Dear Department of History of Art community: current and former students, faculty, friends and supporters. I’m pleased to bring you the fall 2024 edition of our annual letter – its fourth edition. It’s always a pleasure to share with all of you the wonderful work being done by our students, faculty and staff here in Pomerene Hall, across campus and in the community.
After the frenzy of conducting three faculty searches in 2023, this year has been a bit quieter in the department, though we’ve certainly still kept ourselves busy. We’ve designed and gotten approved a whole slate of new courses, both for our new faculty and for existing faculty, as part of the university’s adoption of a new general education curriculum. I’m thrilled about students getting to take these new courses, some of which have already launched and others that are being taught this spring for the first time. These include Prof. Levin’s “The Developing World on Screen,” Prof. Patterson’s “Inventing the Americans,” Prof. Aranke’s “Arts of the Black Atlantic,” Prof. Rivas’s “Latinx Art in the U.S.,” Prof. Ghosh’s “From Buddha to Bollywood” and Prof. Kunimoto’s “East/West Photography.” These are going to open up our students to so many new parts of the world and of our history, as well as bring new students into our department. Thanks to everyone for their hard work in getting these new courses approved!
This fall we also launched a new graduate Certificate in Contemporary Art and Curatorial Practice. This certificate is designed to be taken by graduate students at Ohio State who seek to gain both practical training and critical perspectives on curating in art museums and film programming. Interest in the certificate has been strong, and we’re excited to begin teaching a new “Curatorial Practicum” next year as part of the program. The certificate will also be a great way for us to continue our ongoing collaborations with the Columbus Museum of Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts and other exhibition spaces in Columbus. Thanks to Prof. Paulsen, Danny Marcus, Prof. Florman and everyone who helped make this certificate happen.
While we are relieved not to be conducting THREE faculty searches at one time, we are delighted this year to be conducting one. Hopefully in the newsletter next year I’ll be able to share news of a new colleague in Global Indigenous Arts, the search we are currently running. Indigenous Art Histories are pushing the field in new directions that we want to be leading, and our new colleague will join a cluster of other new hires in Indigenous Studies across the College of Arts and Sciences. Thanks to Prof. Aranke for chairing the committee for this important search. In other hiring news, we were also delighted to bring Dr. Kristen Adams into our department this year as Assistant Teaching Professor. Kristen received her PhD from our department in 2020 and had been offering courses for us for several years in Renaissance and Baroque Art. We are so glad that she will now be a full-time member of our faculty.
We continued this year with one of our signature goals in the department: providing opportunities where students can interact firsthand with works of art. This fall, Prof. Patterson led another successful trip with our graduating senior majors to New York City. During the same break, Prof. Rivas also led a group of graduate students from his seminar to Los Angeles, which you can read more about later in the newsletter. Prof. Levin led a study abroad trip for the first time, exploring Art and Film in Berlin with a colleague in the Department of Art. One of our graduate students, Allie Mickle, was our inaugural graduate intern at the Asia Society in Hong Kong for three months in spring 2024 – you can read about her experience later in the newsletter as well. Fundraising for the Hong Kong internship program has been generously led by Ohio State alum Alice Mong, director of Asia Society Hong Kong. And the generous funding from the Murnane family continues to provide opportunities for our graduate students to conduct their research around the world. As always, these exceptional experiences are balanced with intensive engagement with the resources and objects here on campus: in Special Collections, at the Wexner Center, at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum and in so many other collections.
This year has also been a remarkable year for our graduate students who have finished their degrees. We had five students file and defend dissertations in 2024: Yifan Li, Lauren Caskey, Clayton Kindred, Julie Defossez and Hannah Slater. We are very proud of you all and can’t wait to see the great work you are going to do in the field.
We have also welcomed a number of exciting guests to our department this year. To name just a few, last spring, Steven Nelson, Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) delivered our annual Ludden Lecture, speaking about the South African artist Moshekwa Langa. We had two major figures in the curatorial world visit to give talks; first, in March, Helen Molesworth spoke at the Wexner Center about her new book, Open Question. Then in October, again in partnership with the Wexner Center for the Arts, we welcomed one of the curators of the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Meg Onli, to speak about her research and curatorial practice. The Samella Lewis Initiative for the Study of Black Art hosted two “Artist x Writer” events, which bring artists and writers into conversation. And our recent PhD lecture series featured fascinating talks by Tamara Golan and A.J. Meyer.
We are also incredibly proud of our undergraduate students, who have done some amazing things in the past year. One of our majors, Alexa Isaac, won a grant to conduct research in Bulgaria for her senior thesis on a medieval icon painting. Several of our recent graduates began PhD programs (at UC Berkeley and Bryn Mawr), another began an MA program in libraries and archives, while several others have gotten jobs at the Columbus Museum of Art and many other places. This fall we launched a new one-credit hour class, taught by Prof. Mathison, called “Careers in Art History,” which we hope will foster even more conversation in the department about how students can prepare to apply what they’ve learned from their degrees out in the world.
There have been a lot of challenges in 2024, from domestic politics to international conflicts, and these have directly impacted a number of members of our community. It is my goal for our department to always be a place where everyone feels safe and valued, certainly in terms of their work and ideas but also as people. I’m proud of the way our students, staff and faculty are supporting each other, and I am always open to suggestions of how we can do this even better.
As always, I love to hear from you, so stop by Pomerene Hall, drop me an email or send me a letter. Wishing you and yours a safe, healthy and inspiring 2025.
Karl Whittington
Professor and Department Chair
