Art History

Summer 2010 – Prof. Susan Merriam

Dutch Stone Houses, Hurley

I spent most of the summer in (very hot!) upstate New York working on two book projects. One, now in draft manuscript form, looks at representations of animals in early modern Europe. I’m particularly interested in exploring how the idea of the human was formed in relationship to the idea of the animal during this period. The second book, now in the research stages, is a hybrid of essays and cultural history. It examines the stretch of road leading from Kingston—New York’s first capital—to Woodbourne Correctional Facility, a medium security men’s prison located about 40 miles away. I made this drive once a week over the two semesters I taught in Bard’s Prison Initiative program, and was often struck by the number of settlements or places I came to imagine as utopias (early Dutch villages, summer camps, bungalow colonies) and dystopias (prisons, an abandoned reservation) along the route. The book examines both the road’s development (how this very rural area became the site of so many differing ideas about sociality) and theories about teaching as they relate to each place and moment in time. I also began an article on images of the Eucharist during the Catholic Reformation (forthcoming in an edited volume on Rubens’s Eucharist tapestries), and completed a book review to be published in Renaissance Quarterly (2011). I ended the summer with a research/pleasure trip to Stockholm and Berlin.

Summer 2010 – Sara Kornhauser

Eli Wilner

This summer I worked for Eli Wilner framing company in New York City. They have a gallery which houses their antique frames and an offsite studio space where reproduction frames are made as well antique frames are restored. I started with finishes–learning about the different layers that can be applied to the gilded frame to give depth and character to the color. Next, I learned how to guild and burnish frames.I also learned about the different layers of gesso and clay that are applied before the frame is gilded as well as how the clay and gilding water are prepared. I tried my hand at woodcarving, working with the master caver who was a 3rd generation carver from Ecuador.   I also learned about the process of restoring antique frames and made molds of frame sections that would be attached to loses on frames. In my final week at the studio I made my own small frame from start to finish.

Summer 2010 – Madeline Turner

Spider by Louise Bourgeoise

Before this past June, I really had no knowledge of contemporary art. I thought I couldn’t understand it and, therefore, I often chose not to deal with it. However, over the summer I had the amazing opportunity to immerse myself and develop my appreciation for the contemporary art world.  This immersion I speak of took place at the DIA:Beacon in upstate New York. At DIA, I interned for the education department and helped develop a proposal for a revamped tour plan for K-12 students. Our primary goal in creating this new tour was to make sure that we would never lecture the students. The artists exhibited at DIA, which include powerhouses Louise Bourgeoise, Andy Warhol, Michael Heizer, and Donald Judd, have created works that can take on so many different meanings to different viewers, that we decided the best way to let the students view the work was by emphasizing the individual experience. One of my favorite moments at DIA occurred when I was observing a tour for a group of eight year-olds. They just seemed to get it. The kids interacted with, played around, and experimented with works like Fred Sandback’s yarn installations and Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses. This singular experience and my experience at DIA as a whole exposed me to the idea that art is really for anybody as long as he or she has an open mind. This coming fall I will be continuing my work with the museum by guiding tours every Saturday. I am so grateful for not only having had this summer experience, but also for finding a place that will help me continue to grow as a member of the art world.

Summer 2010 – Nicki Stein

The Edward Gorey House exterior

This summer I worked as an intern and docent at the Edward Gorey House, a small museum dedicated to the life and work of the somewhat eccentric, wholly fascinating author and illustrator, Edward Gorey. My love of Gorey’s bizarre, sometimes nonsensical stories and blackly comedic, seemingly anachronistic illustrations, have only been enhanced by the small strange details I’ve learned about his life through docenting and conversing with the directors of the museum. His undying and life long love of cats, his penchant for memorizing his favorite soap operas line by line, as well as his insatiable interest in literature from all corners of the world. I got to know the people who knew Edward in his lifetime as well. The director of the museum, Rick Jones, was a close friend of Edward’s and was actually sitting in the room with him when, in the year 2000, Edward Gorey threw his head back laughing, promptly had a heart attack and passed away.

Working in a small museum environment has been extremely rewarding to me, as I have been able to work so closely with the wonderful people who run the museum, and have such close contact with the artworks as well as with the Gorey enthusiasts who come from all over the world to see the place where he spent so time cross-hatching and inventing story after story. I was even able to aid in organizing the Gorey House’s annual children’s event, “Fantastagorey: A Children’s Day Celebration.” Introducing a new generation of fans to Gorey’s work and legacy was a joy in and of itself.

Ombledrum, The Edward Gorey House Cat

Working in this museum I feel I’ve gained more than just internship experience. I’ve gained close insight into the life of a man whose work I have long admired. It’s not often that one gets to so intimately observe the life and work of a favorite artist. I feel extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to work at the Edward Gorey House, which has allowed me to explore the world of museum work while simultaneously exploring the strange universe once inhabited by Edward Gorey himself.

Summer 2010 – Clare Conniff

Clare and the other students with family and friends of the program's director.

My Summer 2010 plans fell into my lap in the form of a mass e-mail from a professor. After quickly filling out some applications and emailing the director of Sinergie, an art restoration program based in the Puglia region of Italy, I found myself spending the month of June in Altamura, a small city near Bari, Italy. I have been interested in art restoration for several years, but I had written it off as something I would have to wait until grad school to do.   Instead, in Altamura I found myself working hands-on with extremely damaged canvases and wooden statues that were 300-400 years old. Tonio, the program director, gave us instructions and demonstrations and then allowed us to not only try the work by ourselves but to do the vast majority of it on our own. In addition to the education in restoration techniques, I and the other students working with the program also found ourselves immersed in the culture of Southern Italy. We stayed in a 40-room villa in the countryside that, although sometimes quiet at night, was a hub of activity. Everyday we encountered Tonio’s friends and family, children and adults taking English courses, and farm workers employed by the villa’s owner who wanted to see our work and interact with us. All in all, I have never had a more productive, educational, and fun summer.

Summer 2010 – Nicolette Cook

During this summer I had two internships, one working with Gwen Spicer, a textile conservator in Delmar, NY and the other working with Hallie Halpern, a painting conservator in East Chatham. With Gwen I was able to work on a late 18th – early 19th Century 13 Star Whiskey Rebellion Flag, a 1863-64 silk flag gifted to the 4th Colored Regiment of the United States from the Colored Ladies of Baltimore, a 1940s handmade satin wedding dress, a 20th C wool coverlet, as well as construct mannequins for settler and Native American replica costumes. With Hallie I assisted her with cleaning and consolidating a large Chinese propaganda oil painting on canvas from the 1960s showing Mao Zedong climbing a hill surrounded by men of the working class. Both internships were interesting, informative and taught me a great deal about how private conservators work.  I will definitely be working with them again in the near future.

Summer 2010 – Prof. Patricia Karetzky

Prof. Patricia Karetzky and husband Monroe in Bejing artist Hou Guanbin's studio

During the summer I gave two talks: “Uses of the Past in Contemporary Chinese Art,” at Xiamen University Fujian in June  and “The Use of Hanzi in Contemporary Chinese Art”  at the Seventh International Conference  on Hanzi Calligraphy Education, Capital Normal University, in Beijing on June 29.  I also published an article Cui Xiuwen, Walking on Broken Glass for the Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (vol. 9 no. 3:18-33).

Summer 2010- Prof. Laurie Dahlberg

Count Olympe Aguado, c. 1852

I spent my summer on three areas of work.  First, I did some legwork on my latest project, a study of the 19^th-century amateur as the driving force behind the discovery and evolution of photography.  I’m intrigued by the fact that amateurism itself has an evolution that is laid bare in the history of photography.  Early in the century, the Amateur with a capital “A” was a revered individual in Europe, respected for the serious scholarly contributions he made to science and the humanities, in such fields as astronomy, archaeology, history, and by 1839, photography.  But by 1890, thanks to the American entrepreneur/industrialist George Eastman, photography was opened to a new class of small “a” amateurs.  Scientific expertise and received ideas of taste and art were no longer a prerequisite, and amateurism in photography became associated with snapshooters, shutterbugs, camera fiends, and Americans, in short, caricatures of middlebrow aspirations.   I’ll be giving a talk on this new material in October, at Concordia University in Montreal.

I also had some writing deadlines pending, including an article celebrating the bicentennial of the birth of Victor Regnault, one of the major figures in early French photography.  Co-written with Sébastien Poncet, a French historian of science, the article is being offered to an international journal of science for non-specialists.  A book review of The Lens of Impressionism: Photography and Painting Along the Normandy Coast will appear next month in caa.reviews, and a review of the exhibition Starburst: Color Photography in America, 1970-1980 is forthcoming in the Winter 2010 issue of Aperture.

All work and no play…so I also worked while playing, restoring my chicken coop from an obscure piece of topiary to a functional building.

Jim Toia, Pewter Ant Colonies Submerged, 2010

“Christian Marclay:  Festival”:  sounds and art works by a pioneer of turntable music.  See and hear Marcel Duchamp talk! (on film).  Ends September 26, but if you’re there by September 19 definitely check out the sleeper show of the summer on the 2^nd floor: “Off the Wall:  Thirty Performance Actions,” featuring documentation in various media of performance pieces ranging from Old Masters Acconci and Nauman to the present.  Ends Sept. 19; Part 2 opens September 30:  Whitney Museum of American Art.

Greater New York at PS1 in Queens.  Works by around 70 young New York artists; see what’s happening–plus some of what has already happened and what will happen.  Includes film programming by Bard’s Ed Halter.

Bard alum Jim Toia’s (’85) 6^th exhibition at Kim Foster Gallery in Chelsea http://kimfostergallery.com/ opens Thursday, September 9 from 6-8, and runs through October 16.   Speaking of Bard alums, check out pieces by Shannon Ebner (’93) and Walead Beshty (’99) on campus, in the fabulous At Home/Not At Home show currently at the CCS!

Summer 2010:  Prof. Susan Aberth

I attended the 5th International Symposium on Surrealism held June 18-20 at The Edward James Foundation, West Dean College located in Chichester, West Sussex (England).  Titled “Surrealism Laid Bare,” this year’s conference was supported by the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacies and the Tate Museum’s project Surrealism and Non-Normative Sexuality.  “Querying Surrealism/Queering Surrealism” was the uniting focus of the two-day event, which was held in conjunction with an exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery  Surreal Friends: Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Kati Horna.  I opened the event with a talk titled “Leonora Carrington’s Bestiality,” held at Pallant House on June 18th.  After the conference I spent five days in Paris doing research on the Cuban surrealist painter Agustin Fernandez.