It was a true privilege to shepherd the department during this academic year. Despite all the complexities, we have accomplished astonishing things!
Our graduate students have garnered a great set of awards and fellowships, both external and internal. Among the major external fellowships are those from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Some students received important travel grants: from the College Art Association (CAA), the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Historians of German, Scandinavian and Central European Art. In addition to the recipients of the departmental Friends of Art awards, we had a tremendous roster of Graduate School Awards winners who got the Pancoast Memorial Fellowship, two Graduate Dean’s Instructional Excellence Awards, and the Barber Moon award. Our graduate students have also presented and organized sessions at a series of important conferences held by the CAA, the Medieval Academy of America (MAA), the American School of Classical Studies, the Archaeological Institute of America, the Newberry Library, the American Numismatic Society, the Renaissance Society of America (RSA), and the Congress of Nordic Historians, to name just a small fraction—and at the MAA, one was awarded the best student paper prize! The International Congress on Medieval Studies was veritably dominated this May by our graduate students and alumni! They have also published in top-tier peer-reviewed journals, in art magazines, in edited volumes, and in exhibition catalogues. Their professional development opportunities have ranged from curating exhibitions at the Getty and the Cleveland Museum of Art to studying textile conservation in Lyon. A special shoutout to Alexandra Kaszenski on her curatorial appointment at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and to Ben Levy on his at the Eskenazi Museum of Art. On May 19-20, an incredibly successful international conference on the long lives of medieval Jewish art took place in London: it was co-organized by one of our PhD students, Reed O’Mara, and several of our graduate students headed to England to chair and moderate sessions. Congratulations to our five MA graduates, one of whom will be continuing her PhD studies with us, and to our BA graduates, some of whom will be going on to graduate work in art history and anthropology!
Our art history faculty have similarly garnered a great set of grants and awards, both global—from the National Endowment for the Humanities—and local (from the Baker-Nord Institute), and secured several Expanding Horizons grants, large and small. They have published in a broad range of peer-reviewed journals, art magazines, and edited volumes, had co-curated exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and had books, exhibition catalogues, and edited collections come out (or imminently coming out!): on the worlds of Byzantium, on abstraction in medieval art, on the Karamu artists, and on scent and sensorium in the global Middle Ages. They have also co-organized high-profile international symposia and workshops: Africa and Byzantium at the Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC; Three-Dimensional Experiences of Ancient Environments at the School of Classical Studies in Athens; and Séminaire Abstraction at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris. They have been invited to speak at a great number of international conferences—in France, in the UK, in Greece, in Colombia – and, nationally, at the Universities of Chicago, Notre Dame, and Minnesota; they have participated in and organized sessions at the annual meetings of the CAA, the MAA, and the RSA; and spoke in several local Cleveland venues: at the Cinémateque, the Public Library, and, of course, at the CMA. Our studio artists exhibited their work across the United States, from Cleveland to Denver, from Kentucky to Iowa.
As usual, our Buchanan, Olszewski, and Julius lectures have brought extraordinary scholars to campus; the Graduate Association for Medieval Studies and the Undergraduate Art History Club held a series of fabulous events; and the Cleveland Symposium, which celebrated its 50th anniversary, was an absolute, rousing success.
This year, we were delighted to welcome our professor of global contemporary art, Benjamin Murphy, as well as our new museum studies guru, Indra Lacis, and we are excited to have a new colleague, Rachel Quist, a specialist in medieval Japanese art, join us in the fall. In turn, Barney Taxel will be retiring from teaching at CWRU at the conclusion of this semester, and we are tremendously grateful for his years of service to the Art Studio program.
I also want to acknowledge CMA’s curators, conservators, librarians, administrators, and our colleagues in education and academic engagement for their boundless support.
I hope you have a wonderful conclusion to this academic year and a glorious start to this summer!
Graduation:
Spring Party:
