We were delighted to host the curatorial talk for the Creation and (Re)Birth Exhibition on November 14 to a full house! Co-curators Prof. Elina Gertsman and Dr. Gerhard Lutz talked about the concept of the exhibition and then focused on specific objects, with the all-important participation from Dr. Sonya Rhee Mace and three PhD students — Zoe Appleby, Rebekkah Hart, and Cecily Hughes. The repeat of the event, this time for the university audience, will take place on January 22.
What divides the animal and the human? Do animals form families? What do images of animals in Hebrew manuscripts signify? Consider these questions and more in this episode of the Multicultural Middle Ages Podcast, sponsored by the Medieval Academy of America and produced by Jonathan Correa-Reyes, Logan Quigley, Will Beattie, Reed O’Mara, and Loren Lee. This episode features Elina Gertsman, David Shyovitz, Julie A. Harris, Sara Offenberg, and Beth Berkowitz in conversation with Reed. Click on the link to hear the episode on the Multicultural Middle Ages website or click here for the direct link on the podcast’s RSS feed.
The joint program’s exciting projects have been highlighted in the museum’s members’ magazine. Read more here on the current and upcoming exhibitions and the Mellon short-term fellows program!
We are delighted to announce that the exhibition on Creation and (Re)Birth in the Global Middle Ages just opened at the Cleveland Museum of Art. This ambitious show pulls together objects from several museum collections to explore some of the fundamental moments in the sacred narratives of the medieval world. The exhibition, co-curated by Professor Elina Gertsman and Dr. Gerhard Lutz, is a culmination of several years of collaboration between the department’s medieval art program and the CMA, made possible by the support of the Mellon Foundation. Graduate students contributed to wall text, object labels, and the gallery guide. For more on the show, featured already in Cleveland Art Events and This is Cleveland, please see here.
The new issue of Perspective, published by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (Paris), features a debate on the subject, conducted by Claudine Cohen, Brigitte Derlon, Elina Gertsman, Monique Jeudy-Ballini, and Itay Sapir, and led by Thomas Golsenne. Scholars of prehistoric, medieval, early modern, and contemporary art discuss several questions: should we consider art’s autonomy if not illusory, then at least relatively so? When have we started understanding and referring to images and objects as works of art? What are the critiques of this nomination? What are the advantages and disadvantages of speaking about “art” or “a work of art” in different fields of art history? Is art-making always political? What about art criticism?
Read the debate here.
How are objects, scents and memory connected? Find out from Prof. Elina Gertsman’s just-published “Housing Scent, Containing Sensorium,” now available online here! In this special issue of Medieval History Journal, dedicated to materiality in the medieval and early modern eras, Prof. Gertsman writes about extraordinary spice containers used in Jewish home liturgy, teasing out their multisensory potential and exploring the many ways these object elicited cognitive, affective, and physiological engagement with their users. Stay tuned for the next year’s publication of Prof. Gertsman’s guest-edited issue of Convivium dedicated to intertwinement between image and scent in the global Middle Ages, which will feature essays by our very own Sonya Rhie Mace and Reed O’Mara.
Cosmic Ecologies: Animalities in Premodern Jewish Culture, an international symposium co-sponsored by Case Western Reserve University, the Newberry Library, and the Northwestern University, took place in Chicago last week. Monday sessions–“Beastly Hybrids,” “Animal Capacities,” and Mystic Fauna”–broached a broad variety of subjects, from animals in the Kabbalah to zoomorphic allegories to micrographic beasts to animal imagery in Hebrew and Yiddish manuscripts–with respondents providing contextual comparanda from medieval Christian and Islamic art. On Tuesday, audiences were treated to an extended session on bodies and animalities as well as to a manuscript / rare book study at the Newberry; the symposium concluded with a roundtable. The joint program was robustly represented by Reed O'Mara, who gave a fabulous talk on the Ambrosian Tanakh; Prof. Elina Gertsman, who co-organized the symposium and gave closing remarks; and Cecily Hughes, Rebekkah Hart, Zoe Appleby, Claudia Haines, Sarah Frisbie, and Ariella Har-Even who were in the audience. Prof. Gertsman was delighted by a surprise visit from Roshi Ahmadian, her very first MA student at CWRU, who now lives and works in Chicago!
