The George T. Dorsch Awards

The George T. Dorsch Awards in the History of Art department were established with funds bequeathed to the department by one of its founding members, George T. Dorsch. An esteemed member of the department and of the FIT community, where he taught for 32 years, Professor Dorsch passed away in September 2000, leaving the farsighted and gracious legacy of an annual gift to support faculty and student professional achievement.

For more information, visit the George T. Dorsch Awards page on our website.

Eveline Baseggio-Omiccioli, recipient of the 2022 George T. Dorsch Endowed Fellowship

My interest for relics began while I was working on my dissertation on the church of Santa Maria dei Servi in Venice. It is then when I realized that Venice was second only to Rome for the number of relics the city boasted. These relics played a crucial role in the construction of the city’s identity and its foundation myth, but today they lay forgotten in their churches, almost completely ignored by residents and visitors alike. The goal of my book project is twofold. On one hand, it aims at retracing the itineraries of the pilgrims who visited Venice on their way to Jerusalem between 1400–1500 in order to determine which relics were most venerated and why. On the other hand, it revisits the stories of the saints to whom they belong, which cults and works of art were associated with them, and how they contributed to shape Venice’s history. Thanks to the support of the Dorsch Award, I spent last summer in Venice researching the city’s archives and libraries for materials related to the relics and rituals of the saints that I intend to examine in my book: Mark, Isidore, Theodore, Nicholas, and

Lucy, just to mention some of the most popular ones. I came across various resources of great relevance to my project and also found new avenues of research that I would like to pursue this upcoming summer.

Cat Trzaskowski, recipient of the 2022 George T. Dorsch Endowed Scholarship

More Life - A Celebration of Queer Identity Through Baroque Aesthetic

Throughout my years of studying art history at FIT, few art movements have captured my imagination quite like the art of the Italian Baroque. The extravagance, dynamic compositions, intense emotion, innovative visual effects and theatrical lighting have inspired my photography and fueled my drive to create. I would often pour over books of painting reproductions, fascinated by the idea that at the core of this movement was a drive to seduce and persuade the viewer through the power of beauty and meraviglia. It was this movement, and its power of psychological persuasion that would become the core of my senior thesis project, “More Life.”

Thanks to the generous support of the George T. Dorsch Award, I was given the resources to travel, conduct visual research, create props and costumes, build elaborate lighting sets, cast and shoot images in studio and edit complex and painterly composites for my Baroque-inspired thesis series. The first stage of the project involved a total of five weeks of travel in Italy my ambitious itinerary brought me to over fifty unique museums, palaces, and houses of worship in Rome, Florence, Milan, Bologna and Venice.

As a contemporary artist and student of art history, I was unprepared for how arresting the direct experience of these works of art would be. Despite my admiration of the work of this period, I expected that my clinical academic understanding would shield me from their sublime emotional power. I thought that, as an informed observer, I would experience admiration, and joy, but not necessarily the legendary meraviglia of these intensely spiritual and psychological works. Instead, I found myself constantly overcome, overwhelmed and transfixed time and again, as I approached each work. It didn’t matter that I had studied so many of these pieces academically that I could trace their lines with closed eyes— I saw them all as if for the first time and was moved to silence and stillness with awe. I was struck by the intensity and the immediacy that these works of art still commanded, centuries later in a world of virtual reality, space flight and artificial intelligence.

As the weeks of my travels went by, I began to consider how this kind of aesthetic persuasion could be used to elevate a community of people who have been historically marginalized and maligned by the types of institutions that commissioned these masterpieces. I thought of all the incredible queer, trans, nonbinary and gender nonconforming people, of their talents, their insights, their creativity, and I thought of my own place as a queer artist raised in a faith leveraged against me.

I was moved to create a project that would take hold of the proverbial microphone, showing the esteem in which I held the people of my community, the way I wished the world could see them. “More Life” became a series of seven large-scale images that blended studio photography, composite environments and elements photographed on my trip, and an illustrative postproduction style to create reinterpretations of historic paintings and sculptures of the Italian Baroque era, re-appropriating these works through a queer lens. Through these reinterpretations, I hope to inspire the viewer to consider a new moral paradigm of love and acceptance for all members of the queer community. I will speak in the Baroque language of “more is more” and depict my subjects as precious, beautiful, and deserving always of “More Life.”

Select images from the “More Life” series will be exhibited at The Museum at FIT as part of the Photography and Related Media BFA Thesis Exhibition Before I Leave , on view from May 16th through May 28th.