It promises to be a busy fall here in the History of Art Department, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. First, we’ll be welcoming six new graduate students, including two University Fellows and a third on a Fulbright: Maria Salvador Cabrerizo (MA, University of London), Emma Clute (MA, Boston University), Trenton Olsen (MA, Brigham Young University), Anna Schuer (MA, Case Western), Eunice Uhm (BA, American University), and Yanzhuang “Gillian” Zhang (MA, Sun Yat-Sen University).
In October we’ll be hosting another Patron’s Circle Lecture, this time by Michael Lobel, Professor of Art History and Director of the MA Program in Modern and Contemporary Art, Criticism and Theory at SUNY Purchase. His talk, “Ivory Tower or Gatehouse?: Art History, the Museum, and the Crisis in the Humanities,” will be held at 5:30 pm on Thursday, October 9, in 180 Hagerty Hall, with a reception to follow here in Pomerene.
We will also be continuing with the Curatorial Practices speakers series that last year brought Lynne Cooke, Hamza Walker and Michelle Grabner to campus. The three curatorial visitors lined up for autumn are Alexander Provan on September 4, Anthony Huberman on September 25, and Lucy Lippard on October 23.
We are looking forward with a great deal of anticipation, too, to the Wexner Center’s 25th anniversary exhibition, curated by Rob Storr: Transfigurations: Modern Masters from the Wexner Family Collection. The show, which features major works by Picasso, Giacometti, and Dubuffet, opens September 21 and will run through the end of December. There will be a number of exciting events surrounding the exhibition, including an early October visit by T.J. Clark. Check the Wexner Center website in September for details about his talk. (Be sure to take note, too, the Humanities Institute speaker series: Wendy Chun will be visiting OSU on October 2, artist Sue Coe on October 9.)
I want to take this opportunity to look backwards as well, to the many accomplishments of History of Art Department faculty, graduate students, and alumni during the past academic year. High on the list are the several awards garnered by our faculty for recent publications: the 2013 International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) Book Prize to Julia Andrews and Kuiyi Shen (PhD, 1999) for The Art of Modern China; the Gustav O. Arlt Award from the Council of Graduate Schools to Christian Kleinbub for his book, Vision and the Visionary in Raphael; and the inaugural TCP-Renaissance Society of America Prize in Digital Renaissance Research to Byron Hamann for his article, “Object, Image, Cleverness: The Lienzo de Tlaxcala,” Art History (June 2013). Karl Whittington was awarded both a Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award and a Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant by the College Art Association for his book, Body-Worlds: Opicinus de Canistrus and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination.
The news from our recent PhDs and current graduate students is hardly less impressive. Jim Voorhies (PhD, 2012) was named Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University; Yanfei Zhu (PhD, 2013) was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago; Javier Berzal (PhD, 2014) has accepted a tenure-track position as assistant professor of art history at Western Washington University; and Seunghan Paek (PhD, 2014) is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Council for East Asian Studies at Yale University. Our current graduate students did well too, garnering several awards this past spring: Ahyoung Yoo received a CLIR Mellon Dissertation Fellowship in the Humanities; Ankur Desai, a fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies; and Ivana Rosenblatt Ohio State’s prestigious Presidential Fellowship. Congratulations to all.
As I marvel at this record of achievement for 2013/14, I can only look forward with great anticipation to what the new academic year will bring!
Lisa Florman
Professor and Chair
Ohio State nav bar
Ohio State navigation bar
