Sampada Aranke
Associate Professor of History of Art and Comparative Studies
Sampada Aranke teaches courses on Black American art since 1945, with an emphasis on the contemporary. She serves as the associate director of the Center for Ethnic Studies. In 2022-2023, she was the director of the Mellon Archives Innovation Programs at the Rebuild Foundation. Her book, Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power was published in February 2023 with Duke University Press and was featured in the October 2023 issue of Artforum. She was a co-curator for Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965-1985 at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis and co-edited the first monograph on the artist entitled Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965-1985 (UC Press). She co-curated Painting is an Act of Spiritual Aggression, a show featuring Berkeley-based artist Dewey Crumpler’s works at Derek Eller Gallery in New York. Currently, her exhibition Ayanah Moor: Undercover is up at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, which was developed in concert with a published conversation with the artist for liquid blackness journal entitled “Reveal and Restraint: Ayanah Moor’s Social Abstraction.” Most recently, her contribution for Rashid Johnson was published as a part of the Phaidon Contemporary Art Series. She gave a lecture at the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park on her book as a part of the African Diaspora Lecture series.
Lisa Florman
Professor of Modern Art and Vice Provost for the Arts
Lisa Florman has been serving as Ohio State’s Vice Provost for the Arts since September 2022. In the time since, her translations of two essays by Alexandre Kojève were published in Kandinsky: Incarnating Beauty, edited by Boris Groys (David Zwirner Books, 2022); and her chapter, “Twentieth-Century Art Historicities: The Multiple Shapes of Time,” appeared in Bloomsbury’s A Cultural History of Ideas in the Modern Age, edited by Stefanos Geroulanos. Lisa also recently completed the introduction and notes to a new book-length English-language edition of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which will be published by Phaidon in 2024. In her role as vice provost, she has, among other things, launched a visiting artist series, stood up the position of Ohio State Artist Laureate, piloted a performance series in collaboration with the Wexner Center for the Arts, helped to create a Community Artist Residency at the Urban Arts Space and formed the Provost’s Council on the Arts. In October 2023, she also co-curated a micro-exhibition (with Jeremy Stone and Danny Marcus) for Ohio State’s Thompson Library; the show, “Lichtenstein’s Brushstrokes,” coincided with what would have been Roy Lichtenstein’s 100th birthday.
Mark Fullerton
Professor of Ancient Art
Mark was appointed to a full four-year term as Chair of the Department of Classics at Ohio State. He continues to teach courses in the Departments of History of Art and Classics on Ancient Greek and Roman art and archaeology.
Ujaan Ghosh
Assistant Professor of South Asian Art and Architecture
Ujaan Ghosh has been working toward his first book manuscript, Abode of Gods: Global Visual Cultures and Local Spatial Practice in Colonial India. He presented a chapter called “Punda, Daroga, Sepoy” in a panel he organized at the Annual Conference on South Asia, held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ujaan is looking forward to a summer research trip to the archives of India where he will continue with his archival fieldwork for his book. Simultaneously, Ujaan has been working on a translation of a Pre-Modern Sanskrita Rāmāyana and a Pre-Modern Odiā Mahābhārata. He presented parts of his research in the South Asia Initiative Lecture Series at Ohio State in November 2023. In terms of teaching, Ujaan was excited to teach his first South Asian architecture survey in the department, titled “From Temples to Skyscrapers.” He is looking forward to teaching his first graduate seminar in spring 2024, “The Asian Metropolis.”
Benjamin Jones
Provost’s Fellow in History of Art
Benjamin Jones recently submitted edits for his forthcoming Art Journal essay “No Man Can Serve Two Masters: A Critique of Mastery in Charles White’s Sound of Silence.” His interviews with Mildred Howard and Adrian Burrell appeared as part of the essay “Black Space Against Colorblind Modernism,” in a publication by the Institute of Contemporary Art San José called Blood, Sweat, and Time: Emerging Perspectives on Mildred Howard and Adrian Burrell. With funding from the fellowship, Jones recently appeared in a documentary on the life and work of Dewey Crumpler. Crumpler is a central figure in Jones’s manuscript, What We Cain’t Do: Art and Pedagogy in the Black Radical Tradition. To deepen his engagement with that project, he is heading to the Elizabeth Catlett papers at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University. Work in service of The Samella Lewis Initiative for the Study of Black Art (SLISBA) at Ohio State has been an invigorating way for Jones to connect with artists and scholars on campus and nationwide. SLISBA hosts weekly write-in sessions and monthly author’s circles and is planning public symposia and performances at Ohio State in the coming months.
In his visual art practice, Jones recently “finished” a living architectural sculpture in Hyde Park, Chicago, and is working on collaborations with Iraqi photographer Wesaam Al-Badry and Palestinian artist Nidal Elkhairy. His art continues to study blackness and spacetime, but has shifted emphasis toward the manifold definitions of power. These inquiries appear between the lines of his academic publications.
Namiko Kunimoto
Associate Professor of Japanese Art and Director of the Center for Ethnic Studies
Namiko Kunimoto has been focusing on her second book project, Urgent Animations: the Afterlives of Japanese Imperialism in Transpacific Contemporary Art. She traveled to Japan in January 2023 to complete work on a chapter about the Hiroshima-based artist Goto Yasuka and is soon departing for Singapore to see recent work by Ho Tzu Nyen. The project also includes contemporary art from Canada and Taiwan. In 2023, Namiko published “Olympic Labor and Displacement: Babel and Its Towers” in the peer-reviewed Review of Japanese Culture and Society and an essay for Cindy Mochizuki’s Autumn Strawberry exhibition at the Surrey Art Gallery near Vancouver, British Columbia. She was pleased to give the keynote address for the ASIANetwork conference, entitled, “Moving Forward/Looking Back: On the Boundary of Art History and AAPI Diaspora Studies.” She also gave presentations on recent work at the Association for Asian Studies conference in Boston, the European Association of Japanese Studies Conference in Ghent, Belgium, and gave an introductory lecture on Japanese art history to four classes of enthusiastic sixth graders at Metro Early College Middle School. In terms of teaching, she was overjoyed to teach her first class with a teaching assistant and appreciated her undergraduate students’ engagement with photography. In her role as director of the Center for Ethnic Studies, Namiko organized a workshop on human trafficking and race in Ohio with the organization Advocating Opportunities and welcomed three new hires in Latinx Studies. This past year, she was thrilled to receive an Ohio State Arts and Humanities Small Grant, an Arts and Humanities Manuscript Workshop grant and an Ohio State Office of International Affairs grant. She was pleased that her advisee Alice Phan completed her PhD on Mono-ha artists and is now working at the Hirschhorn Museum. Namiko welcomed Michiko Kubota to her cohort, joining her other graduate students, Jessica Tjiu, Mia Kivel, Christy Sher, Maika Kagawa Bahr and Hannah Slater.
Erica Levin
Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Experimental Cinema
In October 2023, Associate Professor Erica Levin gave a talk on her recently published book, The Channeled Image: Art and Media Politics after Television, at the Wexner Center for the Arts. She is now working on her second book project, tentatively titled, Property’s End: Experimental Non-Fiction Film after the Financial Crisis. She conducted research for the project in Portugal last fall and presented her work at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in Denver in April. She also brought Sílvia das Fadas, one of the artists featured in the book, to campus in March for a performance of her recent multi-projector film, Light, Blaze, Fulgor. This spring she’ll be co-teaching a new high-impact general education course, “The Developing World on Screen,” with Associate Professor of Geography Max Woodworth. She’ll also be taking a group of students to Berlin and Venice in May with Professor of Art Roger Beebe.
Christina Wei-Szu Burke Mathison
Associate Professor of Teaching
Christina Wei-Szu Burke Mathison offers courses in Chinese and Taiwanese art with a particular focus on the impact of invasion and colonial conquest. This autumn she enjoyed bringing her "Art of Colonial Taiwan" class to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum to view original paintings, prints and maps documenting the effects of the Japanese Imperial conquest of Taiwan in the early twentieth century. In November 2023, Christina brought a group of 55 students to the Cleveland Museum of Art for a tour of the exhibition China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta and to attend a lecture on Ming Dynasty China. She presented “Temples of Local Color: Representations of Taiwanese Identity” at the Association for Asian Studies conference on the panel she organized entitled Perspectives on Asian Art – In Memory of John C. Huntington (March 2023). In September she participated in the Land/scaping Taiwan conference at the University of Washington, presenting “Colonial Landscapes, Hidden Messages: Reenvisioning Taiwanese Landscape Painting.”
Jody Patterson
Associate Professor and Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Chair of American Art
Jody Patterson designs and delivers courses and seminars dedicated to the study of American art. She is currently developing an undergraduate general education course, “Inventing the Americans,” which will explore how art contributed to notions of nation and citizenship in the new Republic. She continues in her role as graduate studies chair and is thrilled to be working with such a dynamic and supportive group of future art historians. She recently completed an article on “Operation Crossroads,” which addresses artistic responses to the atomic bomb; her focus was Ralston Crawford and the peacetime nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946. She presented her new in-progress research on the 1940s at conferences and public lectures, including a lecture on Robert Gwathmey at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Jody was awarded a Mellon Senior Research Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, where she is undertaking archival research for her book project What About Modern Art in Democracy? American Art and the Legacies of the New Deal in the 1940s.
Kris Paulsen
Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and New Media
Kris Paulsen spent much of 2023 working on an exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art in collaboration with graduate students, Sarah Rosalena: In All Directions. Paulsen edited a catalogue to accompany the exhibition, in which writing by the students appears alongside work by prominent scholars. In conjunction with the exhibition, Paulsen has programmed the Kidder Video Gallery at the CMA, including work by Amelia Winger-Bearskin and Karrabing Film Collective. Paulsen also co-edited a special issue of Media-N on The Afterlives of Data and published an essay on Zach Blas’ AI artworks. She continues to work on her new book manuscript, Future Artifact, for which she was a finalist for the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writer Grant. Paulsen delivered talks at Sorbonne Université/Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, and held a public conversation with artist and technologist James Bridle about AI and other intelligences. She continues to oversee the Art, Technology, and Social Change Micro-Residency Program and she co-organized the symposium “Is AI Justice Possible,” which brought together leading philosophers, artists and computer scientists to hypothesize alternative ways of conceptualizing and building AI. With collaborators from across the university, Paulsen is working on a series of curricular and funding initiatives on artificial intelligence at Ohio State.
Carlos Rivas
Assistant Professor of Latinx and Latin American Art and Ethnic Studies
After finishing a one-year appointment as Visiting Assistant Professor at the Claremont Colleges in Southern California during the 2022-23 academic year, Carlos Rivas has been focusing on two book projects including his upcoming monograph on eighteenth-century Spanish colonial cartography and landscape, tentatively titled Warped Isthmus: Decolonizing Aerial Vision in the Descripción Geográfica-Moral de la Diócesis de Goathemala, 1768-1770. The still-untitled second book project is a collection of essays on Central American futurities in a volume co-edited with psychologist Joanna Beltrán Girón. In the autumn 2023 semester he taught his first course at Ohio State, an introductory survey of modern Latin American art, in which he emphasized the importance of both pre- Columbian and colonial era iconography and visual culture as a basis for which to further understand the work of Latin American artists in the modern and contemporary era. In June 2024, Rivas will travel to the Latin American Studies Association’s annual conference in Bogotá, Colombia to deliver a paper titled “Fascist Propaganda and Cycles of Violence in El Salvador” as part of the “#ProhibidoOlvidarSV: Histories of Resistance and Solidarity in El Salvador” panel. At the conference, he will also be a part of three other roundtable discussions, including a panel on “Researching and Teaching Spanish Settler Colonialism in Mesoamerica.”
Professor Rivas is excited to be developing new courses for both the Department of History of Art and the Center for Ethnic Studies, including a new survey course on contemporary Latinx art in the United States.
Karl Whittington
Associate Professor of Medieval European Art and Chair of History of Art
In summer 2023 Karl Whittington’s book, Trecento Pictoriality: Diagrammatic Painting in Late Medieval Italy, was published by Brepols as part of the Renovatio Artium series; it was a joy to see the book come out after a decade of work. He is delighted to be moving on to a new project, a short book in progress called Queer Making: Desire and the Creation of Medieval Art. In May and October 2023 he took research trips to Germany (Berlin, Cologne, Aachen, Hildesheim, Frankfurt) and the United Kingdom (London) to conduct research on a range of objects for the book. In January 2023, he gave an invited lecture for the Medieval Colloquium at Northwestern University on material from the new book project.
As department chair, Karl is excited to continue working toward a range of curricular and programming initiatives. In the 2022-2023 academic year, he participated in the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Academic Leadership Program (ALP), as part of a cohort of six Ohio State faculty members who met throughout the year with Ohio State leaders as well as with colleagues across the Big Ten at two retreats at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Penn State University. In the classroom, he is developing a new online general education course on gender and sexuality in European Art and taught a graduate seminar in autumn 2023 on Queer Art Histories. This fall he was delighted to welcome a new graduate student, Tony del Aversano, who joins a great and growing cohort of medievalists in the department.
