Congratulations to PhD Alumnus Michael Yonan, Professor of Art History at the University of Missouri, on the recent publication of Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art, ed. Stacey Sloboda and Michael Yonan (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019). While the connected, international character of today’s art world is well known, the eighteenth century too had a global art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds is the first book to attempt a map of the global art world of the eighteenth century. Fourteen essays from a distinguished group of scholars explore both cross-cultural connections and local specificities of art production and consumption in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The result is an account of a series of interconnected and asymmetrical art worlds that were well developed in the eighteenth century.

Michael was also a visiting guest professor in the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University, in Stockholm, Sweden in Spring 2019 and will be returning there for Spring 2020.

Michelle P. Brown’s Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts, originally published in 1994 and a standard English-language reference work on the terminology associated with the study of European illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, has been published in a new edition revised by Elizabeth C. Teviotdale (PhD, 1991) and Nancy K. Turner. The text of the original edition has been substantially revised and new terms have been introduced relating to the emerging science of the study of materials in manuscripts. The text has also been updated to better conform with contemporary usage. An entirely new suite of color images—mostly from Getty manuscripts acquired since the original edition was published—illustrates the dictionary-style text, with images accompanying terms that can most benefit from illustration. The new edition has been labeled “essential” by Choice, and Nicholas Herman in The Medieval Review writes: “The authors of this excellent mise-à-jour should be thanked for their contribution to what will remain a standard introductory and reference resource.”

Teviotdale, who was a curator in the Department of Manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum for ten years, has been the Assistant Director of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University since 2002. Her other publications include The Stammheim Missal (2001) and Das Sakramentar von Beauvais (2011).

Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts, revised by Elizabeth C. Teviotdale and Nancy K. Turner

Congratulations to PhD Candidate Jennifer Wu, who was awarded a grant to attend the Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art (SITSA) at the Harvard Art Museums. Along with a cohort of doctoral students in art history, she received object-based training on conservation and technical analyses as well as hands-on experiences with various artistic materials and techniques. The two-week program emphasized interdisciplinary collaboration with conservators, curators, scientists, artists, and art historians in discussions on art-technical history.

Congratulations to Ph.D. Alumnus Michael Yonan on the recent publication of his recent book Messerschmidt’s Character Heads: Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art History. Artsy recently interviewed Michael about Messerschmidt’s weird, grimacing figures and you can read about them here.

Fulfilling Chancellor Folt’s expansive vision for the arts, and in partnership with our wonderful colleagues in Arts Everywhere and Carolina Housing, we hatched our pilot “intramural” arts studio last week. Thank you so much for the various ways you have supported the Morrison Art Studio so far. We have heard incredible excitement from the UNC community regarding the 24/7 access and the no-cost supplies, and only anticipate those numbers to continue growing.

Over the course of the past week alone, we:

• welcomed nearly 500 unique students and campus community members to the studio for a visit;
• signed up nearly 350 unique students and campus community members to our studio listserv;
• led 14 group orientation sessions;
• trained and provided 24/7 access through Housing to 160 students and campus community members!!
• and we are busy planning more sessions and gatherings to continue to bring this opportunity to more and more students and campus community members.

Approximately half of those who have been oriented live in Morrison dorm, with additional usage by students living in most South Campus dorms.

Thanks again to Assistant Professor Lien Truong and Department Chair Carol Magee in Art and Art History, to Allan Blattner and his entire team in Carolina Housing, and to UNC facilities for their leadership, efforts, and enthusiasm. The Morrison Art Studio is the perfect example of strategic partnership at work.

Please feel free to stop by.  We are continuing the studio’s “open door” policy over the next week.  The studio will be during the staffed hours below either by our Artist-in-Residence, first-year MFA studio art student Natalie Strait or two work-study students hired by the Art and Art History department who will be serving as Assistant Studio Managers. Their names are Eden Teichman and Meghan Mcguire, sophomore and first-year students respectively who are already doing a wonderful job of giving orientations and learning the ropes of studio management!

Monday 4 – 9 pm

Tuesday 5:30 – 10 pm

Wednesday 5:30 – 10 pm

Thursday 5:30 – 10 pm

Huge thanks to Haley Smyser who singlehandedly managed the launch event with grace and skill!

PhD alumna Ann Millett-Gallant is also an artist, and several of her works have been chosen for an exhibition at the National Humanities Center, “Esse Quam Videri.”

August 31–December 15, 2018

Exhibition Reception and Curator Talk: Thursday, September 20, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm

Esse Quam Videri [“To be, rather than to seem”] is an exhibition exploring North Carolina, its history, culture, and landscape, through the lens of disability. There are many experiences which we all share: romantic and familial love, employment, citizenship, education, and caregiving, to name a few. People with disabilities have typically been erased or considered disqualified from these experiences, yet they too participate in them. Following the curatorial theme of the overarching EVERYDAY project, this exhibition will showcase works that tell stories unique to North Carolina, using universal experiences or ideas, but presented in audacious ways—particularly based in the knowledge and creativity that disability brings to them. “To be, rather than to seem”: how can we explore through disability representation and disability aesthetics what disability history, knowledge, and culture is relative to North Carolina?

Works in this exhibit have been selected by jurors Ann M. Fox and Linda Dougherty. Fox and Dougherty will give a talk about the exhibit as part of the exhibition reception on September 20th.

https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/esse-quam-videri/

Congratulations to PhD candidate Ashley Bruckbauer, whose essay “Ambassadors à la turque: Assimilation and Dissimulation in Eighteenth-Century Images of French-Ottoman Diplomacy” was recently published in Tara Zanardi and Lynda Klich, eds., Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices (New York: Routledge, 2019).

Abstract:

Fashion played an essential role in the performance of cultural and political identities in eighteenth-century France. This was especially true in diplomatic exchanges and depictions of diplomatic figures, who represented their king and country abroad. Cultural cross-dressing, or the assumption of foreign attire, complicated this function of costume, however. While art historians have examined cultural cross-dressing in eighteenth-century aristocratic portraiture and representations of masked balls, the ambassador has remained a peripheral figure in studies of the popular phenomenon. This essay situates diplomacy at the center of an analysis of French dressing à la turque, examining paintings of French and Ottoman ambassadors adopting the dress, customs, and accoutrements of their hosts. I analyze how these representations of French-Ottoman diplomacy engage with eighteenth-century diplomatic practices and theories as well as popular conceptions of the ambassador as a social type. Contemporary treatises advised diplomats to act as protean characters, assimilating the manners of their foreign hosts. Simultaneously, critiques of the profession characterized the ambassador’s shape-shifting abilities as signs of his duplicitous nature. I argue that images of diplomacy featuring cultural cross-dressing manifest these contested notions of the ambassador, casting the figure as both a sensitive intermediary and a deceptive performer.

Now an assistant curator of American Art at the Worcester Art Museum, Art History alumna Erin Corrales-Diaz is part of an initiative there to add wall text to portraits that reveal the sitter’s ties to slavery. You can find her comments on the initiative in a recent article from Artnet: https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/worcester-art-museum-slavery-wall-text-1305407

Congratulations to Brantly Moore, who will be traveling to do research in Amsterdam this summer with grant funding from the University of Amsterdam! She will be participating in UA’s Summer Seminar, “Museum Objects as Evidence: Approaches to the Material World,” offered in conjunction with the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Bard Graduate Center.

Hannah Clager is one of two UNC alumni selected as 2018 Thomas R. Pickering Graduate Foreign Affairs Fellows. Recipients of the Pickering Fellowship receive two years of financial support and professional development to prepare them for a career in the U.S. Foreign Service. Fellows also complete a domestic internship at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., and an overseas internship at a U.S. embassy.

Managed and funded by the U.S. Department of State, consideration is given to qualified applicants who have displayed outstanding leadership skills and academic achievement. The fellowship aims to support those historically underrepresented in the U.S. Foreign Service, including women, minority groups and students with financial need.

Hannah Clager, from Lake Worth, Florida, will attend Harvard University this fall to pursue her master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies. Her studies will focus on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and North Africa; human rights and refugee affairs; and cultural diplomacy in the region. Clager earned her bachelor’s degree in 2013 with a major in art history and a minor in African studies. At UNC-Chapel Hill, she completed her art history honors thesis on the 2012 Dakar Biennale after seven months of fieldwork in Dakar, Senegal. She worked as a full-time paralegal for close to three years and then spent 14 months in Morocco as a Fulbright Student Researcher beginning in 2016, where she studied Arabic and completed a case study of the new Mohammed VI Modern and Contemporary Art Museum in Rabat.