Congratulations to PhD alumna Carlee Forbes, who recently started her new position as Associate Curator of African and Oceanic Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art!

Congratulations to all of our graduates of the Class of 2024! Here are a few images of the celebrations that were held in the Friday Center in May.

Congratulations to several recent Art History alumni who have been appointed to new positions:

PhD alumna Alex Ziegler will be starting at the University of Wyoming Art Museum as the Curator of Academic Engagement.

PhD alumna Miranda Elston will be starting at Coastal Carolina University with an assistant professorship in their Department of Visual Arts.

MA/MSLS alumna Callie Beattie will be starting a position at the Library of Congress as an archivist in the Rare Book and Special Collections division.

Alice Ann Driscoll passed away peacefully at her home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on December 22, 2023. She was born December 2, 1941, to Daniel J Driscoll and Alice (Root) in Austin, Texas. Her childhood years were spent between Fort Worth and Austin, Texas where her father Dan Driscoll pursued his architectural career. Ann was especially proud of the Austin landmarks that Dan designed with his partner Delmar Groos, among these the Deep Eddy and Barton Springs Bathhouses.

Growing up Ann attended O’Henry Junior High and Austin High, where she served as the vice president of the student council, and was voted Senior Favorite. Ann also pursued a love of riding horses at the Hobby Horse Stables in Austin.

Ann attended University of Texas at Austin where she graduated with a degree in the school of Architecture and was a member of the Pi Beta Phi sorority as well as multiple honor societies. She subsequently became one of the first women to attend law school at the University of Texas.

She married Michael Austin Hatchell on June 26th 1965, and subsequently moved to Tyler, Texas where she raised her two sons while completing her MLA at Southern Methodist University. In Tyler, she was involved in the Junior League, the First Presbyterian Church, and worked as a travel agent. She also traveled extensively internationally, pursuing her interests in art history, Egyptology, photography, language, and opera while attending classes at University of Texas at Tyler and Tyler Junior College. Ann continued on her father’s path by contributing to the architecture and design in building the family home. She later enrolled and finished her M.A. degree at Southern Methodist University in Dallas Texas where she graduated in May 1994 where she was advised by Annemarie Weyl Carr.

Ann moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1994 where she enrolled in the PhD program at University of Chapel Hill, North Carolina under the mentorship of Dr. Jaroslav Folda, where she graduated in 2005. Her dissertation, “Alberto Sotio, 1187, and Spoleto: The Umbrian Painted Cross in Italian Medieval Art” served to promote scholarly and local interest on the most sacred object in Spoleto, Italy. After graduation, Ann continued to pursue her research and teaching. She taught at Meredith College and North Carolina State, and was published in numerous publications including the Cleveland Museum of Art journal. In her later years, she moved from Chapel Hill to Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Ann will be remembered for exemplifying the intellectual curiosity, creativity, and determinism that came from her parents, and also for encouraging those same qualities in her children. Her friends around the world will also remember her “How do you do’s,” and though her lilting Texas accent faded over time with her language studies and travel, her unique charm and grace never faltered even in the midst of the challenges she faced.

Ann is preceded in death by her parents Alice and Dan, and is survived by her two sons and daughters-in-law David Hatchell (Elise) of Oakland, CA; and Chris Hatchell (Kimberly Dukes) of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She is survived as well by her brother Bill Driscoll (Meredith) of Richardson, Texas, and nephews Robert Driscoll, Steven Driscoll (Lindsey), and her special friends Latrelle Peterson from Austin, Texas and Kathy Jo Wetter from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

The family expresses its eternal gratitude to the staff at Methwick Community in Cedar Rapids, for providing exceptional care and comfort over the last 8 years.

A memorial service in honor of Ann’s life will be held at a later time in Austin, Texas. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests memorials be made to Friends of Deep Eddy in Austin Texas, or the Cyprus American Archaeological Institute.

This obituary was published in the Austin American-Statesman on May 13, 2024,

UNC’s website features a wonderful story on Art History PhD Jennifer Wu (2023) about the challenges of being a non-traditional student and commuting back and forth between Chapel Hill and Washington, D.C. while completing graduate school. Read it here: Lifelong learner finds personal renaissance

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Victoria Rovine, professor of art history, as the next director of Carolina Public Humanities. She begins her new role on July 1.

Professor Rovine has been a member of the department of art and art history faculty since 2014, joining the Carolina community after positions at the University of Florida and the University of Iowa. She is also currently director of the UNC African Studies Center, a position she wraps up at the end of this semester.

She has had a long association with Carolina Public Humanities programming, having given a number of lectures and talks on campus and at community colleges that were sponsored by CPH, the University’s public outreach arm for the humanities. The program is one of the many ways UNC serves North Carolina by bringing faculty expertise and resources to partner with communities throughout the state.

Professor Rovine is a scholar of African art, particularly African textiles and dress practices. She has published widely on African fashion designers, contemporary African artists and the representation of Africa in Europe through visual culture. Her public outreach experience began early in her career, when she worked as an educator at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and later as a museum curator at the University of Iowa Museum of Art, where she saw firsthand the value of engagement and partnerships between the academic and public worlds. Her commitment to sharing the value of the humanities as a means of enriching our lives, addressing profound questions and building a stronger democracy could not come at a more important time.

I would like to once more thank Lloyd Kramer, professor of history, for so ably steering Carolina Public Humanities since 2014. The program greatly expanded under his tenure, even during the pandemic. Professor Rovine will find a talented and committed team in place when she begins her new role this summer.

I would also like to thank the members of the search committee, chaired by Christie Norris, director of Carolina K-12, for their efforts: Sarah Geer, CPH Advisory Board Chair; Eric Linwood Johnson, CPH Advisory Board Member; Herica Valladares, Associate Professor, Classics; and Alex Worsnip, Associate Professor, Philosophy.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt

Senior Associate Dean for Fine Arts and Humanities

Kenan Eminent Professor of Southern Studies

College of Arts and Sciences

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Congratulations to the following Department of Art and Art History students who were inducted into Phi Beta Kappa this spring:

Isabelle Lilly Anderson, art history minor
Louise Celeste Covington, art history minor
Lauren Ashley Flach, art history minor
Lauren Sage Guillemette, studio art major
Andrew Robert Knotts, studio art major
Sydney Kates Martin, studio art major
Toni-Ann Ocloo, studio art minor
Glorianna R Tarlton, studio art minor

Congratulations to PhD Alumnus Daniel Ackermann, who has just been named director of Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, the house museum for American decorative arts at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.  You can find the full announcement at https://www.mfah.org/press/mfah-appoints-daniel-kurt-ackermann-director-bayou-bend-collection-gardens. Daniel was previously the curator for the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem.

Congratulations to Emily DuVall, who represented the department at the Middle Atlantic Symposium (co-sponsored by CASVA, the National Gallery of Art, and the University of Maryland) this past weekend of March 1-2, 2024. Emily’s talk, “Visualizing Power: François Ier’s Royal Entries,” presented new research that resulted from travel to France in the Fall of 2023, funded by a Stephens Family Award. Her advisor Tania String was also in attendance to introduce her talk and photographed Emily in action at the Symposium.

The Florida State University Art History faculty and graduate students will host the 40th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium on March 1–2, 2024, on their main campus in Tallahassee, FL.

Rachel Ciampoli will be presenting on “‘The Indigenous Posey of the Soil:’ Eastman Johnson’s Maple Sugar Paintings and the Aesthetics of Erasure.”

Between 1861 and 1865, American genre painter Eastman Johnson produced roughly twenty-five oil sketches in preparation for an ultimately unfinished master work depicting New Englanders engaged in the harvest and production of maple sugar. Although hailed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a potential domestic cash crop and a wholesome foil to the unsavory politics of cane sugar production, northeastern maple sugar was entangled in contentious Indigenous-settler relationships. Using Sara Ahmed’s theory of “stickiness” as a framework, I argue that Johnson’s sentimental and homogenously White characterization of maple sugaring should be understood in light of the erasure of Native American cultural practices and Johnson’s own relationship to Indigenous communities. Recovering Indigenous associations with the practice of maple sugaring engages in the very process of untangling— perhaps unsticking—historical assumptions and perpetuated myths and undermines the integrity of a single-origin narrative, thereby complicating typical expectations of place and people.

Sydney Herrick will be presenting on “Breaking Chains, Forging Beauty: Redefining African Jewelry Design Through the Artistry of Emefa Cole.”

Within prevailing art historical discourse, contemporary African jewelry remains overlooked, primarily due to long histories of exoticization and jewelry’s association with craft. This paper focuses on the work of British-Ghanian jewelry designer Emefa Cole, examining how her utilization of sticky materials, referential designs, and diverse display methods disrupts these conventional paradigms and position her work as fertile ground for exploring critical theoretical frameworks like Afrofuturism and Black Futurity. This paper positions contemporary African jewelry as a medium ripe for in-depth art historical and theoretical investigation, highlighting a significant void in the field and advocating for a renewed emphasis on jewelry as an autonomous art form capable of enhancing broader understandings of art, culture, and individual expression