and bring about social and political change. We are honored to partner with the Marieluise Hessel Foundation and George Soros to ensure this critical work continues perpetually,” said Gil Vazquez, Executive Director of the Haring Foundation.

About the Haring Wall Drawing
In the early 1980s, Keith Haring was invited by Bard College Professor of Art History Tom Wolf to speak at the Procter Art Center (now the Fisher Studio Arts Building) about his practice and personal ethics around graffiti art. Prior to the talk, in an act of spontaneity, using a fat Magic Marker, Haring drew a series of five crawling babies on the wall of Wolf’s office. During a phase of construction and expansion in the Fisher Arts Studio Building, a portion of the wall with the drawing was carved out and moved to Wolf’s new office located in a different building on campus.

With Wolf’s imminent retirement from Bard College, the work will be transferred from the Department of Art and Art History to CCS Bard to undergo conservation and stabilization. It will be permanently installed in the CCS Bard Library, where students, researchers, and guests will have continued access to Haring’s work, illustrating the connection between Keith Haring and Bard College.

See more https://www.bard.edu/news/32-million-given-to-bard-college-endowing-keith-haring-fellowship-in-art-and-activism-in-perpetuity-2022-09-21

Making Collections Matter:
A Symposium
Fri, Sept 23, 2022
10 am–4:30 pm

This day-long symposium focuses on the historical formation, current uses, and future possibilities of modern and contemporary art museum collections. Bringing together curators and scholars who are engaged with and thinking critically about museum collecting practices, the sessions consider how collections are built, who they serve, and how they can be sustainably stewarded now and in the future.

3–4:30 pm | Session 3: Collecting for the Future
What are the ethical implications and practical considerations of building and caring for collections now and in the future?

• Naomi Beckwith, Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator, Guggenheim Museum
• Cheryl Finley, Inaugural Director, Atlanta University Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective, Distinguished Visiting Professor, Spelman College, and Associate Professor, Cornell University, and Amy Whitaker, Associate Professor of Visual Arts Administration, New York University
• Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), Executive Director & Chief Curator, Forge Project
• Alex Kitnick, Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College 
• Pilar Tompkins Rivas, Chief Curator and Deputy Director, Curatorial and Collections, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

For more info: https://whitney.org/events/making-collections-matter-a-symposium

Bard College’s Division of the Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Anne Hunnell Chen as Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture. Her tenure-track appointment begins in the 2022–23 academic year.

Anne Hunnell Chen specializes in the art and archaeology of the globally connected Late Roman world. She is the founder and director of the NEH-funded International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), aimed at virtual reassembly and recontextualization of archaeological information from a uniquely preserved archaeological site of cross-disciplinary significance. Dr. Chen has published on Roman, Persian, and Digital Humanities topics, and taught equally wide-ranging coursework.

In addition, she is currently at work on a monograph, Tetrarchic Art, Architecture, and Ideology Between East and West (284-325 CE). Taking a transculturally-sensitive, multimedia, and contextual approach, hers is the first book to treat the imperial art of this critical transitional era in its own right, rather than as an accessory in a longue durée narrative. She argues that emperors of this era sensitively adjusted their ideological messaging to address ever-evolving internal and external political pressures—including inordinate pressure from the Persian Sassanid East—and that the stylistic abstraction most commonly associated with the imperial art of the period was not as all-pervasive as generally assumed.

She has excavated at the Roman Baths in Iesso (Spain), and at the Roman imperial palace at Felix Romuliana (Serbia), a UNESCO World Heritage site. In 2013–14, she spent a year as a fellow in the Department of the Ancient Near East at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where she worked on the international loan exhibition Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age. Dr. Chen also serves as co-chair of the international Pelagios Network, and an historical consultant for the Virtual Center for Late Antiquity (VCLA).

She earned her B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fields of Art History and Classical Studies, and her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University. Prior to joining the Bard community, she taught at Brown, Hofstra, and Yale Universities.

Prof. Susan Aberth, Art History and Visual Culture Program, and collaborator CCS-graduate Gilbert Vicario have just won a $50,000 Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Grant for their exhibition on tracing esotericism in the Americas at the Phoenix Art Museum.

For more information:

(https://warholfoundation.org/2022/06/29/the-andy-warhol-foundation-for-the-visual-arts-announces-spring-2022-grantees/).

Foreland x Bard Docent Program

Foreland is an 85,000SF contemporary arts development that includes 31 artist studios, three commercial art galleries, two private event spaces, food & beverage, and a membership-only cooperative workspace. Located on the banks of Catskill Creek, the Foreland campus is housed within three historic mills dating to the mid-1800s. It is a beacon of contemporary art, aesthetic wonder, and modern functionalism all within the Hudson River Valley.

Foreland is seeking two motivated, poised, and outgoing students to join the team as gallery docents for our newly established Foreland Gallery Coalition (FGC). Eloquence in contemporary art is crucial. The FGC is a nationwide coalition of 15 renowned programs that produce exhibitions at Foreland twice yearly. Docents will be a critical member of the Foreland Gallery Coalition staff, primarily ensuring the safety and security of works on view, welcoming gallery visitors, answering visitor questions, and opening/closing the gallery.

Docents will be exposed to the behind-the-scenes of running a gallery and interact with an exceptional group of artists and art dealers. A proficiency in speaking about art as well as the ability to quickly learn the ins-and-outs of gallery pragmatics is essential. Docent applications will be accepted at 3 times throughout the year, coinciding with the start of each semester and summer break, with an initial employment commitment of 16 hours per week for a minimum of 5 months. Applicants interested in summer employment must be available to work every Saturday and Sunday from 10:30am-6:30pm, beginning June 25, 2022. Docents will be compensated at a rate of $16 per hour.

Please send a resume and a short cover letter to [email protected]. Applications are due by June 1, 2022. Serious inquiries only, please. Learn more about Foreland at forelandcatskill.com or follow us on instagram @forelandcatskill!