Georgetown University, Department of Art and Art History Newsletter No. 1, Spring 2021

NEWSLETTER

Department of Art & Art History • Georgetown University

No. 01 • Spring 2021

LETTER FROM THE CHAIR IN THIS ISSUE

2 3 5 8

Letter from the Chair Student Stories Faculty Updates

Dear Students, Alumni, Colleagues, and Friends: What a year it has been. As we conclude Spring semester 2021, it is difficult to believe all we have experienced since Spring 2020.

Together and individually we have witnessed unimaginable loss, division, and disruption close to home and around the world. We know the years ahead will be deeply shaped by this one, and sincerely hope for changes that lift everyone.

My colleagues and I always marvel at Georgetown students, but this year they have shown us new kinds of fortitude and brilliance.

Although we terribly miss being together in studios, classrooms, and galleries, we have treasured our classes and other gatherings online.

All the steep learning curves, glitches, and frustration also brought great creativity, patience, and inspiration. The many distances have made us value our community more than ever.

Alumni Updates

I am immensely grateful for the dedication of our faculty and staff, who have, along with the rest of the Georgetown family, worked incredibly hard on behalf of our students and each other. This Spring we are thinking especially of the Hoya classes of ‘20 and ’21. Having missed the chance to celebrate your Commencements on Healy Lawn, we will be very eager to hear from you and to see you when you’re back on the Hilltop! The same is true, as always, for all of our other students and friends.

Read more about Professor Scott Hutchison’s Flux exhibit on page 4

We hope you enjoy this first newsletter of the Department of Art and Art History. As we look forward to future issues, we will be keen for news from our alumni. Please let us know what you’re up to with the simple form (linked at the end of the newsletter). We’d love to hear from you!

Design Director

TONI-LEE SANGASTIANO Editors

AL ACRES

ELIZABETH PRELINGER

ANDREA GALLELLI HUEZO

With all good wishes from our Department,

Al Acres Department Chair Wright Family Term Associate Professor in Art History

Coordinator

EMILY AUFULDISH

// Cover: Toni-Lee Sangastiano, Carousel House, Asbury Park, NJ. Oil on panel. 6 x 6 inches. Private collection. // Inside Cover: Georgetown University

STUDENT STORIES I am a junior double-majoring in English and Art. I was also recently admitted to the English Department’s AB/MA Program, where I hope to study satire across history and media. I am currently the political cartoonist for The Lincoln Project, the political action committee. As a contractor, I create political cartoons, illustrations, and graphics to help support democracy and hold those who would do it harm accountable. My work is shared via LP’s newsletters and social media with a combined audience of over 4.5 million followers. I also create political cartoons for Our Daily Planet, a Hoya-founded environmental news platform.

I’ve created work for BBC News, Voice of America, GU Politics, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Georgetown University Office of Communications.

At Georgetown, I attended the 2020 Climate Forum, and drew the presidential candidates while sharing them on Twitter. One of the event organizers, Our Daily Planet, emailed me during the event and asked if I wanted to make a weekly cartoon—I said yes. A few months later on a Friday in June, my ODP boss’s husband retweeted one of my cartoons and tagged Lincoln Project founder Steve Schmidt, and I was hired as their cartoonist within a few hours. My Lincoln Project job has brought me over 17K Twitter followers in only a few months, and has brought in a whole new audience for my other work.

More recently, I had the honor of being a Seminar Course Assistant for Prof. Morrell last fall for the first-ever art-centric Ignatius Seminar, “Line,” where I worked with a class of first-year students and helped Prof. Morrell facilitate the virtual course. I also have taught several virtual drawing workshops over the last year, including one for the Georgetown Program Board’s programming for Homecoming 2020.

I’m so grateful to have studied under professors like Prof. Morrell, Dr. Sangastiano, Prof. Hutchison, Prof. Kelly, Prof. Barnhart, and so many other incredible mentors who have helped me expand my understanding of what visual design can accomplish—visually as well as ideologically.”

// Alex Bowman |3|

Department of Art & Art History — Spring 2021

Alex Bowman — Studio Art

Suna Cha—Art History

Hello! My name is Suna Cha and I am a graduating senior with double majors in Art History and English.

I am currently based in New York City, but I grew up in New Jersey and Seoul, South Korea. During my time at Georgetown, I wrote articles on arts and culture for The Hoya, including a feature on the Department of Art & Art History and reviews of exhibitions at the Maria and Alberto de la Cruz Gallery. I was involved in the Georgetown International Student Association and formerly served as a resident assistant in the Southwest Quad. I also enjoyed presenting my papers at a number of symposiums and conferences. In summer 2019, I had the opportunity to intern at the Frick Art Reference Library and the

// Suna Cha Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I developed an interest in curating.

More recently, I have worked as a research assistant for Professor Michelle Wang, who is also my thesis advisor. I am writing on woodcuts as vehicles for protest and emotion, focusing on the South Korean democratization movement

Andrea Chavarín—Art and Museum Studies Georgetown’s Museum Studies Masters Program. Our program started during the COVID-19 pandemic, and I can say that this misfortune allowed me to meet and share the program with the most resilient and passionate students, who are now my friends. In our small classes, we developed our voices and our sorority towards each other creating engaging discussions. As a Mexican American, my focus in the program was to learn how to bring visibility, awareness, research, and access to the Latinx community.

|4|

// Above: Andrea Chavarín

// Carmen Puig at Casa Wabi,

March 2021

in the 1980s. My research interests center on modern and contemporary Korean art, from the introduction of Western and Japanese imperialism in the late 19th century to the postcolonial and Cold War era. I am particularly interested in the development of abstraction; legacies of colonialism and empire; material culture, mass media, and consumption; and the everyday lives of women. I am thrilled to continue my studies in fall 2021 at Harvard University, where I will pursue a master’s degree in Regional StudiesEast Asia with a concentration in Korean Humanities. I hope to pursue a PhD in Art History and become a scholar and curator of Korean art. I am truly grateful for the Department’s continued support for my academic and professional passions.

My name is Andrea Chavarín, and I am a graduate student at

Through enriching courses like Museum Foundations, Education, Digital Media, Management, Curation, Collections, to mention a few, I now have a broader understanding of museums as institutions. I now know the work that museums need to make them agents of social change, and in my career, I will work to make museums places of inclusion and community.

Before entering the Master’s program, I was an assistant curator in the Asian Art department at the San Diego Museum of Art and an Archaeologist at the Museo Templo Mayor in Mexico City. Today I am interning at the Mexican Cultural Institute of Washington D.C., and have been accepted to study a Ph.D. program on Mesoamerican Art History at UC San Diego this Fall.

Carmen Puig—Art History and Studio Art While growing up in Spain, I did not learn much about Latin America.

It is a thorny issue that is avoided in school curriculums. So when

On March 16th, I moved to Mexico City to join Casa Wabi while I finish my last semester remotely. Casa Wabi is a non-profit foundation that advocates and promotes artisans, artists, and the arts in Mexico.

Since visiting Mexico City in Spring 2020, I have been captivated by Casa Wabi’s work supporting Oaxacan and international artists. I could not be part of its team today without having learned about Mexico’s art. More importantly, I could not have found myself as an artist without the encouragement of my professors.

I am forever grateful to them, the Department of Art and Art History, and Georgetown University for challenging me to discover different countries and cultures. In the years ahead, I plan to remain in Mexico, studying its art firsthand and pursuing my career as an artist while promoting the art of underrepresented communities. J

FACULTY UPDATES Al Acres

Professor Al Acres will conclude his two terms as Chair of the Department of Art and Art History in June, 2021.

The students in his recent courses (a seminar on Albrecht Dürer and a survey of Northern Renaissance Art) were inspiring company during this most challenging of years. He will be on sabbatical in 2021-22, completing a book and an article on Jan van Eyck, along with research for a new book project that explores marginal dimensions of late medieval painting. In December he joined the Reverend Dr. James Hawkey, Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey, London, for a presentation within a seminar series for Advent entitled “A Great and Mighty Wonder.”

Following her Spring 2021 seminar on Race & Color in Latin American Art, Prof. Gallelli Huezo is developing a new course titled Spectacle in Latin America. Both seminars draw upon her current research for a book exploring the intersection of spectacle and race in Latin America.

Scott Hutchison

|5|

Ian Bourland

Professor Ian Bourland taught new seminars focusing on critical theory and questions of race, racism and aesthetics, and continued ongoing work as a critic for Artforum and Frieze. He also completed a series of entries for a comprehensive volume for Phaidon Press, African Artists, to be published in late 2021. A new book project on Africa and resource extraction is underway, and was awarded support through an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art this Summer

Andrea Gallelli Huezo

Aubin Pictures recently invited Professor Andrea Gallelli Huezo to design a course to accompany their film Aggie, based on the social justice philanthropy of Agnes Gund. The seminar she created, Art: Justice & Activism, is to be taught in universities across the U.S.

From March 13th through April 24th, The Fred Schnider Gallery of Art exhibits Flux, recent paintings by Professor Scott Hutchison. Scott’s paintings express inner dimensions of his subjects, inviting us to learn their stories. People take center stage with layers of their personal experience left for us to discover. “It’s about coaxing a story I see embedded in their pose and the physical space they occupy. Any overt message is a residual effect left by the more formal elements of artistic practice and the process of creation,” says Scott.

Department of Art & Art History — Spring 2021

I saw that Georgetown offered a Latin American Art History course, I joined eagerly. Within the first week, I was hooked. In every lecture, Prof. Gallelli Huezo presented objects I had never seen before, cultures with an astonishing past, and religions honoring and fearing nature. I could not believe that I had never heard about these thriving civilizations. Through these courses, I realized that history and art go hand-in-hand, so I declared my dual major in Art History and Studio Art. Since then, Prof. Reed’s guidance and knowledge have helped me explore different art media.

Thanks to him, my art —inspired

by Mesoamerican and Mexican Art—seeks to address social issues through ceramic and mixed media.

FACULTY UPDATES Jayme McLellan

environment. Drawing on his visual experiences and memories from Oxford, he is concerned with the tension between depicting a sense of place and creating landscapes of the mind.

In Fall 2021 he taught “Line,” the first Art course ever offered in Georgetown College’s program of Ignatius Seminars for first-year students.

2018) was translated into Japanese and published in Japan in February 2021. The book was reviewed already in noteworthy art magazines including Art Notebook (April issue), one of the most influential art magazines in Japan.

Susan Nalezyty

B.G. Muhn

|6|

HARD ART DC 1979, the book Professor Jayme McLellan created with Lucian Perkins, Lely Constantinople, and Alec MacKaye, has sold out its first pressing!

HARD ART toured internationally as an exhibition from 2011-2015. Jayme and her team are working on a new exhibition about Valley Green apartments, where Bad Brains had their fifth ever concert.

HR, the singer for Bad Brains, modeled this Rock Against Racism concert on concerts of the same name organized by The Clash in London. Perkins captured the only known images of the legendary 1979 concert held in a marginalized neighborhood of DC that no longer exists. Many of the men raised at Valley Green ended up in prison. The new exhibition will focus on systemic racism and the U.S. prison industrial complex.

John Morrell

Starting in 2017 with a five-month artist residency at Campion Hall, Oxford University, Professor John Morrell has been focusing on a series of landscape paintings. His paintings investigate nature within the urban and suburban

Professor B.G Muhn gave a public lecture on North Korean art, “What Does Art Mean to the North Korean People” on March 11, 2021. This lecture was generously sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Mary Washington.

The lecture addressed two recent national art exhibitions in Pyongyang between October 2020 and January 2021.

Professor Muhn compared perspectives on art from the people in North Korea and those in the West. His book on North Korean art, Pyongyang Art, the True Color of Chosonhwa (in Korean,

Professor Susan Nalezyty’s review of the catalogue and exhibition, Tintoretto: Artist of the Renaissance was featured in the Fall issue of Renaissance Quarterly.

In November, her article, “The Social Life of Bartolomeo della Nave’s Art Collection in Seicento Venice” was published in the Journal of the History of Collections. In January, her new research on the history of enslaved people at Georgetown Visitation was brought out on this neighboring institution’s website, which features newly commissioned silhouette “portraits” and short biographies of individuals emancipated by the federal government in 1862. Also published on this website was a newly composed brief history of this over 220-yearold Catholic high school for girls.

Professor Stephanie Rufino is currently delivering a new course which surveys architecture from the Ancient through the Baroque eras with examples from across the globe. Students recently analyzed an important mosque in Mali, as well as structures in Mexico and Peru. The importance of community involvement in a building’s often sensitive preservation process and a structure’s shifting function amidst political change are among the issues recently discussed. While surveying historical buildings, we have kept an eye on contemporary news such as the 2021 Pritzker Architecture Prize awarded to French architects Lacaton and Vassal.

Students lauded the French architects’ commitment to preserving and improving existing affordable housing in lieu of demolishing buildings with important social histories.

at the 2021 College Art Association conference. She also presented “Sideshow and Circus, Pandemic Adaptations and the Dialogic,” at the Circus and Its Other (CaIO) conference, UC-Davis. Her topic inspired the COVID-related theme for the CalO digital panel series until they can safely gather again in person at UCDavis in the fall. Four of her paintings were recently acquired by the Italian American Museum of Washington DC (IAMDC).

Lisa Strong

Toni-Lee Sangastiano

Professor Toni-Lee Sangastiano was the featured guest expert on postmodern sideshows and banner painters, which included her first painted banners for the 1997 Coney Island Circus Sideshow, as part of the Coney Island Museum’s Ask the Experts series. Dr. Sangastiano chaired a panel on “The Freak Show in Contemporary Culture and Aesthetics”

Professor Lisa Strong’s essay on Karl Bodmer’s anthropological illustrations will be published in Faces from the Interior: The North American Portraits of Karl Bodmer (University of Washington Press) this month. The exhibition associated with the text opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 5th. In February, she co-presented a paper on peer mentoring with Laura Schiavo, Director of the Museum

Studies MA program at George Washington University at the College Art Association conference. She gave a presentation on a newly acquired painting by artist Alfred Jacob Miller at the Shelburne Museum in March.

Michelle C. Wang

With Xin Wen and Susan Whitfield, Professor Michelle C. Wang coauthored an article “Buddhism and Silk: Reassessing a Painted Banner from Medieval Central Asia in The Met” in the Metropolitan Museum Journal, v. 55 (2020). This article studies a 9th-10th century banner painting from the silk routes that was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in 2007.

Based upon rigorous analysis of the painting’s visual and material features, a translation of a hitherto unstudied inscription, and provenance research, Professor Wang and her co-authors were able to determine with greater precision the original provenance of the painting, which they determined to have been connected to the ancient silk road kingdom of Khotan. They also benefited from collaboration with the museum’s Department of Textile Conservation, which removed the painting from its modern mounting, allowing them to examine it from both sides. This brings to a close a collaborative research project that brought Professor Wang and her co-authors to the Metropolitan Museum, British Museum, and Victoria and Albert Museum to study related silk road paintings and textiles. J

|7| Department of Art & Art History — Spring 2021

Stephanie Rufino

ALUMNI UPDATES Jeremiah Bradley (MA’20) started as Membership Assistant at Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Gardens in March.

Julia Tagliabue (C’20) is completing her MA program in Museum Studies at the École du Louvre in Paris, France. Her area of specialization is Cultural Mediation.

Katie Maher (C’19) is completing her MA in Art History at The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, where she is in her last semester of coursework. She is currently a curatorial intern at The Museum of Modern Art in the Drawings and Prints Department. As part of this internship, Katie is assisting on an exhibition entitled “Cézanne Drawing,” due to open in June 2021.

Matthew Fritschen (C’19) is a jewelry designer and founder of Matthew Winters, a Colorado-based luxury jewelry and accessories brand. Each piece is designed and handcrafted utilizing natural materials found in the Rocky Mountain West.

Charlotte Hord (MA’18) was promoted to Event Planning Specialist at the National Gallery of Art in October.

Sarah Jane Kim (C’18) is a Researcher & Writer for the 20th Century & Contemporary Art department at Phillips auction house in New York, and volunteers on the editorial board of the Coalition of Master’s Scholars on Material Culture.

Previously, she worked in the Drawings & Prints department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and graduated from Columbia University’s MA in Art History program, where she focused on 19thcentury French and modern prints.

Carrie Lebel (C’17) is completing her JD at Stanford Law School and plans to join a Bay Area firm after graduation.

She recently enjoyed getting real-world

exposure to art law during an internship at the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, which advises some of the city’s museums and cultural institutions.

Caitlin DeSantis (C’16) is the lead stylist for Under Armour in Baltimore, MD where she determines fashion direction for the brand’s e-commerce and marketing creative.

Christine Slobogin (C’16) recently passed her viva voce and was awarded her Doctorate in Art History from Birkbeck, University of London. She is now a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Wellcome Trust in London, while also working part time at a commercial art gallery specializing in printmaking.

Krishna K Sharma (C’16) is currently a first year medical student at Georgetown University School of Medicine.

Mary Ahearn (C’16) earned her MA in Art Business from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, where she wrote her thesis on gender inequality in the art market. She currently lives in London and works at Christie’s In the Valuations department, where she coordinates Post-War & Contemporary Valuations for collectors located in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Grace Dubuque (MA’15) was promoted to Senior Account Manager, Valuations, at Sotheby’s in September.

Robin Owen Joyce (C’15) is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts.

His dissertation concerns printmaking, muralism, and communications technology in the United States in the 1930s. He has worked at the Museum of Modern Art, and his research has been supported by a fellowship from the Hauser & Wirth Institute.

Nora M. Rosengarten (C’14) is a doctoral student at Harvard University, where she is specializing in the history of prints and printmaking. Prior to beginning studies at Harvard, Nora graduated with her MA from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art in 2019 and worked as a Curatorial Assistant at the Clark Art Institute from 2019-2020.

Andrew Toporoff (C’14) is graduating from Columbia Law School in April and taking the New York bar exam in July. He is pursuing a trusts and estates practice, and is excited to create opportunities for artists, collectors, and arts institutions.

During law school, Andrew worked closely with one of the major treaties for cultural property protection, the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention, and with Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts New York.

Francesca Pazniokas (C’11) is a playwright and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. Her work has recently been produced or screened in New York, London, Melbourne, Toronto, Buenos Aires, Belfast and Brussels. She’s currently a commissioned playwright with Tony Award-nominated company Clubbed Thumb and a member of The Field’s Artist Council.

Galina Olmsted (C’10) is the assistant curator of European and American art at the Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, where she oversees a collection of over 1400 paintings and sculptures made between 1100 and 1989.

Her most recent exhibition, The Art of the Character: Highlights from the Glenn Close Costume Collection, opens May 2021 and is accompanied by a catalogue published by Scala Arts Publishers.

Share your

NEWS