art_history
Department of Art and Art History

Art History Newsletter, Fall 2007

STUDENT AWARDS, FELLOWSHIPS, AND NEW POSITIONS

Awards

  • Catherine Dossin, Inaugural Graduate Student Instructor Award

Fellowships

  • Rowena Dasch, 2007-2008 Smithsonian Pre-doctoral Dissertation Fellowship
  • John Hopkins, University Continuing Fellowship (Cullen), Two-year Pre-doctoral Rome Prize, American Academy in Rome
  • Adrian Kohn, Smithsonian Fellowship in American Art
  • Ufuk Soyoz, Kress Travel Grant
  • Maia Toteva, University Continuing Fellowship
  • Mike Wellen, Jacob Javits Fellowship

Tenure-Track Positions

  • Michael Carrasco, Florida State University
  • Heather Mathews, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma Washington

Graduate Alumni News

  • Anne Stanton, Ph.D. in medieval art, 1992, is now chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Missouri.

Conference Papers

ANNUAL ELEANOR GREENHILL GRADUATE STUDENT SYMPOSIUM, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN, MARCH 2007

  • Tracy Lea Hensley, “Deciphering the Grotesque: Four Bronzes from the House of the Ephebe, Pompeii”
  • Kimberly L. Jones, “Visual Actors and Ritual Spaces: Comparing Monumental Centers in Early Pre-Hispanic Peru”
  • Joshua L. McConnell, “Israhel van Meckenem's Namensornament: The Medium is the Message/ Perception is the Medium”
  • Rachel Mohl,“A Kabbalistic Exchange: Xul, Borges and Jewish Mysticism”
  • Peter Mowris, “Mimicry and Mourning: Christina Fernandez and Maria's Great Expedition”

PAPERS GIVEN BY UT GRADUATE STUDENTS AT NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCES 2006 – 2007

Ph.D. Students

  • Catherine Dossin
    • “Why Is There no Great Female Painter? - Women Artists and the 1980s's Return to Paintings”
    • Women and Gender Studies Annual Graduate Student Conference, UT Austin, April 2007
    • “American Pop Art and the German People: Reexamining the Success of American Pop Art in Germany”
    • Midwest Art History Society's Annual Meeting, Indianapolis, IN, March 2007
    • “Buying Art – Making History: The Influence of European Collectors on American Contemporary Art”
    • University of Florida Society of Art History Graduates' Annual Symposium, Gainesville, FL, February 2007
    • “Exhibiting Cultural Identity: Controversial U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American/Latino Art in the 1980s”
    • Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies, California State University Dominguez Hills, CA, November 2006
    • “New York-The Other: The French Existentialists and the American City”
    • UT American Studies Graduate Conference, UT Austin, September 2006
  • Rowena Dasch
    • “Unraveling the Deception: Trompe l'Oeil as Guide to Charles Bird King's Picture Gallery, 1824–1861”
    • Florida State University Graduate Student Art History Symposium, Tallahassee, FL, February 2007
    • “Race and the American Nation: Understanding the Politics of Ethnicity in Charles Bird King's American Indian Portraits”

    • Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Annual Conference, Selinsgrove, PA, March 2007
  • Rina Faletti
    • “Rome's First Aqueduct Reconsidered: Appius Claudius Caecus and the Aqua Appia of 312 B.C.” Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), San Diego, CA, January 2007
    • “Water Problems for a World Center in an Arid Region: California, A Case Study” International Water History Association, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland, June 2007
  • John Hopkins
    • “The Sacred Sewer: Tradition and Religion in the Cloaca Maxima” Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease and Hygiene in Rome from Antiquity to Modernity, The British School at Rome. Rome, Italy, June 2007
  • Adrian Kohn
    • “Mathematics in Minimalism“
      Panel on Art and the Mathematical Instinct, College Art Association, New York, February 2007
  • Eun-Su Lee
    • “A Preliminary Note on Buddhist Sculptures from Dhaka Region” (to be published in the Journal of Bengal Art vol.11, 2007)
      The 7th International Congress on Bengal Art, Bogra, Bangladesh, February 2007
  • Peter Mowris
    • “Andre Breton and Eidetic Perception”
      Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Conference, New York, NY, November 2006
  • Onur Öztürk
    • “A Study of Design and Construction Practice in Roman Asia Minor: The Sebasteion at Aphrodisias, South Portico Anastylosis Project”
      Society of Architectural Historians Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, PA, April 2007
    • “The Patrons of Roman Architecture in Asia Minor”
      University of Florida Society of Art History Graduates' Annual Symposium, Gainesville, FL, February 2007.
  • Ana Pozzi-Harris
    • “Concrete and Madi art in their local context: a methodological approach.” The Geometry of Hope International Symposium, Blanton Museum of Art, UT Austin February 2007.
  • Ashley Schmiedekamp
    • “Picturing the Cosmos: Surrealism and Astronomy”
      Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Conference, New York, NY, November 2006
  • Ufuk Soyoz
    • “The Temple of Zeus-Asklepios: Ritual, Space and Politics of Body at Pergamon”
      60th Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, Pittsburgh, PA, April 2007
  • Maia Totev
    • “On the Opposite Sides of the Iron Curtain: Ilya Kabakov and Joseph Kosuth” Smithsonian Fellows Lectures in American Art Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., May 2007

M.A. Students

  • Kency Cornejo
    • “Liberation Theology and Art: A Case Study of Roberto Huezo's ‘Vía Crucis del Pueblo Salvadoreño’” 27th Annual ILASSA Conference on Latin
      America, UT Austin, February 2007
  • Tracy Lea Hensley
    • “Restoring Pornography to the Elite: Re-sexualizing Pompeian Private Collections” Possessing Knowledge: Archiving, Collecting and Displaying in the Ancient World, 18th Annual UNC-DUKE Graduate Colloquium in Classics, Durham, NC, April 2007

FACULTY NEWS

JACQUELINE BARNITZ
Jacqueline Barnitz has taught modern Latin American Art here since 1981 when the first full time faculty position in this field was created and has just retired from teaching as of this May 2007. During her years at the University of Texas she created the first graduate program in that field. She taught this subject and has written and lectured widely in North and Latin America since the 1960s. Among her publications is her book Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America (2001).

During this past year she participated as a respondent in the Symposium “Guernica and After: The Power of Representation” organized by this year's Harrington Fellow Andrea Giunta in April 2007. This event was coordinated with the Harrington Fellowship Program, The Department of Art and Art History, the Blanton Museum of Art and the Center for the Study of Modernism. The proceedings of the symposium are to be published bilingually.

Barnitz has written two chapters for a catalog of the exhibition “La Presencia: Latin American Art in the United States.” collections (summer 2007). This exhibition, which featured works in U.S. collections, took place at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California. She has also contributed an essay “Moving Through Time With a Camera” to the catalog of an exhibition on the work of the Argentine artist and film maker, Leandro Katz at the Centro Cultural de España in Buenos Aires (summer 2007).

STEVE BOURGET
With a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation Steve Bourget is pursuing the Moche on the desertic Peruvian coast at Huaca el Pueblo, a site with monumental architecture in the Zaña Valley. In addition to a detailed study of the site, the main objective of this project is to study Moche political organization at a number of key sites distributed across four contiguous valleys.

Bourget assisted the curator of the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, (Santiago, Chile) in the preparation of an exhibition of Moche art. This forthcoming exhibition is based on his recently published book: Sex, Death and Sacrifice in Moche Religion and Visual Culture, University of Texas Press (2006). He also wrote the catalogue's essay. He pursued his curatorial interests with the display of the Art and Art History Collection in the Fine Art Library and in the lobby of the Dean's office.

In March 2007, Bourget participated in a sting operation with FBI agents at the home of a pre-Columbian art dealer in Laredo. At his place, more than 200 antiquities from Peru were seized.

MICHAEL CHARLESWORTH
Biographical Notes, 2006–007

Patrick and my friend Richard
in London, point the way ahead.
Card III is at stake.

Returning from the Ligurian
coast, Hereford and Yorkshire, work
began. The vessel's pilot had
to prepare Landscape and Vision
for book publication. Papers
for CASVA – CASVA! Magic name
to conjure with – at the National
Gallery, and a small sym-
posium here in Texas, had to be
made good. Topics photographic
– how, in the nineteenth century
albums helped create canons in
art history, and what institutional
responses were: that's a tough topic.
And the other, closer to home
with a rosy pastoral glow
all over it: Alfred Watkins
and how his photographs contributed
to our life's imagination
of pre-history.

Meanwhile, the lists
had to be entered on behalf
of India! Praise and blame distributed,
stern judgement handed out, and good
old Blackwells need ten thousand words
upon the Picturesque way of seeing –
a nice project this, for a volume
that's to revise conceptions about
British art and architectural
history.

Watch ended, at last
the pilot can now leave the helm
and turn in below.
Rather a happy thought!

And
steam, flowing out of a chimney
rising and twisting in the air
through beautiful volumes, then
disappearing, forms an emblem
of our lives.

JOHN CLARKE
John R. Clarke saw two book manuscripts through press and completed an interactive CD-ROM that he began in 1997. Two book chapters, one article, and a book review appeared, with six completed articles and book reviews in press.

Clarke refined the text, produced final illustrations, and copyedited Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 B.C.–A.D. 250, due out from the University of California Press in November 2007. As it turned out, tight production schedules required Clarke to perform these same tasks—nearly simultaneously—for Roman Life, 100 B.C.–A.D. 200.

Unlike Looking at Lovemaking, a scholarly book concerned with the intersection of humor and social class, Roman Life is aimed at a broad audience. It re-creates the lives and experiences of people through fictional stories about individuals known from archaeological and inscriptional evidence. Whereas the stories follow these individuals in thematic chapters (religion, work, entertainment, bathing, military life, banquets, funerals), discursive captions in boxes provide factual background on the various facets of Roman life and culture.

Roman Life is lavishly illustrated with 144 images, most in color. A special feature is a CD-ROM, The House of the Vettii at Pompeii: An Interactive Visit, that will be bundled with the book. Because of changes in software and operating systems, Clarke had to rewrite the entire CD (originally completed in 2002) with the help of UT's Center for Instructional Technologies. Although it is stand-alone, The House of the Vettii amplifies the chapter of Roman Life on the culture of the ancient house. Users assume roles (servant, client, visitor, family member) to explore the house and the meanings of its complex mythological paintings in increasing depth.

Clarke lectured extensively on a variety of subjects. He was keynote speaker for two symposiums: one, at Helsinki Technical University, on Space in Architecture; the other, at the University of Oregon, on the Body in Visual Culture. Clarke also presented a model for the production and reception of visual art in ancient Rome for a symposium on Art and Social Class at New Paltz University. He gave several papers related to ongoing excavations and study of the Roman Villa of Oplontis, including a report at the International Congress on New Research in the Area of Vesuvius, sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Culture. In May and June he rejoined the Oplontis Project team for a second season of research and excavation, directing work on the mosaics and wall paintings of Villa A.

Clarke received a Faculty Research Award for the spring of 2008, when he will reside in Italy working full time on the Oplontis Project. The goal is to complete his chapters on the wall paintings and mosaics for the final publication of Villa A; he will also begin editing the contributions of the project collaborators.

PENELOPE DAVIES
In 2006–2007, Penelope Davies organised a session titled “Italian Politics and Architectural Production” and gave a paper at the Second International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, University of Granada. She also gave a paper at Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease and Hygiene in Rome from Antiquity to Modernity, a conference at the British School at Rome. She published two essays, “The Personal and the Political in Classical Archaeology” in Blackwell's Guide to Classical Archaeology, edited by Susan Alcock and Robin Osborne (Blackwell's Press, Oxford), and “Exploring the International Arena: The Tarquins' Aspirations for the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus,” in The Proceedings of XVIth Conference of the International Association of Classical Archaeology, Harvard University, August 2003. She continued research on a book on the art and architecture of the Roman Republic, under contract with Cambridge University Press. She also worked on the first seven chapters of Janson's Basic History of Art (Prehistoric through Roman). She received the Hugh Last Fellowship from The British School at Rome, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, an American Philosophical Society Sabbatical Fellowship, a UT Faculty Research Assignment for 2007-2009, and an Art History Faculty Travel and Research Fellowship. Davies's teaching was recognized with a Department of Art & Art History Teaching Excellence Award.

JULIA GUERNSEY
Julia Guernsey continues to pursue research on the Preclassic period (1500 BC – AD 250) in ancient Mesoamerica. Her book, Ritual and Power in Stone: The Performance of Rulership in Mesoamerican Izapan-Style Art, was published by the University of Texas Press in 2006, and focuses on the political and cosmological significance of Late Preclassic, Izapan-style stone monuments and their context. She also continues to work as the project iconographer for the La Blanca archaeological project, an Olmec-period site that flourished between 900–600 BC along the Pacific slope of Guatemala. An article on the recent discovery of an important monument at La Blanca is in press in a co-authored article in Antiquity, and will also appear in the proceedings of the national archaeological symposium in Guatemala, XIX Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2005. Detailed analysis of the discovery and 2004-2006 field seasons also appears in a grantee report submitted to the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc., available online at www.famsi.org. Other forthcoming publications include “Estilo y sociedad en el Preclásico de la costa del Pacífico,” in Memorias de la Segunda Mesa Redonda Olmeca (INAH: Mexico City) and a special co-edited edition of the journal Ancient America, entitled “Sacred Bindings of the Cosmos: Ritual Acts of Bundling and Wrapping in Ancient Mesoamerica.” Guernsey also presented papers in 2006 and 2007 at the XXI Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala held in the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología de Guatemala, at the Museo Popol Vuh in Guatemala City, at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, at the 25th Annual Maya Weekend at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and at the 52nd International Congress of Americanists, Sevilla, Spain.

LINDA HENDERSON
During 2006-2007 Linda Henderson continued her research and writing toward the completion of her 300-page text, “Reintroduction: The Fourth Dimension Through the 20th Century.” This book-length essay will accompany the MIT reprint of her book The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. She has also begun work on an exhibition for the Blanton Museum of Art to be staged in fall 2008 titled “Refiguring the 1960s: The Park Place Gallery Group, New York 1963–67.” Her publications for the year include the essay “Space, Time, and Space-Time: The Changing Identities of the Fourth Dimension in Twentieth-Century Art,” in the Berkeley Art Museum catalog Measure of Time (2007) and an essay on “Modernism and Science,” for the collection Modernism, produced by the International Comparative Literature Association (John Benjamins, 2007).

Henderson spoke at a number of venues, beginning with a September 2006 lecture at the Berkeley Art Museum's Measure of Time exhibition and a roundtable discussion at the Whitney Museum's fall 2006 exhibition Albers and Moholy-Nagy. In October she gave the invited Misher Lecture at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia and participated in the symposium “In the Mind's Eye: Visions of Higher Dimensions in Art, Math and Science.” At the November 2006 conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, she spoke on “The Ether, the Fourth Dimension, and Cubist Painting” and at the College Art Association's February 2007 meeting she participated in a session on Art and the Mathematical Instinct, with a paper on The Spatial ‘Fourth Dimension' versus Space-Time at Mid-Century: Stuart Davis, Marcel Duchamp, and Robert Smithson.” In later spring she served as a respondent at the University of Texas symposium Guernica and After: The Power of Representation, organized by visiting Harrington Fellow Andrea Giunta. Finally, she gave keynote addresses at two European conferences. At the first, “Ultravision,” in Berlin in March 2007 she spoke on “Objects of ‘;Ultravision: The Fourth Dimension and the Ether of Space.’” At the second conference, “Utopianism in the Sciences” sponsored by the University of Groningen in May 2007, she lectured on “The Fourth Dimension as a Sign of Utopia from Charles Howard Hinton to Buckminster Fuller.”

JOAN A. HOLLADAY
On the basis of grant proposals that Professor Holladay wrote, the International Center of Medieval Art was awarded grants totaling $480,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Getty Foundation for Gothic Sculpture in America, III: The Museums of New York and Pennsylvania. With Professor Susan Ward of the Rhode Island School of Design, Holladay will coordinate and edit this volume of about 400 entries written by twenty authors. She was a contributing author on the first two volumes, which inventoried Gothic sculpture in New England and the Midwest. Dr. Holladay delivered papers related to the book she is currently finishing and other projects at institutions from North Texas State University to the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. She finished her second and final three-year term as book review editor for art history for Speculum and was named to the newly formed Forward-Looking Committee for the International Center of Medieval Art.

JANICE LEOSHKO
Leoshko reports the most striking event of 2006–07 for her may have been organizing and chairing a panel for the 2007 CAA on “Ruins.” This panel attempted to look at different ways ruins have been used. The presenters' were invited to address topics touching upon the following questions: Who has the right to interpret, manage and “restore” ruins? What knowledge about the past determines whoweilds that authority? What conservation measures or other transformations have been imposedupon monuments perceived as “lying in ruins”? How have thosetransformations reshaped those monuments? When has viewerreception treasured the ruined state?

Questions like these continue to be a central focus of my investigations with respect to the place where the Buddha is supposed to have achieved enlightenment in India, the site of Bodhgaya. For the CAA panel, I and my co-chair Padma Kaimal were quite taken aback by the large number of submitted papers (39 altogether!). At the meeting, it was clear that the topic is a central one for many young and established scholars. This was evident during the extremely interesting discussion after the five presentations.The participants in this successful panelwere strongly encouraged to submit their papers for a collective publication. This verifies the importance of the past for understanding the present as well as the need to consider many perspectives. Indeed, I find this a fruitful perspective for many topics, e.g. an article of mine now in press“Assessing Evidence of Asokan-period Art,” in a volume of conference papers entitled Asoka in History and Historical Memory.

NASSOS PAPALEXANDROU
Papalexandrou's results of his 1999–2005 exploration of a large public building (perhaps a palace) at Polis tis Chrysochou, Cyprus (ancient kingdom of Marion/Arsinoe) appeared in “A Cypro-Archaic Public Building at Polis tis Chrysochou: First Preliminary Report” Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus 2006, published in December 2006. In summer 2006 Papalexandrou spent a month expanding further the excavation of this unique find while a study season in June 2007 enabled him to oversee conservation and study the finds of the 2006 season. These will be published in a second report, currently under preparation, in the Report of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus 2008. In 2007 Papalexandrou published one more article (“Constructed Landscapes: Visual Cultures of Violent Contact” Stanford Journal of Archaeology 5 (2007), in which he focuses on the interplay of the past and the present in monumental configurations of contemporary landscapes in Crete and Cyprus.

During a departmental research leave in spring 2007 Papalexandrou continued research and writing of his two book-length projects (Monsters, Fear, and the Uncanny in Early Greece, Shaping a Theory of Vision in Orality). In summer 2007 he conducted research in numerous museums and collections in Greece. He also started research towards the publication of the Bonham Amphora, a hitherto unpublished specimen of Greek Geometric art at the Sam Rayburn Library and Museum, Bonham, Texas.

In fall 2006 Papalexandrou designed and oversaw with enthusiasm the installation of the collection of Greek Pottery (Athenian black- and red-figure vases, Corinthian and South Italian wares) at the Blanton Museum of Art. The conception behind this installation involves three thematic groups that focus on the “Greek Banquet,” “Vases in the Life and Death of Ancient Greeks,” and “South Italian Vases.” In collaboration with Dr. Rabinowitz of the Classics department he is preparing a graduate seminar to examine further these vases (to be offered in the 2008 spring semester).

GLENN PEERS
Glenn Peers taught a class on Medieval Sicily at the Mediterranean Centre for Art and Sciences in Siracusa, Italy, in spring 2007, as part of UT's Maymester program. The class explores interaction in Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages amongst communities and faiths at Siracusa as expressed and determined by its art and architecture. That interaction amongst pagans, Christians (of various confessions), Jews and Muslims at Siracusa is also the subject of a current research project, on which he delivered a lecture in March at the Netherlands Institute for Academic Studies, Damascus, Syria. During the fall, he gave a lecture at the University of Chicago in memory of Angela Volan. With Charles Barber, he organized a session on the work of Marie-Josá Mondzain, who also came to speak in Austin, as part of the Byzantine Studies Conference in Saint Louis. In January, he took part in a symposium at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, which focused on the “Icons from Sinai” exhibition; he wrote several entries for the catalog. He also took part in a panel at the XXIe Congrès international des Études byzantines, London, England and gave a paper called “Extroverting the Icon: Animated Spaces of the Byzantine Image.”

In 2006–7, articles on philhellenism in Renaissance Europe: “Thinking with Animals: Byzantine Natural History in Sixteenth-Century France,” appeared in Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance and on the subversion of the classical tradition in medieval Byzantium in “Masks, Marriage and the Byzantine Mandylion: Classical Inversions in the Tenth-Century Narratio de translatione Constantinopolitim imaginis Edessenae,” in Intermedialités. Forthcoming articles include “Purposeful Polyvalency: The Stag and Hunter Motif in the Twelfth-/Thirteenth-Century Frescoed Grotto at Kafr Shleiman, Sayyidat Naya, Lebanon,” in Iconographica; “Vision and Community among Christians and Muslims: The Al-Muallaqa Lintel in Its Eighth-Century Context,” in Arte medievale; and “Magic, the Mandylion and the Letter of Abgar: A Fourteenth-Century Amulet Roll in Chicago and New York,” in Intorno al Sacro Volto: Genova, Bisanzio e il Mediterraneo (XI-XIV secolo), ed. G. Wolf, C. Dufour Bozzo and A.R. Calderoni Masetti, Genoa, 2007. Reviews in this past year have been written for Orientalia Christiana Periodica, CAA. Reviews, The Medieval Review and Speculum.

Until October, Peers continues to serve on the boards of the Canadian Institute in Greece and of the Gennadius Library, American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He is the programme chair for the Byzantine Studies Conference to be held at the University of Toronto on October. For the 2007–08 academic year, Peers will be on research leave as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

SUSAN RATHER
Professor Rather began a three-year term as assistant chair for art history this year. She continues her work on Gilbert Stuart, preeminent portraitist of the early Republic, and also completed an essay titled “‘The Limner’: Harry Croswell, Newspaper Politics, and the Portraitist as a Public Figure in the Early Republic,” which will be published in a volume addressing the arts in the new American republic. Rather's contribution analyses an unusual series of fictive letters to the editor, printed over the course of two years in a Federalist weekly published in Hudson, NY. Their author was presumably the editor himself, spurred by his recent trial for libel against President Jefferson. The case provided the legal foundation for modern understanding of freedom of the press and demonstrates the extent to which allegories of the professional practice of portraiture could be effective as a political discourse.

In March 2007, Rather spoke to Texas Exes on “Masterpieces of French Painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1800–1920,” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The program was the inaugural effort of a new program within the Provost's office to engage UT graduates in the humanities.

ANN REYNOLDS
Ann Reynolds' recent publications include “The Problem of Return,” for a book about the Land Arts Program (forthcoming from University of Texas Press, 2008), a long review of the Hélio Oiticica exhibition in Houston for Artforum (Summer 2007), an essay on feminist publics circa 1970 for Witness to Her Art, published by Bard College, an essay on the role of the cinematic imaginary during the 1960s for a volume devoted to the work of Ruth Vollmer, a chapter on minimalism for the Open University, an essay on Nancy Spero's New York subway mosaics for a two-person exhibition at the Baltic, and several essays on Robert Smithson written in conjunction with his recent retrospective. Currently, she is working on a new book-length project tentatively entitled Playtime: Creativity and Community in New York, 1940–1970. Through this study she will address the central formal, theoretical, and social circumstances of the integration of various creative communities in New York during the 1940s through the 1960s. The project will be focused by a number of case studies of the intersections of art world cultures and subcultures, including those identified with specific immigrant communities. She was a Fellow at the Clark Institute in Williamstown, MA during the Fall of 2006, and she held a Dean's Fellowship from the University of Texas during the spring of 2007.

YUN-CHIAHN C. SENA
Yun-Chiahn C. Sena specializes in Chinese art and culture with a focus on the antiquarian movement and literati art and aestheticism after the tenth century. After receiving her Ph.D. in Summer 2007 from the University of Chicago, she joined the faculty of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation, Pursuing Antiquity: Chinese Antiquarianism from the Tenth to the Thirteen Century, examines the Chinese antiquarian movement with a new methodological approach which integrates data from art and literary works, archeological findings, and historical documents. By revealing that Chinese antiquarians focused on the conceptual representation of the past, rather than its material remains, her dissertation establishes a new paradigm in the studies of collecting and antiquarianism unseen in Western cases. Sena's recent study on Kao gu tu and Bo gu tu, the two most important illustrated antiquarian writings produced before the introduction of modern archaeology to China, will appear in Wu Hung, ed. Reinventing the Past: Archaism and Antiquarianism in Chinese Art and Visual Culture in 2008.

Sena is currently working on a project which examines images of ancient ruins in both visual and literary works from the tenth to the fourteenth-century. Focusing on the theme of fangbei, visiting ancient stelae, she argues that, rather than directly depicting actual remains from the past, Chinese antiquarians created the images of ancient ruins by drawing upon historical imagination, personal memories, painting traditions, and their own cultural identity within Chinese society. As a new faculty member specializing in Chinese art, Sena offers courses which were not taught at the University of Texas at Austin before. The subjects of her teaching range from the general survey of Chinese art to her own research on Chinese antiquarianism and literati culture. In addition, she is also interested in teaching theoretical issues of collecting and antiquarianism and the uses of the past in contemporary Chinese art scenes.

RICHARD SHIFF
During the past year or so I've been largely occupied with writings for exhibition catalogues. These have included essays on Cézanne (Walters Art Museum), Johns (Art Institute of Chicago), Pissarro (The Jewish Museum), Seurat (Museum of Modern Art), and Baselitz (Royal Academy, London)—all for exhibitions that will open during the autumn of 2007. I'm now working on another group of exhibition essays for the coming months: Cézanne once again (Philadelphia Museum of Art), Marlene Dumas (LAMOCA and MOMA), Peter Doig (Tate Britain), Joel Shapiro (PaceWildenstein), and Cy Twombly (Tate Modern). A short book titled Doubt is scheduled to appear in October; it discusses tensions that arise when the interpretations proposed by friendly critics differ from the views of the artists they endorse.

CHERISE SMITH
In her second year at the University of Texas at Austin, Professor Smith offered courses in twentieth century African American art and in the History of Photography. She also taught a graduate seminar titled “Historicizing the Politics of Identity.” She continued efforts to recruit and mentor under-represented students in the Department of Art and Art History.

Smith continued work on the manuscript Enacting Others: Identity Performance in Works by Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith which historicizes the politics of identity by looking at how racial, ethnic, and gender identities are negotiated in art. She focuses on Piper's Mythic Being performances (1973–1975) in which she cross-dresses as a black man; Antin's three-week long performance of the fictional black ballerina Eleanora Antinova (1980) and her book Being Antinova (1983); Smith's staged-for-video performance of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (2001) in which she inhabits the identities of twenty-nine characters belonging to different racial, ethnic, gender, and class groups; and Lee's Hip Hop Project (2001) in which the artist infiltrated a community of African Americans and Latinos to which she did not belong, took on the dress and behaviors of members of that group, and then photographed herself ‘in situ.’ She suggests that the artists engage and rely on the logics of boundary-crossings, such as passing, drag, cross-dressing, and minstrelsy, in order to show how identity is negotiated and to demonstrate that identity is not fixed or stable.

Smith's essay “Re-member the Audience: Adrian Piper's Mythic Being Advertisements” was published in a special issue of Art Journal, focusing on alternate modes of art distribution, that she co-edited with Gwen Allen. Smith lectured on Carrie Mae Weems' engagement of Conceptualist practices and history at the “Pictures and Progress” symposium at Duke University. In addition, she gave presentations on Nikki S. Lee at the Collegium of African American Research annual conference as well as on Adrian Piper at the University of Delaware.

She is the primary coordinator of Lectures on the Black Diaspora: Locating the “Universal” in the “Specific” series which hosted visits by the Conceptual artists Adrian Piper and Charles Gaines and the art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw.

JEFFREY CHIPPS SMITH
Jeffrey Smith was on research leave during the 2006–07 academic year. He has received a NEH research fellowship for the spring 2008 semester. He is writing a monograph on Albrecht Dürer, which was commissioned by Phaidon Press of London. Smith's recent publications include The Art of the Goldsmith in late Fifteenth-Century Germany: The Kimbell Virgin and Her Bishop (New Haven, 2006); and essays “Die Kunst des Scheiterns: Albrecht von Brandenburg und das Neue Stift in Halle,” in Thomas Schauerte, ed., Der Kardinal – Albrecht von Brandenburg: Renaissancefürst und Mäzen, Bd. 1 Katalog, exh. cat., Halle, Stiftung Moritzburg – Kunstmuseum des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt (Regensburg, 2006), pp. 17-51 and “Dürer in America,” in Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) – Woodcuts and Engravings: The Dürer Collection of the Foundation of Lower Saxony and the Konrad Liebmann Foundation, Germany, exh. cat., Honolulu Academy of Arts (Honolulu, 2007), pp. 8-14. His public lectures include “The Art of Ambition Thwarted: Albrecht von Brandenburg and the Neues Stift in Halle” at the Universität Bonn and the Universität Heidelberg; “Dürer on the Beach” at the Renaissance Society of America Conference in Miami; “Life in Black and White: Prints of Dürer and Rembrandt” at the Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi; “Panofsky's Dürer” at the symposium Dürer, l'Italia e l'Europa sponsored by the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome; “Nuremberg and the Topographies of Expectation” at the symposium Positionen zur deutschen Kunst um 1500 im internationalen Vergleich at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie; “Dürer and Sculpture; Dürer as Sculpture” at the Skulpturensammlung (Bode Museum) in Berlin and at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich; and “The ‘Invention' of Dürer as a Renaissance Artist” at the Renaissance? Perceptions of Continuity and Discontinuity in Europe, c. 1300–c. 1550 at the University of Edinburgh. Among other professional activities, Smith currently serves on the boards of the Renaissance Society of America and the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference.

DAVID STUART
Over the past year Stuart focused on several writing projects, the most important being a book manuscript submitted in April to Thames and Hudson on the Maya ruins of Palenque Mexico. This will be a “popular” book, meant to be accessible to a wide range of informed students, colleagues, and even visitors to the site. The press seems to move slowly, but Stuart hopes the book will be out in the spring or summer of 2008. Stuart has also been working on a number of smaller endeavors, perhaps the most interesting being a lengthy co-authored study on the early murals of San Bartolo, Guatemala. That work also produced an article published in Science in 2006, reporting on the earliest firmly dated examples of Maya hieroglyphs so far discovered (ca. 300 B.C.). A new book project is currently in the works, on the nature and representation of time in Maya art and political ideology.

Among the lectures Stuart presented was an invited talk at the European Maya Conference in Malmo, Sweden, last December, as well as an annual endowed lecture hosted by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Utah, in September, 2006. The latter was devoted to the current understanding of the origin of writing systems in Mesoamerica, based in part on Stuart's collaborations with the San Bartolo project.

Stuart's research continues to focus on Maya iconography and hieroglyphs, though these days he often finds himself spread too thin, as discoveries and research in the overall field of Mesoamerican studies continue at a rapid pace. In order to reduce his backlog on publications, Stuart decided to embrace the technological world of “blogging” and in 2007 created his own weblog devoted to Maya glyph studies. He firmly believes that weblogs have great untapped potential in fostering academic communication and discussion.

Within UT's orbit, Stuart continued to work at the complex negotiations involved in establishing the Casa Herrera, an academic and cultural center that the CFA will operate in Antigua, Guatemala. Several trips were made to see the progress on the facility's restoration. It's a stunning place, and it will hopefully prove to be a major component of the department's future activities. Although the Casa will be a magnet for scholars working in Mexico and Central America, it will be open to any member of the department faculty who can make good use of it in research and teaching. Stuart looks forward to working with all Art History colleagues in forming a vision for the facility that can benefit all.

LOUIS WALDMAN
The academic year 2006–2007 saw the publication of seven new essays: “Raffaellino del Garbo and His World: Commissions, Patrons, Associates,” Artibus et Historiae, LIV (2006), pp. 51–94; “Two New Contracts for Niccolò Soggi's Ricciardi Nativity in Arezzo,” Paragone, LVIII, No. 625 (March 2007), pp. 80–88; “The Contract for Andrea Sansovino's Baptism of Christ for the Florentine Baptistery,” The Sculpture Journal, XVI, no. 1 (Spring 2007), pp. 1–5; “‘He Ran Away to Rome and Defrauded the Said Nuns’: Bernardo di Leonardo, Francesco Granacci, and the San Giorgio sulla Costa Altarpiece,” Source, XXVI, no. 1 (2006), pp. 22–26; 60); “Scalabrino a Cerreto Guidi e altrove. Acquisti documentari e qualche nuova attribuzione,” Erba d'Arno, CVI (Autumn 2006), pp. 31–41; “An Unknown Commission of Giovanni della Robbia: The San Basilio Tabernacle for the Florentine Compagnia dello Spirito Santo,” Source, XXVI, no. 2 (2007), pp. 1–8; “New Paintings by Giovambattista del Verrocchio,” Source, XXVI, No. 3 (Spring 2007), pp. 34–39.

Also appearing were a review of the new monograph on Michelangelo by Cristina Acidini (“Il Michelangelo che mancava,” in Il Giornale dell'arte, XXV, No. 263 [March 2007], p. 50) and a review essay on the Leonardo exhibitions all over Europe in 2005-6 (“Leonardo da Vinci: Florence, London, Oxford, and Munich,” in The Burlington Magazine, CXLIX, No. 1249 [2007], pp. 283–286).

During the academic year 2007–8 Prof. Waldman is on leave from UT and is in Florence, where he holds a one-year position as Assistant Director at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

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