Tag Archives: History of Art

Conferences and Presentations, Current Students

Shannon Steiner (History of Art) presents at 40th Annual Byzantine Studies Conference

Symeon_Menologion of Basil II

Shannon Steiner, Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art, recently presented at the 40th Annual Byzantine Studies Conference, held at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver BC, from November 6-9, 2014.

She was invited to participate in the session “Two Columns and a Stylite,” organized by Dr. Robert G. Ousterhout of the University of Pennsylvania. Her paper, titled “Pillars of the Community: Stylites as Architecture,” explored representations of stylite saints (early christian monks who lived their lives on top of columns) that either showed the saints with architectural features or that were executed directly on architectural elements like columns or piers. She contextualized these images in the common Byzantine understanding of architecture as a metaphor for community and argued that stylite saints purposefully merged their bodies with architecture in order to become monumental rallying points for new Christian communities.

Above is an image of one of the painted miniatures from the Menologion of Basil II.

Uncategorized

Prof. Lisa Saltzman (History of Art) delivers keynote address at UCLA Art History Graduate Student Symposium

Paola Nogueras Nov 2008

Professor Lisa Saltzman will deliver the keynote address at the 48th Annual UCLA Art History Graduate Student Association Symposium. This year’s conference is on the the theme of “(re)mediation” and invites papers from graduate students exploring themes of remedy, reworking, or reuse as well as questions of artistic medium and attendant technology.

Professor Saltzman will present research from her new book about the “afterlife” of photography in contemporary culture, Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects, forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press.

Current Students, Uncategorized

Lori Felton (PhD candidate, History of Art) publishes essay on Egon Schiele

A new exhibition of works by the famous Austrian artist Egon Schiele has just opened at the Neue Galerie in New York. “Egon Schiele: Portraits” is the first exhibition to focus exclusively on the enigmatic and distinctive portraiture of the artist; it was organized by Schiele scholar Dr. Alessandra Comini.

Bryn Mawr PhD candidate Lori Felton penned an essay for the exhibition catalogue, entitled “Seeing the Self-Seers: The Viewer’s Role in Egon Schiele’s Early Double Self-Portraiture.”

The exhibition is on view now through January 19, 2015.

 

Current Students

Summer Internship Spotlight: Mechella Yezernitskaya

Yezernitskaya_intern_photo-sm

This past summer, Mechella Yezernitskaya (History of Art) was the Thomas Walther Collection Research intern in the Photography and Conservation departments at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Above she can be seen studying a Roman Karmen photograph, entitled Moscow Illuminations Celebrating the Tenth Anniversary of the Russian Revolution (1927), in the Photo and Paper Conservation lab at the museum.

Current Students, Outside Awards

Summer Internship Spotlight: Michelle Smiley

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

This summer, Michelle Smiley served as a graduate student intern at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where she worked in the department of photography under curator Diane Waggoner. Michelle spent much of her time doing research for an upcoming exhibit of nineteenth-century photography on the east coast of the United States, titled “East of the Mississippi” (forthcoming, fall 2016). In particular, she researched individual photographers like William Herman Rau, a photographer for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Henry Peter Bosse, a German-American photographer who served in the United States Corps of Engineers out of Rock Island, Illinois. Bosse photographed the development of the Mississppi in the 1880s and 1890s.

Above, Michelle can be seen cataloguing one of the twenty Bosse cyanotypes given to the National Gallery of Art. These are all part of the series “Views on the Mississippi River” which were displayed as an album at the 1893-94 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.

The prestigious internship program at the National Gallery of Art also includes bi-weekly seminars that introduce the interns to all aspects of museum work, from library image collections, to curatorial, to the director’s office.