Kristen Adams
Assistant Teaching Professor of Early Modern European Art
Kristen Adams is excited to join the department this year as an assistant teaching professor. She will teach early modern European art courses already established in our curriculum, and she is excited to develop new course offerings. She will bring her research interests to new courses focused on the history of textiles as well as a course that examines the preservation of art in times of war throughout history. She looks forward to continued collaboration this year with the Emerging Tech Studio at Ohio State and art historians working at other institutions to create immersive learning experiences for students utilizing virtual reality technology.
Sampada Aranke
Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Black American Art
Sampada has been working on exhibition catalogue essays on Black American artists for upcoming exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art. Additionally, she curated Dewey Crumpler: Life Studies at The David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at University of Maryland, College Park in autumn 2024. This exhibition features the work of Dewey Crumpler, an artist and teacher based in the San Francisco Bay Area, that includes both works on paper and large mixed-media paintings and accompanies a recent acquisition of archival materials by the Driskell. She is also a co-convener of the Samella Lewis Initiative for the Study of Black Art with Benjamin Jones. This year, the initiative will host Artist x Writer conversations throughout the year. Lewis, a giant in Black American art and art history, graduated with a PhD from Ohio State and was both an artist and writer. This series moves in that spirit, as a way to stage meaningful conversations between cultural workers who advance Black arts globally. Finally, she continues to develop and teach courses in Black American and contemporary U.S. art in addition to advising graduate students.
Lisa Florman
Professor of Modern European Art and Vice Provost for the Arts
In her role as Vice Provost for the Arts, Lisa Florman recently launched a new integrated arts website — arts.osu.edu — and an app, through Bloomberg Connects, of the public art on campus. Other ongoing initiatives include a visiting artist series, a performance series (done in partnership with the Wexner Center for the Arts), the annual Artist Laureate program and a Community Artist Residency, the latter hosted by Ohio State’s Urban Arts Space. In her role as professor of art history, Florman wrote the introduction and provided notes for a recent re-translation of Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, part of the Penguin Classics series; it will be released in a paperback edition in May 2025. This fall Lisa was also invited to join the Gateway Film Foundation Board of Directors for a four-year term.
Ujaan Ghosh
Assistant Professor of South Asian Art and Architecture
Ujaan Ghosh finished the fieldwork for his first book project, City of God: Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Religious Space in South Asia. This past summer, he traveled to India to work in the archives of Kolkata, Bhubaneshwar and Puri. Ghosh will present parts of his research that germinated from this fieldwork at the Annual Conference of South Asia in Madison (in October 2024), The Annual Association of Asian Studies (2025), and The College Art Association (2025), respectively. In the summer of 2024, Ghosh was invited by the South Asia Summer Language Institute (SASLI) in Wisconsin to give a lecture. Ghosh’s talk, “Two and a Half Stories: Subversions, Counter Texts, and Alternative Imaginations in the Mahābhārata,” drew from his second book project on the vernacular renditions of the Mahābhārata tradition in South Asia. In 2024, Ghosh also finished his half-a-decade-long co-translation project, Baidehīśa Bilāsa (The Amorous Play of Rāma). This seventeenth-century Odia poetic rendition of the Sanskrit epic, Rāmāyana, is expected to be published by the end of the year. In terms of teaching, in 2024, Ghosh was overjoyed to teach his first graduate seminar and his “Introduction to the Theories and Methods of Art History.” He loved interacting with the students and teaching them to explore newer methods of studying Art History. In the spring of 2024, he also gave a presentation to Ohio State undergraduates to help them prepare for graduate school applications. Throughout the year, Ghosh also developed his first GE course, "Buddha to Bollywood." He is looking forward to teaching the course in spring 2025.
Namiko Kunimoto
Associate Professor of Japanese Art and Director of the Center for Ethnic Studies
This year, Namiko published “Olympic Labor and Displacement: Babel and Its Towers” in the Review of Japanese Culture and Society. She gave a virtual talk (from midnight to 2:30 a.m. EST!) for the Amagasaki Cultural Center in Japan, celebrating 100 years since the birth of the artist Shiraga Kazuo, and presented “Feminism, Bourgeois Liberalism, and Shimada Yoshiko’s Becoming a Statue of a Japanese ‘Comfort Woman,’” at the University of Chicago. Kunimoto was a keynote speaker for the UCLA “Action and Perception” Graduate Student Conference. She chaired a session called “Animating History in East Asian Art” at the College Art Association Conference in Chicago, where she also presented “Re-animating Imperial Ruins: Ho Tzu Nyen’s Visions of Singapore.” Kunimoto welcomed photographer Aileen Smith to her undergraduate general education class, "Photography East and West," who spoke about the photography of the Minamata Disaster. That interview will be published in Behind the Camera: Gender, Power, and Politics in the History of Japanese Photography. Kunimoto was delighted to receive a Greater Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows Fellowship for the 2024-2025 academic year. Her book project, Imperial Animations in Transpacific Contemporary Art, is under review and will hopefully be published in early 2026.
Erica Levin
Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Experimental Cinema
Erica Levin is working on her second book project, tentatively titled, Property’s End: Experimental Non-Fiction Film after the Financial Crisis. She was awarded an Arts & Humanities Large Grant to conduct research for the project on the work of British-Nigerian filmmaker, Onyeka Igwe in London and New York during her sabbatical this spring. Another essay drawn from the book project on the work of Brazilian filmmaker Ana Vaz is forthcoming in the journal Afterimage. She presented an early version of this essay at the University of Oxford as part of an event sponsored by the Terra Foundation entitled, “On Landscape, Colonialism, and Ecology in the Art of the Americas.” She also participated in a roundtable discussion on the state of the field of experimental film studies published in The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema (2024) and co-chaired a panel at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies annual conference in Boston in March on the subject. She is currently serving as Head of Film Studies and chaired a successful search for a new faculty member in film studies last year. With Roger Beebe, Professor of Art, she co-taught a study abroad course in Berlin focused on cinema and contemporary art, which ended with a short visit to the Venice Biennale. She is looking forward to more travel for research during her leave this year.
Christina Wei-Szu Burke Mathison
Associate Professor of Teaching of Taiwanese and Chinese Art
In March, Christina Burke Mathison travelled to Taiwan, capturing video footage of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century temples to create a virtual reality experience for exploring Taiwanese religious architecture. These virtual environments will provide Ohio State students the opportunity to enter Buddhist and Taoist temples in Taiwan from campus. In April, Christina presented on Taiwanese culture and values for a Women in Business event organized by a former student. Christina continues to utilize The Bliss M. and Mildred A. Wiant Collection of Chinese Art, housed at the Wexner Center for the Arts, bringing various classes for private viewings of works dating from the eighth to the twentieth centuries. She and the students in her "Art of Modern and Contemporary China" course are currently working with the Wiant Collection to curate an exhibition focused on art collecting in modern China.
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. This autumn she is once again leading the Senior Research Seminar, which focuses on developing primary research skills. The seminar will focus on George Bellows, an Ohio State alum who achieved international fame during the first decades of the twentieth century as a member of the Ashcan School. The seminar takes advantage of local archival resources, including Ohio State’s Thompson Special Collections, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum and the Columbus Museum of Art. To better understand Bellow’s place within the broader history of American art, students will travel to New York over fall break to visit the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She continues in her role as graduate studies chair and this spring was the recipient of the Graduate Faculty Mentorship Award. She is continuing with work on her book project What About Modern Art in Democracy? American Art and the Legacies of the New Deal in the 1940s. She was appointed to the national board of the Living New Deal, a research project and online public archive documenting the scope and impact of the New Deal on American lives, and she will chair a panel on The “Work” of Art in American Culture from the New Deal to Now at the annual College Art Association Conference.
Kris Paulsen
Associate Professor of New Media Art
Kris Paulsen is a 2024-2025 Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Technology and Culture at the University of Toronto. She will make multiple trips to Toronto to participate in a series of seminars and public events around the theme “Absent Here, Present There.” The year of programming will result in an edited book on the topic, which will feature new writing by Prof. Paulsen. In addition to the Toronto events, she traveled in July 2024 to the Nam June Paik Art Center in South Korea to present a lecture on Paik’s satellite television works of the 1970s and 1980s, and delivered the 2024 Comini Lecture at Southern Methodist University, in which she discussed satellite and rover images of Mars in the context of speculative and anti-colonial art practices. In 2024, Paulsen published several essays, including “Video’s Past Futures” in the collection The New Television: Video After Television (No Place/MIT Press), “Simulating Citizenship” in Debi Cornwall: Model Citizens, an essay on art and machine learning in October (Summer 2024), and a review of Tai Shani’s work in CAA Reviews. Paulsen continues to oversee the Art, Technology, and Social Change Micro-Residency Program, which in 2024 brought Alison O’Daniel, Sarah Rosalena, Elizabeth Povinelli, Katherine Behar and Jennifer Rhee to campus to deliver public lectures, visit classes and conduct workshops with students.
Paulsen’s proudest achievement of 2024 was helping the department launch its new Certificate in Contemporary Art and Curatorial Practice, which will provide graduate students with professional and hands-on experiences that prepare them for museum careers. She received a 2024 Imagined Futures Grant for her dedication to teaching courses that foreground professional practices and resume-building experiences. She is currently working on her second book manuscript, titled Future Artifact, as well as collaborating with former Wexner curator Kelly Kivland on an expansive exhibition of artwork by Mimi Onuoha. Like 2023’s Sarah Rosalena: In All Directions at the Columbus Museum of Art, this project will also involve students in the production of the exhibition and catalogue.
Carlos Rivas
Assistant Professor of Latin American Art and Ethnic Studies
Carlos Rivas had a busy (and wonderful!) first year and summer at Ohio State, traveling to Chicago for the College Art Association Conference in February and to Bogotá, Colombia in June to attend and present at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) annual conference. He also participated in the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity’s (NCFDD) summer Faculty Success Program, a ten-week writing mentorship and support program geared towards junior faculty. Carlos has continued to focus on two major book projects. His upcoming monograph, Warped Isthmus: Aerial Vision in the Descripción Geográfica-Moral de la Diócesis de Goathemala, 1768-1770, centers on eighteenth-century Spanish colonial cartography and landscape. He is also co-editing an essay collection on Central American futurities with decolonial liberation psychologist Joanna Beltrán Girón, tentatively titled X∞Creatives: The Healing Power of Isthmian Ancestral Technologies. He has also submitted shorter pieces to journals Ethnohistory and INKS, and is contributing several short pieces to a catalogue documenting the multimodal performance piece Yana by Ati Cachimuel, a visiting artist last spring at the Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design (ACCAD) here on campus. Yana used elaborate light, sound, music and 360º projection to create a fully-immersive performance/installation piece that resulted in a profound fusion of contemporary technology with traditional and contemporary Andean cosmology, expanding the boundaries of how indigenous identity can be expressed in the digital age.
In addition to research, Carlos developed two new General Education courses, including "HISTART 3562: Contemporary U.S. Latinx Art" and a new course for the Center for Ethnic Studies, "ETHNSTD 3572: Central American Immigrants in the US," both of which will be offered in spring 2025. Also coming in spring 2025 will be LA-based artist Kiara Machado who Carlos invited to be one of the Office of Academic Affairs’s (OAA) visiting artists for the 2024-2025 academic year.
This fall, Carlos also enthusiastically welcomed two new graduate students, Shima Karimi and Camellia Valencia, who join a growing cohort of Latin Americanists in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Andrew Shelton
Professor of 18th and 19th Century European Art
Andrew Shelton is serving as the interim chair of the Department of Art for the 2024-2025 academic year. He is also editing a special issue of the open-access journal Arts on “Queerness in 18th- and 19th-Century European art.”
Karl Whittington
Professor of European Medieval Art and Department Chair
Karl Whittington was promoted to professor in May 2024. He recently completed a new book manuscript, Queer Making: Essays on Artists and Desire in Medieval Europe, which will appear in 2025 as part of the ICMA’s “Viewpoints” series, published by Penn State University Press. After earlier research trips to the U.K. and Germany, in June 2024 he took a final research trip for the project to France, visiting sites in Provence and in and around Paris. This year he also published a book chapter, “Opicinus de Canistris’s Demonic Seas,” in The Four Elements in the Middle Ages, Interdisciplinary Perspectives: Volume One – Water (Brill, 2024). He is excited to contribute an essay on a late fifteenth-century polychrome wood sculpture of Saint Sebastian for the catalogue of an upcoming show focusing on gender and sexuality in medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in autumn 2025.
Whittington’s other big project is that he is taking over as one of the new lead authors for the next revision of Gardner’s Art through the Ages, one of the most widely read textbooks in the field of art history. Alongside two co-authors, producing a newly edited text of the book, with new artworks and enhanced discussions of race, gender and sexuality, methodology and materiality, will occupy him for much of 2024 and 2025.
As department chair, Whittington is excited to support the search for a new faculty member in Global Indigenous Arts this year, to continue working to bring students into direct contact with works of art through field trips and travel initiatives, and to continue exploring ways to enhance professional training and career pathways for undergraduates.
