We are delighted to announce that Alex Kaczenski, a doctoral candidate in medieval art, just started her new position as the Assistant Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art! Alex joins LACMA from the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, where she has been a curatorial assistant. LACMA’s vast European painting collection comprises works ranging from the twelfth to the early twentieth century. In her role as Assistant Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, Alex will be responsible for collection research and development through exhibitions, publications, and acquisitions.
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.
Reed O’Mara, a PhD candidate in medieval art, was featured in the @cwruartsci monthly newsletter. Mellon Fellow and now a curatorial intern at the Getty, Reed recounts a fabulous summer filled with research and conference travel, and funded, in part, by the International Center of Medieval Art and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. See more here!
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.
Congratulations to Sarah Frisbie who has been selected to receive a SECAC Gulnar Bosch Travel Award. The award will serve to support her travels to the SECAC 2024 conference this October. The Gulnar Bosch Travel Award recognizes merit and emerging scholarship in art, design, and art history. Well done, Sarah!
Both as a physical dimension and a subjective concept, time defines human existence and experience, evident in visual production across eras and places. Held in partnership with the Cleveland Museum of Art as part of the joint program between CWRU and CMA, this year’s symposium welcomes innovative research papers that explore the themes of time and temporality in the creation, reception, and afterlives of objects and events in the visual arts. Submissions may explore aspects of this theme as manifested in any medium as well as in any historical period and geographic location.
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!