Art History

Summer 2010 – Prof. Tom Wolf

Lady Archer Soapine Card

I continued my research about Asian-American artists by visiting a descendant of a fascinating, overlooked Japanese American set designer in Seattle.  But most of my summer was devoted to writing an article about the famous feminist writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  Early in her career, in the 1880s, she worked as an artist, and her first husband was an painter.  Although a tremendous amount has been written about her (over 40 books) no one has really analyzed the art of her formative years:  the significance of the art she made in terms of gender issues, and the relation between her artistic concerns and those of her husband.  They lived in Providence, Rhode Island, which I visited several times to do research about their artistic context, and which will be incorporated in the essay I plan to submit for publication soon.

Summer 2010 – Noah Chasin

Lagos

Summer is a very conflicted season for academics. On the one hand, we are “not working” in the conventional sense, leading many friends and family members to believe that we have a guilt-free three-and-a-half-month vacation. The reality is that summer is when academics get the chance to focus on their own research in the absence of preparing class lectures, grading, committee work, and meeting with students. I was able to get away for a couple of weeks to Costa Rica with my family, but even there, writing continued on my most pressing project, a book-length manuscript on Team 10 and the ethics of participatory urbanism. My research focuses on the immediate postwar period in Europe where architects (working on the urban scale) undertook an approach to urban reconstruction that was radically different from their predecessors. Different because instead of assuming that the architect/designer was the supreme hand guiding the development of urban morphology, Team 10 felt that eliciting the input of once and future residents of a city would ground the metropolis both historically and functionally in a more ‘user-friendly’ format. My argument holds that Team 10’s work in the 1950s-70s foreshadows a lot of contemporary urban design practices that advocate for ad-hoc, self-organized, and participatory urban interventions. I also began working on an article derived from the aforementioned project on John Turner’s sites and services projects for the World Bank in the late-1960s. I published an article in the Journal of Architectural Education entitled “Democracy, Deliberation, and Hybridity in Three Contemporary Architectural Practices: Interboro, Apolonija Šuštersi?, and Stealth,” and just at the end of the summer completed an article for ArtForum entitled ““STEALTH.unlimited: What It Takes To Make (And Un-Make) A City.”