DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE
On the Cover
Professors Gómez and Kurczynski used part of their Mellon funds for the 2023–24 Sawyer Seminar on “Race and Visual Culture in the Americas” to commission a major new public artwork for the city of Holyoke, Mass. Putting theory into practice, they gave the community organization Nueva Esperanza free rein to select an artist of their choice to dialogue with the Puerto Rican community in Holyoke.
GREETINGS FRIENDS, COLLEAGUES, AND ALUMNI!
In this, my third and final year as chair, I am pleased to report that all is well in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture. As you will see in this newsletter, with the hire of Provost Professor Charmaine Nelson, we are branching out in new directions (see page 2). Recruiting Professor Nelson, an experienced scholar, teacher, and mentor who specializes in Black Diasporic Art and Visual Culture, was a result of the Anti-Racism Action Plan we drew up two years ago. We welcome her with open arms and embrace the change she’s already bringing to the department.
However, this year sadly marked the last time that Distinguished Professor Walter Denny taught. He retired after 53 years of teaching at UMass (!) this spring 2023. In honor of Walter, we have planned a special symposium, “Islamic Art and Museums,” to take place on October 21, 2023 (see page 3). October is a lovely time of year in western Massachusetts, and we hope you will join us for this special event.
On a final note, I was very pleased that so many alumni (BA and MA) contributed entries to this year’s newsletter. It is gratifying to see the wonderful things you do!
CONTENTS
2 Introducing Charmaine Nelson
3 Celebrating Walter Denny
5 Mellon Foundation Grant
6 Graduate Diversity Fellowship
6 Department Updates
8 Graduate Student Spotlight
10 Alumni Spotlight
12 Faculty News
15 Alumni News
20 Giving to the Department, 2021 Donors
Monika Schmitter Professor and Chair
INTRODUCING CHARMAINE NELSON
This academic year, the department welcomed Dr. Charmaine Nelson as provost professor in art history. Nelson’s research and supervisory interests encompass the art and visual cultures of Canada, the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe through the lens of the Black Diaspora. A preeminent scholar in her field, Nelson has authored seven books and she received numerous prestigious fellowships and appointments. After teaching at McGill University for 17 years, she was appointed a Tier 1 Canada research chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University, Halifax, Canada. There, she had the opportunity to establish the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery, the first research center to focus on the country’s 200-year participation in transatlantic slavery.
In joining the UMass Amherst faculty in fall 2022, she has brought to the university the Slavery North Initiative, which expands on this work to include the American North. Ultimately, she hopes to grow the initiative into a research and public outreach hub, and to fund on-site fellowships that will provide traditional scholars and artists-in-residence financial and scholarly support for their research and creative production that is focused on slavery in both Canada and the American North. Nelson prioritizes training her undergraduate students to conduct original research and sharing this research with the world. Since 2014, she has published an open access, undergraduate student e-journal, Chrysalis: A Critical Student Journal of Transformative Art History, which she plans to continue at UMass.
When advising her students on their future career plans, Nelson tells them it’s a certain type of person who enjoys the solitude of engaging in archival research. Personally, she finds deep satisfaction in getting lost in historical documents and artworks. Nelson reflects,“Learning about enslaved people in centuries past allows me to contemplate the complexity of their unimaginable experiences. I am filled with gratitude for their ingenuity, bravery, and ability to survive, and I am fortunate to be able to study their histories and cultures.”
Adapted from an article written by Lauren Rubenstein.
CELEBRATING WALTER DENNY
This past year was Professor Walter B. Denny’s 53rd year teaching at the University of Massachusetts Amherst! He has seen it all!
Walter (as he is universally known) first became enamored of Islamic art and culture when he lived in Istanbul for a year as a teenager. He went on to earn his BA in art history at Oberlin College in 1964, and his MA and PhD from Harvard University in 1965 and 1971. At the time Walter was in graduate school, there were no courses offered in Islamic art; he had to train himself. He was originally hired at UMass in 1970 as an architectural historian, but then went on to develop his signature course, Art History 115: “Introduction to the Visual Arts,” a thematic survey of the history of art from antiquity to the present day. In the fall semester, he taught it for the 48th time, which means that over the years he has instructed upwards of 10,000 students in the elements of art history, not to mention the many MA students he has trained as teaching assistants. In 2014, he was named Distinguished Professor at UMass Amherst.
When not teaching Art History 115, Walter’s primary field of teaching and research is the art and architecture of the Islamic world, particularly the artistic traditions of the Ottoman Turks, Islamic carpets and textiles, and issues of economics and patronage in Islamic art. In addition to curatorships at the Harvard University (1970 – 2000) and Smith College (2000 – 2005) art museums, he was named Charles Grant Ellis Research Associate in Oriental Carpets in 2002 at The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. His 2000 – 2001 exhibition, Palace of Gold and Light, brought works from Istanbul’s Topkapı Palace to the United States. He served as senior consultant in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2007 to 2013, and again from 2014 to 2017. In 2011, he received the George Hewitt Myers Award for Lifetime Achievement in Textile Studies from the Textile Museum. A prolific author, he has written over ten publications on Islamic art, the art of the Ottoman Turks, textile and carpet history, and the arts of the Islamic book—and has been translated into French and German! One seminal publication, How to Read Islamic Carpets, was published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press in the fall of 2014.
To honor Walter’s extraordinary contributions and generosity toward UMass, especially to the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, we are planning a special event that will encapsulate his dual commitment to the academy and the museum. Speakers include many prominent scholars and curators in Islamic art, all of whom were Walter’s students and/or collaborators. Mark your calendar! We would love to see you there!
SAVE THE DATE
Special Symposium in Honor of Distinguished Professor Walter B. Denny
LIST OF SPEAKERS
Aimee Froom (’93MA)
Curator, Arts of the Islamic World, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Amanda Phillips (’02MA)
ISLAMIC ART AND MUSEUMS
Saturday, October 21
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Associate Professor, Islamic Art and Material Culture, University of Virginia
Yael Rice (’04MA)
Associate Professor, Islamic Art, Amherst College
Kendra Weisbin (’11MA)
Associate Curator of Engagement & Interpretation, Mount Holyoke College Museum of Art
Margaret Squires (’18MA)
PhD student in Islamic Art, Courtland Institute, London
Sheila Canby
Curator Emerita, Department of Islamic Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Laura Weinstein
Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Sumru Krody
Senior Curator, The Textile Museum, Washington, D.C.
MELLON SAWYER FACULTY SEMINAR ON RACE AND VISUAL CULTURE IN THE AMERICAS, 20TH TO 21ST CENTURIES
In the fall of 2020, HAA Professors Ximena Gómez and Karen Kurczynski were awarded a prestigious grant to conduct a Mellon Sawyer Faculty Seminar. Over the 2022 – 2023 academic year, the seminar met four times with guest scholars and artists, including local cultural workers and faculty from departments across the Five Colleges, working in architecture, art, communication, comparative literature, gender studies, and Spanish. Graduate students participated in a satellite seminar (including Isabel Ruiz, Roya Peighambarzadeh, Simone Cambridge, and Piper Prolago from our department), led by postdoctoral fellow Cat Dawson, to share their research and discuss disciplinarily-specific approaches to key themes, especially the relationship between art and social change.
In October 2022, the Five College Faculty and graduate students convened for an introductory seminar and attended an outdoor tour of public murals in Holyoke, Mass., led by Chloe Soto, project manager of local community organization Nueva Esperanza. Putting theory into practice, Professors Gómez and Kurczynski gave Nueva Esperanza free rein to select an artist of their choice for a new public art project. Soto and Director Kayla Rodriguez commissioned a new mural by the San Juan-based all-female mural art collective, Colectivo Moriviví. Over the course of a three-week residency in April, Moriviví worked with a group of young participants from Holyoke to create the mural. Each seminar meeting included one artist paired with one visiting scholar for a mixed faculty and graduate student seminar followed by a chance to discuss the presentations further over dinner. In October, artist Alma López from UCLA was joined by Leticia Alvarado from Brown University. In December, Chicago-based Grand Portage Ojibwe artist Andrea Carlson conversed with scholar Kate Morris from Santa Clara University. In March, Nuyorican artist Juan Sánchez visited from Hunter College, and scholar Jennifer Gonzalez participated via Zoom from University of California, Santa Cruz. The lively conversations centered around the relationship between contemporary art, its public, and issues of cultural representation, indigeneity, immigration, and diaspora. The seminar culminated in a public conference on May 5, “Anti-Colonial Practices in Art, Museums, and Visual Culture,” featuring presentations from participants, a keynote address by Amy Lonetree (Ho-Chunk, professor of history, UC Santa Cruz), and participation from UMass graduate Dr. Kelli Morgan, now director of curatorial studies at Tufts University.
GRADUATE DIVERSITY FELLOWSHIP DEPARTMENT UPDATES
In the fall of 2020, our department committed to offering a recurring two-year Diversity Fellowship to support master’s students who seek to pursue an academic or professional career in art history but face significant historical or economic barriers to further graduate study. For the 2024 cohort, we welcomed Simone Cambridge, born and raised in Nassau, Bahamas, who holds a BA in art history and international development, with a minor in urban systems geography, from McGill University (Montréal).
As an art historian, her interests lay in transatlantic slavery, diasporic identity, postcolonialism, and race in visual culture and curatorial theory. Her research has been published by the McGill University Department of Art History and Communications, the Journal of Black Canadian Studies, and Hyperallergic. Simone’s article,
“’It has just begun’: Strawcraft in Bahamian Visual Culture,” was published in the Journal of the Universities Art Association of Canada’s RACAR 47th issue, “salt. For the preservation of Black diasporic visual histories,” in October 2022. At UMass, Simone now works closely with Dr. Nelson. After coming from an institution with large class sizes, she highlights our program’s “proximity to the professors and other graduate students...there are more opportunities to learn about what people are working on.” Seizing upon this collegial nature, Simone has made connections with the Afro-American Studies Department and participated in the interdisciplinary Mellon Sawyer Seminar. She has quickly become an integral member of the UMass community and proven herself a trailblazer in the field.
STUDIED SPACES: STUDENT MURALS IN THE W.E.B. DU BOIS LIBRARY
THE 23RD ANNUAL MARK ROSKILL SYMPOSIUM
For the annual Mark Roskill Symposium, held in September 2022, the second-year master’s cohort presented an interdisciplinary conversation led by public scholar and curator Pamela Grossman.
Simone Cambridge’s current research focuses on how contemporary artists engage with the colonial legacies of strawcraft in the Bahamas.
Photo: “On the Way to Market” (ca. 1877–78), Jacob Frank Coonley, albumen print, 7 x 8 ½. Part of the National Collection, previously owned by R. Brent Malone. The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas.
On September 28, 2022, the History of Art and Architecture Department held an opening for the student-curated exhibition in the Greenbaum Gallery. Becca Griebno, Maggie Carroll, and Grace Ksander worked with Undergraduate Program Director Meg Vickery to bring together a sampling of photographs of student-painted murals from the stairwells of the library. The earliest murals date from the late 1980s and were part of the Mass Transformations project, initiated in 1986, to spruce up the campus. In part to deter graffiti, the university allowed students to paint murals in the stairwells. Inspired students can still find an empty wall and get permission to record, in paint, their collegiate experiences. In an examination of 12 murals, “Studied Spaces” unfolds the origins, inspirations, and impact of the library’s most permanent collection of student work. This selection explores common themes within the murals: connection, community, escapism, humor, and hope.
Titled “The Witching Hour: Occultism & Magic in Visual Culture,” the symposium aimed to recognize the relevance of spiritual practices that have shaped history and culture, a conversation that was enriched through the lens of contemporary feminism. The symposium took place at the historic Amherst Woman’s Club for a packed in-house and virtual audience, with over 200 attendees in total! The department also had the pleasure of welcoming Damian Roskill, the son of the event’s eponymous honoree. Mark Roskill was an influential art historian and scholar of art historiography and criticism who taught at our institution for over 30 years.
Grossman’s keynote lecture focused on how visual representations of witches and magic intersect with changing historical attitudes toward minoritized genders. Classics Professor Debbie Felton from UMass and Art History Professor Natasha Staller from Amherst College provided historical bookends for Grossman’s talk, reflecting on the perceptions of witchcraft in Ancient Greece and their representation in Goya’s etchings. Professor Alexis Callender from Smith College placed the theme in the contemporary moment, showcasing how a practicing artist herself visually engages with magic and mythology to recuperate histories excluded from hegemonic archives.
EVA FIERST GRADUATE STUDENT CURATORIAL FELLOWSHIP
The University Museum of Contemporary Art’s annual Eva Fierst Curatorial Fellowship provides selected graduate students from the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, as well as other UMass departments, the opportunity to produce an exhibition at the UMCA. The year-long program gives graduate students an in-depth experience of curatorial practice—from grant writing and budgeting to conceptualizing and realizing an art exhibition at the end of the spring semester.
This year, two graduate students from our department—Samit Sinha ’23MA and Lawrence Gianageli ’24MA—curated an exhibition titled “Masculine Identities: Filling in the Blanks.” Their exhibition questioned the visual articulation of traditional representations of maleness in dialogue with artworks that offer overlooked and divergent views of masculinity. Featuring artworks by Carlos Villa, Andy Warhol, Kehinde Wiley, and Nicole Eisenman, among many others, the gaps of masculine representation were positioned against the popular masculine pictorial narrative.
The curators sought to introduce an expanded vision of masculinity and show the diversity that exists beyond its traditional perceptions. When we view masculinity through a variety of contemporary artworks, a certain plurality takes shape that does not adhere to an established gendered formula. There is space for new concepts and interpretations and a nuanced approach to how we read masculinity in art, alongside versions of masculine identity that do indeed conform to an expected representation.
GRADUATE STUDENT SUMMER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
JULIA BENDER
Last summer, I had the pleasure of working as the curatorial intern at the Smith College Museum of Art. Working with Dr. Danielle Carrabino, curator of painting and sculpture, I explored two main projects. The first was research about a sculpture of Saint Catherine that was long believed to be a 19th-century replica of a medieval original, but my research led me to believe that the authenticity of the work as an original cannot be discounted on any solid grounds. This sculpture is now on view at the museum and further information can be found on SCMA’s website, where I wrote a post about my findings. My second project at SCMA was research into a collection of Islamic ceramics donated to the museum, which was also assessed by Professor Walter Denny. This project allowed me to spend time in the Collections Department at Smith and become more familiar with the inner workings of the museum world.
NICHOLAS DAHLE
My graduate studies focus on art from East Asia, particularly architecture and garden design in Japan. Since this requires extensive language training, I focused on improving my skills this past summer and found a language instructor who taught Japanese in both the United States and Japan and met with him virtually twice a week for three months.
SAMIT SINHA
As a collections intern at the Mead Art Museum, I was involved in the management and improvement of the museum’s database. The project goal— to enhance online collection content and increase discoverability of artworks and cultural material—was primarily realized through a review of objects’ “tags.” These tags, coming from a predefined list with over 1,000 entries that are approved for museums, function as keywords that increase an object’s generalizability by association with common words and phrases for which a scholar, student, or enthusiast might search in the collection.
I was able to add and review tags for nearly 1,000 pieces in the museum’s permanent collections. Prior to this review, most of the objects that were assigned to me did not have any tags at all. As an emerging art historian and admirer of the collections, I took careful consideration to assign tags that would be relevant to a wide range of potential investigators, certainly increasing their discoverability by a degree of significance.
Simultaneously, I conducted preliminary research on a series of Ragamala Indian miniature paintings. I was able to identify key resources that could be pertinent to future investigations. I also worked to translate a text that is featured in one painting (AC 1967.77.cc). Using a Google-based application, I attempted to transcribe the characters, using Hindi as the assumed language. Although I was
unable to complete the entire transcription, my efforts provide a starting point for future students and/or researchers who are unfamiliar with the language.
ISABEL RUIZ CANO
I worked on two projects at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art’s collections department in the summer. The department is currently conducting a diversity audit of the museum’s permanent collection, aiming to get an accurate picture of the identities represented through careful research on the artists in the collection. I helped develop a survey for living artists to share their demographic information. Especially after taking courses focused on race and identity in contemporary art with Professor Kurczynski, developing this survey was a very interesting practical application of the same concerns that weave through my academic investigations. The other project was to create custom archival housing for linoleum blocks that are part of the Eric Carle Collection. After consulting with museum registrars and reaching out to other institutions across the country, I constructed matboard trays that secured each individual block and fit into existing archival boxes. Along the way, I created an inventory of the blocks and identified their related publications, capturing information and location in the museum’s database.
Working so closely with museum professionals (who were excited by my contributions and trusted my skills!) inspired me to apply for full-time
employment at the Carle. I’m excited to now be part of their team as assistant curator—something that would not have happened without the support of the UMass HA&A Department!
ANITA ZIA
I had the opportunity to work at the Hunter House Victorian Museum in the Freemason District of Norfolk, Virginia. This beautiful home was built in 1894 by William Pit Wentworth, a Boston architect. The Hunter House Victorian
Museum is a nonprofit historic house museum with a mission to tell the human stories of late 19th- and early 20th-century life through the lens of everyday experiences, collections of the Hunter family, and their local community. This past season, the Hunter House featured an exhibit entitled “Thoroughly Modern Victorian: How the Victorian Era Birthed the Modern Age,” which displayed various objects from the Hunters’ personal collection as well as some objects on loan. I assisted in the
development of some of the educational programs, such as our specialty lecture teas, and gave tours on both the general permanent collection and our featured exhibit. I also had the opportunity to explore the museum’s photographic archive, which included an abundance of the family’s personal photos. These photographs encompassed a range of subjects from family portraiture to even bunny and cat pictures!
KACEY
GREEN, ’18BA
After graduating in 2018 with my BA in art history and BS in biochemistry, I attended a paper conservation course with the International Institute for Restoration and Preservation Studies in Italy. After that, I began gaining conservation experience in other specialties to prepare for graduate school. I spent most of this time at Historic New England, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Toledo Museum of Art. I am currently pursuing my Master’s of Science in Art Conservation at the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (WUDPAC). In my first year at WUDPAC, I tried a total of nine conservation specialties (paintings, textiles, photographs, etc.). I treated objects, visited a variety of cultural institutions, and examined objects through scientific and art historical perspectives. For my second and third year of study, I will declare a major in objects conservation, with a minor in paper conservation. Working in this field has been the greatest privilege; however, I have also found that this work can be scarce, underpaid, and inequitable. This realization shifted many of my career objectives and I now incorporate more advocacy, community outreach, and constructive critique of the field in my work. With that being said, I love the work I do and fervently believe the preservation of material culture is essential. In this field, you never stop learning and experience something new each day. To anyone interested in conservation, please feel free to contact me at kmgreen@udel.edu!
ISABEL RICHARDS ’13BA
After graduating from UMass, I began working at Philip Johnson’s Glass House (1949) in New Canaan, Conn. I am now the development manager and work with the deputy director to spearhead fundraising initiatives. Every day is different and exciting. I might be working on programming for our members,
In June 2022, I made the jump to development and membership at Old Sturbridge Village, where I processed gifts and memberships, provided support for events such as the Ken Burns Lifetime Achievement Award honoring Jon Meacham and the President’s Award honoring Richard Nylander, assisted with grant research, and managed a donor base of thousands of constituents. Since March 2023, I returned to my first love, museum education, taking a full-time position at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art as education coordinator.
CHRISTY ANDERSON ’85MA
Harbison and Iris Cheney in Renaissance art, and classes with Walter Denny in decorative arts. And I wrote a final paper for the master’s on Inigo Jones, a 17th-century architect working in England.
organizing a private event on site, or soliciting corporate support. Currently, my focus is on our upcoming Summer Party gala. We are working with artist Derrick Adams on a fundraising edition, confirming sponsorship, and curating our signature art + design auction. All proceeds support critical preservation needs on site. I am fortunate to work alongside a dedicated team as we foster the creative legacy of Philip Johnson and his partner, David Whitney.
NATALIE RICHARDS ’20BA
Following graduation from UMass Amherst in a surreal 2020 due to the pandemic, I took a full-time position in museum education at Storrowton Village Museum, a 19th-century historic house museum on the grounds of Eastern States Exposition, home of the annual Big E in West Springfield, Mass. As the adult education coordinator, I managed a team of 100+ volunteers essential to the operation of the museum, developed public programs and lectures aimed toward adult audiences, including an annual summer lecture series, and crawled through basements and attics, conducting collections work whenever possible.
I am an accidental art historian. I applied to the UMass art history program a year after I completed my undergraduate degree in 1981. Recently married, my husband was attending the UMass computer science program, and I wanted to study architecture. But at that time, there was no architecture school in western Massachusetts, and the next best thing was art history. I had no idea what a change it would bring to my future! I had studied Renaissance literature in college, so I made the easy decision to focus on Renaissance art and architecture in my courses. I took classes with Craig
After I completed my MA in 1985— I certainly didn’t rush in making my way through the requirements for the degree—I tried several different arts-related careers. For a year, I was the director of the local arts center in Leverett and also worked as a curatorial assistant in textiles and decorative arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. While I liked both of these experiences, within a few years architecture called me back, and I decided to push on to a PhD program. The great preparation I received at UMass made all the difference for me in the History, Theory, and Criticism Program in the Architecture School at MIT. I decided to continue with my work on English architecture and wrote my doctoral thesis on the reading and writing practices of Inigo Jones, spending several years in London and Oxford studying his surviving books that are filled with his annotations.
I taught at Yale University for several years, and then moved to Canada to teach at the University of Toronto, where I have been a faculty member for almost 20 years. Teaching in Canada is remarkably different from programs in the States. The universities are all public entities, so there is much less of a difference between the small elite private schools and the large state universities as we have in the States. The thing that I have enjoyed most has been the great diversity of students. The University of Toronto is a very international institution, and the students bring their own experiences with architecture, cities, and landscapes to the classes.
The work on Inigo Jones appeared in a book published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. After years of teaching Renaissance architecture and always trying to expand and rethink the field, I published a new European-wide survey of architecture in 2013. I am now working on a book about the importance of the sea to the history of architecture and looking at ships as a kind of floating building. In addition to my own research and writing, I am also now editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin, a principal journal in art history. I would never have imagined that after enrolling in the MA program at UMass as an alternative to architecture school, I would now be helping authors develop their essays for publication.
GÜLRU ÇAKMAK spent the 2022 – 23 academic year away from the Department, first on parental leave in the fall, having welcomed her baby boy, Renan Çakmak-Tweedie, in July 2022 with her husband, Brock Tweedie, followed by a sabbatical leave in the spring. She was awarded two highly competitive internal grants in support of her research on the 19th-century Ottoman painter, archaeologist, and bureaucrat Osman Hamdi Bey. Just prior to going on parental leave, she delivered an online lecture at the National Gallery of London’s Stories of Art 1800 – 1900 course. In September 2022, she organized an online symposium entitled “Nineteenth-Century Visual Technologies in Contemporary Practices” in conjunction with the volume of the same title she is at work co-editing. In January 2023, she began her position as the chief editor of H-France Salon, an online multimedia journal of French studies encompassing history, literature, art history, cinema, theory, and culture.
During the last full academic year before his retirement in June of 2023, WALTER DENNY has begun to return to a pre-COVID schedule of academic activity. Contributions to exhibition and collection catalogues from Dubai
to Genoa to London, virtual lectures across the globe, in-person lectures on both coasts, and major consulting work for several American museums are now making their way back to the regular schedule. Walter continues his work as chair of the Visiting Committee for the Department of Textile Conservation at the Metropolitan, and in March he gave the keynote address for a two-day virtual symposium jointly sponsored by The George Washington University Museum/ The Textile Museum in Washington and Koç University in Istanbul. His doctoral and post-doctoral advising, from Sarajevo to London to New York, continues to be an important part of his professional activity, which, like the rest, promises to continue long after retirement from the university. Walter continues to work on his major long-term project: a general scholarly history of the Islamic carpet.
SONJA DRIMMER enjoyed getting to know the department’s graduate students this year, teaching Methods of Art History as well as a graduate seminar, The Art of the Medieval Book, in special collections at the Du Bois Library. She delivered several presentations and workshops including the Houghton Lecture and Workshop in Early Book History at Harvard University, and invited talks at the Bibliotheca Herziana in Rome and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, where she spent part of her sabbatical as a Humfrey Wanley Fellow. Her publications this year included articles in two open-access collections she co-edited, Race-ing Queens, a special issue of The Scholar and Feminist Online (with Mira ˇAssaf Kafantaris and Treva B. Lindsey) and Seeing Codicologically: New Explorations in the Technology of the Book, a special issue of the Journal of the Walters Art Museum (with Lynley Herbert and
Benjamin Tilghman). Later this year, her introduction to and translation of Erwin Panofsky’s first publication, which she co-authored with William Diebold, professor emeritus of art history at Reed College, will appear in Critical Inquiry and her article, “The Hamburg Facsimile Debate and Hildegard Facsimile Craft,” will appear in Modern Language Quarterly.
XIMENA GÓMEZ was on parental leave in the fall 2022 semester with her son, Julian Gomez-Hart, who was born in April 2022. She was excited to return to teaching in the spring, debuting a revised version of her class on Latin American and U.S. Latinx art that focused more on the racial issues in Latinx art. Over the course of the year, along with Professor Karen Kurczynski, she oversaw the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Race and Visual Culture in the Americas, 20th to 21st Centuries.” Ximena made good progress on her book manuscript, tentatively titled “Indigenous and Black Confraternities and the Creation of Visual Culture in Colonial Lima.” She presented a paper and served as a discussant at the Renaissance Society of America conference. She published an article, “Nuestra Señora del Mal Querer:
Marian Imagery and Rosalía’s Ascent to Pop Urbano Royalty,” for a special issue of Scholar and Feminist Online, co-edited by Professor Sonja Drimmer. She gave invited presentations at the Art Gallery of Ontario (via Zoom) and the Springfield Museums. She was also a fellow in the Crossroads in the Study of the Americas (CISA) Program, organized by Five College Inc.
CHRISTINE I. HO continued to experiment with new courses for undergraduates. In the fall, she designed a new class, “Modern Art in East Asia”; in the spring, she offered a revised version of an undergraduate seminar, “Craft and Design in Japan,” with a final Storymaps project; and she continued to direct a fully online section for Art-Hist 110, which has increased enrollment of the course by 50 students. She traveled to give five invited talks and published two articles in craft and design history: “Crafting Friendship,” in a special issue of the journal Art History, and “Design and Handicraft” for an edited volume, Material Contradictions in Maoist China (University of Washington Press). She continued to serve the university and the field of art
history through several committees and organizations, including as reviews editor of new Chinese and Korean books for caa.reviews.
KAREN KURCZYNSKI advised MA students in her first year as graduate program director and taught Modern Art in the fall semester and Contemporary Art during the spring. With Professor Ximena Gómez, she administered several sessions of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Race and Visual Culture in the Americas, 20th to 21st Centuries” in 2022 – 2023. While continuing research on her book project on contemporary drawing practices in relation to politics, feminism, and race, she traveled to New York in January 2023 with undergraduate research assistant Chelsea Staub to view art works by Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, and others in museum and gallery collections, and interviewed Smith with Chelsea in upstate New York. She presented papers on contemporary drawing at a conference in Copenhagen in November and, as chair of a panel on drawing at the College Art Association in February, she’s now working on a related article for the online journal Burlington Contemporary.
In June, LAETITIA LA FOLLETTE served as the archaeological expert on a tour of Malta and circumnavigation of Sicily aboard the amazing Sea Cloud II. Last fall, she was blessed with wonderful teaching assistants as she directed AH-100 again after seven years, including for the first time in two online sections. In her third and final year as president of the Archaeological Institute of America, Laetitia participated in the Oppenheim Report’s November broadcast, “Archaeology as Storytelling.” The presidential plenary she organized and chaired at the AIA conference held in New Orleans (during an unusually balmy week in January) focused on the archaeology of food and foodways. In February, Laetitia also gave an invited lecture to the Italian Cultural Institute affiliated with the Italian Consulate in New York City, entitled “Archaeological Adventures in Rome.”
CHARMAINE A. NELSON arrived in Amherst from Canada in August 2022 and began teaching her undergraduate lecture course, “The Black Subject in Historical and Contemporary Popular Culture,” in September. While learning the new UMass platforms and meeting
new colleagues and students, she has also juggled immigration processes and relaunched her institute. Previously founded as the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery, Charmaine brought this innovative academic hub with her from Canada to UMass and relaunched it as the Slavery North Initiative, expanding its mandate to include research and research-creation on practices of Transatlantic Slavery in Canada and the American North. Charmaine has also kept up her active lecturing schedule giving talks at Duke University (Durham, North Carolina), the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), Humber College (Toronto, Ontario), the University of Winnipeg (Manitoba), King’s College (Halifax, Nova Scotia), and Mount Allison (Sackville, New Brunswick). In February, she gave a presentation to Shaw Communications Canada (Toronto) and presented the UMass Honors College Black Heritage Month lecture. In March, she gave the keynote address at the 44th Annual Association for Canadian Studies in German-Speaking Countries in Grainau, Germany. In fall 2022, she was inducted as a fellow in the Royal Society of Canada and elected as a member of the American Antiquarian Society.
students during a spring 2023 walking tour of the UMass Campus Center by Marcel Breuer about his restoration of Breuer’s very similar Pirelli Tire Building in New Haven. In fall 2022, Tim spoke at the Docomomo Annual Awards ceremony in New York, where UMass Brut received an excellency award from the international modernist preservation group.
JENNIFER
ATKINSON ’99BA
NANCY NOBLE co-taught “The Digital Art Historian” with Brian Shelburne, head of the Digital Scholarship Center, W.E.B. Du Bois Library. As associate dean for undergraduate education in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, she directed the college’s undergraduate recruiting efforts, undergraduate special events, new student orientation and transition, and represented the college on numerous university councils and committees.
TIM ROHAN returned from a sabbatical year to teach a full load of courses, including Junior Year Writing, his survey classes on 19th and 20th Century Architecture, and a large-enrollment general education course about the history of architecture and the built environment. He advanced research on his book about Manhattan interiors and gave an invited talk about it at Wellesley College in spring 2023. His article about an encounter among Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Rudolph, and Philip Johnson at last appeared in an edited volume about Wright from University of Virginia Press.
Tim worked closely with groups dedicated to the preservation of buildings, such as Historic New England. He organized events for UMass Brut, the campus preservation group of which he is a founding member, including a visit from Bruce Becker. The architect talked with
MONIKA SCHMITTER is completing her third and final year as department chair and looks forward to a year-long sabbatical next year, when she will return full time to her research projects. When she traveled to Rome in January for another research project, she was able to visit the Villa Aurora, which is at the center of a contentious inheritance dispute and just happens to house a rare Caravaggio ceiling painting, among many other works of art. She reported on her encounter on the online news site The Conversation . On May 4, she delivered a lecture about her recent book, The Art Collector in Early Modern Italy: Andrea Odoni and His Venetian Palace, for the charity organization Save Venice at the Chilton Club in Boston.
MEG VICKERY continued to learn the ropes as undergraduate program director, advising students on courses and programs at UMass and hosting undergraduate events, such as the opening of “Studied Spaces: Student Murals in the W.E.B. Du Bois Library” curated by Maggie Carroll ’23, Becca Griebno ’22, and Grace Ksander ’23 in the Greenbaum Gallery on campus. Meg taught her “Women in Architecture” class in the fall 2022 semester for both undergrads and graduate students. In November, she traveled to Copenhagen where she presented “The Business of Childhood: Play and Nature in the Work of Marjory Allen” at the University of Copenhagen. Meg is currently preparing her talk on a chapter as part of a publication through the Women in Danish Architecture program.
Jennifer continues her work as the director of the Collections Management Division at the Harvard Art Museums. In her role, she led a collaborative group of university library and museum representatives to align health and safety protocols during the COVID pandemic in support of remote teaching with the collections. Most recently, she wrote a comprehensive collections management policy that guides internal museum operations and forms the basis of the Art Museums’ AAM reaccreditation submission. As a contributor to the museums’ recently launched strategic plan, she has been appointed to lead one of its four goals: to conduct a feasibility study and full project plan for the development, construction, and occupancy of a new Collections and Research Center at Harvard University. Lastly, she will soon finish her term as interim deputy director responsible for safety and security, facilities, operations, and capital projects. On a personal note, she was fortunate enough to win a spot in the lottery to purchase tickets for the summer Olympics in Paris in 2024 and looks forward to sharing photos and stories of this long-awaited bucket list trip!
ANNA BECK BIMBA ’04BA
Anna is the editor of an online and bi-annual print luxury lifestyle magazine called Love Happens. Published by the Portuguese home decor brand KOKET, the magazine is all about design, fashion, art, and all things beautiful and luxurious.
JANET BERLO ’74BA
Janet Catherine Berlo retired from the Department of Art and Art History and the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester in 2020. She has published numerous books on the arts of the Americas, with a particular focus on native arts of North America. She owes her love of all things non-western to her
UMass Professors Gary Tartakov and Walter Denny. While at UMass, Janet also took studio art courses, and she’s spending her retirement still writing but also making fiber arts of many kinds.
MEG BERNSTEIN ’11MA
Meg started a position as assistant professor of art history at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in January 2023. Meg’s article, “A Knightly Family’s Social Network: Sculpting Alliances at the Church of St. Peter, Cogenhoe,” was published in Studies in Iconography (Vol. 44) in the spring.
MATTHEW BLANCHARD ’21MA
Matthew recently began work at the Worcester Art Museum, where he serves as the corporate relations manager. In addition to his work at WAM, he teaches the occasional architectural history course at UMass during the summer and winter sessions.
ZÖE BURNETT ’17MA
Last year, I began working at Antiques and the Arts Weekly as assistant editor. My job includes editing press releases for reprint in our magazine, reporting news in the antiques and arts market, and covering events.
GISELA CARBONELL ’02MA
At the Rollins Museum of Art, Gisela continues to offer specialized curatorial tours in Spanish in a series called Arte y Café con la Curadora, in which she highlights a different exhibition every month, covering works by diverse artists and sharing some of the behind-thescenes process of curating exhibitions. Among several exhibitions on view at the RMA this spring, Visual Field: RMA Staff Picks encourages visitors to vote for their favorite work in the show. Gisela selected Fairfield Porter’s The Dog at the Door as her artwork for the exhibition. She was inspired to pick this work, in part, because of her 13-year-old dog,
Paco! At the moment, she is working on two individual exhibitions for this summer that will highlight contemporary artists Eugene Ofori Agyei in his first solo museum show and artist Elsa María Meléndez in her first solo museum exhibition in the United States.
Gisela was invited to participate as a mentor in the Association of Art Museum Curators Foundation’s Curatorial Mentorship Program for a member of the 2022 – 23 cohort. In July 2022, she published “Salvador Dalí and Maurice Sandoz: A Fantastic Collaboration,” in the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, Vol. 13 No. 1. She was also invited to create an audio guide for Gustave Courbet’s painting, The Greyhounds of the Comte de Choiseul, in the collection of the St. Louis Art Museum, highlighting multiple perspectives on works on view. Gisela serves as a member of the Diversity Advisory Council to Dean Barbara Krauthamer, College of Humanities and Fine Arts.
MAURA COUGHLIN ’90BA
In September 2022, after 15 years at Bryant University in Rhode Island, I began a new position as teaching professor at the Boston campus of Northeastern University in the Department of Art + Design. Most of my research is situated at the intersection of 19th-century visual culture and the environmental humanities. I co-curated an exhibition in June about the visual and material culture of seaweed, titled “A singularly marine & fabulous produce: the Cultures of Seaweed,” at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.
In October 2022, I spoke at a symposium, “Animal Modernities,” on Breton cows and their images at Dartmouth College and in October at a symposium dedicated to the 50th anniversary of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing in Metz, France. In the summer of 2022, Maura took part in the third and final meeting of the international workshop, “Towards Ecocritical Art
History: Methods and Practices” at the University of Vienna. All of these projects will result in new publications. At Northeastern, she is developing new classes: Global Visual Culture and Ecology, and the Anthropocene in Art and Design.
CLAIRE D’AMATO, ’13MA
Claire D’Amato is the assistant curator of education and outreach at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. She enjoys welcoming audiences of all ages to the museum for public programs, classes, and tours. She is also a member of the Community Arts Council of New Brunswick. She is grateful for the good friends she made during her time at UMass.
LINDA DELONE BEST ’78BA
I have retired after working over 40 years in art museums as a registrar and collections manager, most recently after 20 years at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. This career was not originally in my plans when first attending UMass, and it was only after taking Walter Denny’s art history survey course that my destiny was sealed. The faculty of the department were enthusiastic, inspiring, and supportive of my aspirations to pursue a job in the museum field. I am forever grateful that I have enjoyed and been gratified by this profession.
It is hard to totally leave the field once it is in your blood, so I continue as an advisory member of the Emily Dickinson Collections Committee as they embark on an IMLS-funded first-time cataloging of their collection. And, of course, retirement allows me lots of free time to visit museums during the week when it’s not so crowded.
KIRSTEN
DIETERICH PITTS ’94MA
I have been helping to run a not-for-profit gallery in Greenwich, Conn., called the Flinn Gallery, for the past 12 years. This winter, I co-curated an exhibit, “Self, Assembled” featuring three artists who use collage to explore identity in their work.
NICHOLAS FERNACZ ’20BA
Over the course of the 2021 – 22 academic year, I was enrolled in the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies at Tsinghua University and completed my master’s degree in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania in August 2022. During my master’s, I also assisted with an exhibition at SPURS Gallery in Beijing that presented new work by Lin Yilin. Since graduation, I have been enjoying working in the Cinema and Media Studies Program at UPenn as a teaching assistant; in fall 2023, I will be starting my PhD program.
SARA GARBER ’08BA
I work in marketing for the architecture, engineering, and construction industries. I’m currently a marketing manager at Arup, an international multi-disciplinary firm at the heart of many of the world’s most prominent projects in the built environment. I work in Boston and live just north of the city with my husband and two small children.
EMILY GENAWAY ’98BA
I lead the sales team at Visible Body, a 3D visual life science education company. My team and I work with educators in K – 12 through medical schools to provide visual, hands-on learning software in subjects like human anatomy and anatomy. I love working in education and with a forward-thinking artistic software company.
I’m also a mom to three kids aged 19, 17, and 12. We traveled to Italy in 2019, where I studied abroad in college. It was wonderful to see my kids experience Italy and learn about the rich history through art.
ALEX GROFF ’11BA
I have been living in the Berkshires since graduating from UMass, working in development and fundraising for a variety of museums as well as educational and cultural institutions. For the last four years, I have held the role of director of development at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Mass. The college is currently embarking on building a new home for the museum on campus, which has been a particularly exciting project to be a part of.
STEPHANIE HUBER AND ANDREW HUBER, BOTH ’11MA
Stephanie is six months into her one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work at the center is focused on turning her dissertation on Dutch figurative painters between the World Wars into a book manuscript. She has an article published in the April issue of Modernism/Modernity, titled “Dutch Neorealism and Cinema Magic: The Case for a Filmic Modernism.” Andrew was recently named head of the department for Post-War and Contemporary Art at Bonhams Auction House in New York. He has been traveling extensively, trying to source exceptional works of art to sell. Most recently he took the winning bid on Robert Colescott’s Miss Liberty, which was sold to Art Bridges, the lending arm of the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Living in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, with daughters Manon (5) and Clotilde (2), the Hubers are finally feeling like true New Yorkers, dealing with difficult co-op boards and leaking boilers.
CECILY HUGHES ’22MA
Cecily Hughes is having a wonderful time as a first-year doctoral student at Case Western Reserve University, studying medieval art and humor with Professor Elina Gertsman. She particularly loves being in the Cleveland Museum of Art every day and working closely with its fantastic medieval collection. In April, Cecily presented at the conference From “Fuzzy” to “Eclectic” and Everything in Between: Intercultural Encounters in the Pre-Modern World at Yale University. She will deliver her paper, “Overpowering Dragons, or Putting Paganism in Its Place,” which she wrote in Professor Gertsman’s Medieval Bodies class on the CMA’s 12th-century Anglo-Norman dragon head, an object that uses humor to articulate the power of Western Christianity. Additionally, Cecily was recently able to travel back to Northampton to experience the culmination of a project she began while still an MA student at UMass. This January, she visited Smith College Museum of Art’s “Brought to Life: Painted Wood Sculpture from Europe, 1300 – 1700” (at the SCMA until August 6, 2023). Cecily spent the summer of 2021 contributing to the exhibition as a curatorial intern to Danielle Carrabino.
SARAH
JOHNSON ’03BA
I spent the last two years as director of development, Global Exhibitions for Design Miami, the sister fair to Art Basel. Prior to that, I was a Lloyd’s of London trained art insurance broker in Europe and then in the U.S., and may begin consulting in this again soon. Currently, I am an adjunct professor teaching art history to graduate visual art students at the Miami International School of Art & Design. I am also a consultant to The Cultivist, a private arts member club that provides behindthe-scenes arts programming, worldwide museum access, art trips, and corporate art-focused event production and promotion.
Missing New England very much these days and hope to get back for a visit sometime soon! I really loved all my classes at UMass as well as the beautiful campus and W.E.B. Du Bois Library, which I recently referenced in my class on the Harlem Renaissance.
HOLLYAMBER KENNEDY ’02BA
Starting in September, I will take up the position of assistant professor of art history, specializing in modern architecture and the Global South, in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. I am currently a senior postdoctoral fellow and guest lecturer at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (GTA) at the ETH Zürich (2020 – 2023), and previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University (2019 – 2020). I received my PhD in architectural history and theory from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University in 2019, and my MA in modern art, critical, and curatorial studies from the Department of Art History & Archeology at Columbia University in 2010.
BRIANNA LOVENSHEIMER ’18MA
I’ve transitioned out of the auction field and settled into my desired field of collegiate museums and institutions. I’m currently the collections cataloguer for the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, and I’m in charge of their Cataloguing Discovery Initiative. We are retrospectively cataloguing the 24,000 objects in the Loeb’s current collection in hopes of creating more robust records for public access.
BARBARA MUZE ’82BA
While it was a rather long time ago, my days at UMass were some of the best and formative years of my life. Since graduating, I have held many positions, including several on college campuses. For the last ten years, I’ve been at the Chopin Foundation of the United States, serving as their executive director since 2019. After UMass, I earned a Master of Science in Management, focused on arts administration from Lesley University. I have also been an active professional pianist and piano teacher, so the Chopin Foundation has been an ideal place for me to land and will, hopefully, serve as my swan song.
CINZIA PRESTI ’20BA
I just finished an MA in classics at University of Cincinnati (MA thesis: “Architectural Furnishings as Evidence of Local Intentionality in Etruscan Tombs”), and am now moving on toward a PhD. Some recent fieldwork has been at the Tharros Archaeological Research Project, Sardinia (where I work as the geospatial coordinator), and I will be excavating this summer at the Pylos Archaeological Research Project, Greece.
AMANDA PHILLIPS ’02MA
Amanda Phillips (associate professor, University of Virginia) spent the AY 2022 – 23 as a Fulbright Fellow in Turkey, affiliated with Koç University in Istanbul. Her new project considers 18th-century Ottoman decorative arts, especially depictions of flowers and plants.
YAEL RICE ’04MA
Yael Rice has been promoted to associate professor of the history of art and of Asian languages and civilizations at Amherst College. Her monograph, The Brush of Insight: Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court, is forthcoming from the University of Washington Press. It was a recipient of a College Art Association Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant in 2021.
ANTHONY ROUX ’07BA
Post-graduation, I worked in the Education Department at the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens in Delray Beach, Florida. I then moved to Boston and managed the volunteer programs and internships department at the New England Aquarium before transitioning into an HR role. In 2015, I moved to New York City for an HR position with the Simons Foundation and was a volunteer ambassador for the Whitney Museum on Saturdays for about three years.
In 2019, I moved out to San Francisco and am now in an HR manager role with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which focuses on curing and managing all disease by the end of the century and improving the education system in the U.S. My roles in HR certainly are not closely connected to my degree in art history, but it’s quite an interesting path that got me to where I am today and it all stems from my career in museums, and I still stay connected via volunteer opportunities and donating.
CATHERINE SHOTICK ’13MA
I have been selected as the inaugural director of the Westerly Museum of American Impressionism, a new museum currently being built in Westerly, R.I. I started the position on May 1 and couldn’t be happier!
ALLISON SLABY ’02MA
Allison Slaby is the curator at Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In fall 2022, Allison curated “Chrome Dreams and Infinite Reflections: American Photorealism” for the museum. The exhibition focused on consumer culture, especially the fascination with cars in the 1970s, and included work by Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Audrey Flack, Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, Janet Fish, and Robert Bechtle. During the organization of the exhibition, Reynolda House was able to acquire Richard Estes’s Hubcap for the permanent collection. Created just two years ago at the height of the COVID quarantine, the painting depicts a fresh Maine landscape reflected in the shiny fender of a Volkswagen Beetle.
MELANIE SOTER ’19BA
I currently work for the commonwealth at the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA), where I have been since January 2022. I work in the Strategic Planning Department as the department’s coordinator. In Strategic Planning, I primarily help with developing and instituting new initiatives and programming for Massachusetts schools in the MSBA Project Pipeline. I am planning on pursuing an MPA (Master’s of Public Administration) soon to help me further in my governmental career. I recently bought a home with my fiancé (we got engaged!). I also adopted a new dog; I have three total now.
ERIN
SULLIVAN MAYNES ’06MA
An exhibition I co-curated at LACMA, “Pressing Politics: Revolutionary Graphics from Mexico and Germany,” is currently on view through July 22, 2023. We hosted a symposium, “Pressing Matters: Prints and Political Activism in the 20th and 21st Centuries” on April 29 in person and virtually. More information is available on our exhibition webpage or through the website for the Association of Print Scholars.
RACHEL
SWEENEY ’21BA
This May, I finished my art history MA from UNC Chapel Hill, where I worked on issues of identity construction and corporeality in Celtic, late antique, and early medieval art. In particular, I completed a thesis titled “’Souls do not become extinct:’ (Re)Constructing an Iron Age Celtic Identity from the Head Motif.” I also presented a paper at Boston University’s History of Art & Architecture Graduate Symposium in April, titled “Performing ‘Irishness:’ The Tara Brooch, Celtic Revival Brooches, and Ethnic Nationalism.”
GLENN
TOMLINSON ’98MA
I continue to serve as the William Randolph Hearst chief officer of learning and community engagement at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. I work with a dynamic, committed team of 12 educators and teaching artists to provide a wide range of programs for a diverse community. Museum education continues to be a rewarding adventure after 35 years in the field, with new challenges and opportunities. I am excited that we are programming for a new exhibition of American Modernism from the Whitney Museum, a subject I first fell in love with in Professor Bill Oedel’s class in 1985!
KATIE TUMANG ’21BA
Immediately after graduation, I worked for a year as a research technician at the Ragon Institute in Boston, working on vaccines. I’m currently studying immunology as a first-year PhD student at NYU Vilcek in Manhattan. Although my days are mostly spent in the lab, on the weekends I try to take advantage of living in New York City by going to as many galleries and museums as possible—I’ve seen a huge breadth of art since I’ve been here, especially from some of my favorite artists that I’ve learned about and always wanted to see. I’ve also been to a ton of art shows in hopes of staying connected to both sides of my UMass degree—and the skate scene in New York has been super welcoming!
ERIN WEBB ’08BA
In November 2021, I was appointed to the newly formed City of Watertown, Mass., Public Arts and Culture Committee. As the chair of the Mission & Vision, Community Sculpture Walk and communications subcommittees, I have been able to work on some wonderful projects. I helped write the PACC’s mission and vision statements; we hosted our first auction in January; we are installing four sculptures on the community path in late April; I created and manage a monthly PACC Arts Bulletin e-news; and I am helping to implement a city-wide, digital arts calendar. I am also a member of the Edible Watertown Subcommittee, a multi-year, partially grant-funded project that celebrates indigenous plants. Getting involved in my community this way has been more rewarding than I could have imagined! I also started a new role as director of Annual Giving and Engagement at
Harvard School of Dental Medicine in August 2022. I am thrilled to be back in higher education fundraising, and I was surprised to discover how many dentists love the arts! Dentistry incorporates a lot of artistry, and I have had wonderful conversations with our talented alumni about the intersection of the arts and dentistry.
JOHN WHITE ’20MA
John White, PhD student in early modern art history at Princeton University, passed his general exams in January and is now working on his dissertation prospectus. His research on a pair of porcelain “sea sculptures” at the Victoria & Albert Museum, a project that began in a graduate seminar with Christine Ho, will be published in Objects & Organisms, edited by Ella Beaucamp, Romana Kaske, and Thomas Moser (Berlin: DeGruyter) later this spring.
ASHLEY E. WILLIAMS ’18MA
Ashley is a PhD candidate at Columbia University writing a dissertation about unfree artistic labor, craft, and settler colonialism in the United States. She contributed labels for “Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest,” an exhibition currently on view at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery. Ashley will be a 2023 – 24 fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She lives in New York City with her partner, Marcel, and their splendid cat, Earl.
GIVING HISTORY OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE
THANK YOU FOR YOUR GENEROSITY.
We are grateful for the generosity of our many alumni and friends. Your gifts to the Department of the History of Art & Architecture Fund support annual events like our guest lecture series, the fall Mark Roskill Graduate Symposium, and the Commencement prizes for graduating seniors. Gifts to the Anne Mochon Internship Fund and the Walter Denny Fund provide our graduate students with grants that support them in summer internships and help them gain the hands-on experience so critical to their professional development. They also contribute to our ability to fund the Diversity Fellowship that promises to make a lasting, positive impact on the field of art and architecture history. You know what your art history education means to you. Please help us continue to assist students by making a gift on our website: umass.edu/arthistory/history-art-and-architecture.
For gift inquiries, please contact:
Robby O’Sullivan
Executive Director of Development
College of Humanities & Fine Arts and the Fine Arts Center UMass Amherst Foundation rosullivan@uma-foundation.org.
We wish to thank the following individuals for their generous donations from May 2022 – March 2023:
Jennifer Atkinson
Claudia Bach
Kris Berglund
Zachary Bissonnette
Tabitha Charles
Ellen Childs
Panayio Chrysanthis
Jane Connell
Emily Victoria Cooper
Patricia Correia
Aminadab Cruz Jr.
Mary Curran
Linda Delone Best
Dr. Walter B. Denny & Alice E. Robbins
Marylaine Driese
Ann Feitelson
Dr. Ximena Gómez Carlin
Yingxi Gong
Dr. Susan Griffith
Dr. Christine Ho
Andrew Huber & Stephanie Peterson
Dr. Karen Kurczynski
Emily Martin
Edith McCrea
William McCrea & Edith McCrea
Nancy J. Noble
Areti Papanastasiou & Dr. Panayiotis Chrysanthis
Joanne Phillips
Katherine Pillman & Keiran Pillman
Kirsten Dieterich Pitts & Andrew Pitts
Jill Roberts
Frank T. Samuel Jr.
Dr. Monika A. Schmitter
Philippe Schmitter
Janiese Schroeder
Paul Staiti
Joanna Torow & Kris Berglund
Dr. Margaret Vickery & Peter Vickery
Rachel Vigderman
Erin Webb
Felice Whittum & Mark Whittum
Jeanne Williams
Diana Worthington
FACULTY
Gülru Çakmak 19th Century European Art gcakmak@arthist.umass.edu
Walter B. Denny Islamic Art, Museum Studies, Orientalism wbdenny@arthist.umass.edu
Sonja Drimmer Medieval Art sdrimmer@arthist.umass.edu
Ximena Gómez American Art xgomez@arthist.umass.edu
Christine I. Ho East Asian Art christineho@arthist.umass.edu
Karen Kurczynski Graduate Program Director Modern & Contemporary Art Kurczynski@arthist.umass.edu
Laetitia La Follette Ancient Art laelaf@arthist.umass.edu
Charmaine Nelson Black Diasporic Art & Visual Culture charmainenel@umass.edu
Nancy Noble Assoc. Dean for Undergraduate Education nnoble@arthist.umass.edu
Timothy M. Rohan History of Architecture tmrohan@arthist.umass.edu
Monika Schmitter Chair
Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art mschmitt@arthist.umass.edu
Margaret Vickery Undergraduate Program Director Architecture mvickery@arthist.umass.edu
STAFF
Regina Bortone de Sá Art History Departmental Assistant regina@arthist.umass.edu
Brian Shelburne Head, Digital Scholarship Center bps@library.umass.edu
Annie Sollinger Visual Archivist annies@library.umass.edu
Department of History of Art and Architecture
University of Massachusetts
W301 South College
Amherst, MA 01003
umass.edu/arthistory
South College in spring with the W.E.B. Du Bois Library in the background.