College of Arts and Sciences

Please join us in congratulating doctoral candidate Jillian Kruse and Dr. Britany Salsbury, Curator of Prints & Drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art and CWRU alumna (BA Art History and English), on the opening of the exhibition Degas and the Laundress! On view in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Gallery of the CMA until January 14, the exhibition is the first to explore Impressionist artist Edgar Degas’s representations of Parisian laundresses, as well as to place this important series in context with paintings, drawings, and prints of the same subject by the artist’s contemporaries.

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This summer, third-year PhD students Clara Pinchbeck and Arielle Suskin were accepted to be part of the American Excavations at Samothrace team. They traveled to Athens and scoped out the Acropolis, found Arielle’s favorite vase fragments in the Acropolis Museum, then landed in Samothrace, land of the ancient sanctuary and many goats.

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Students in the Graduate Association of Medieval Studies (GAMS) had a fantastic time at the first GAMS event of the semester last night—Pizza and Movie Night (with nothing less than Monty Python and the Holy Grail playing)! Lots of laughs and discussion among our medievalists, musicologists, and more. We're...

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In July PhD Candidate Jillian Kruse had the amazing opportunity to take part in the Association of Print Scholars Intaglio Printmaking Workshop for Early Career Curators and Scholars funded by the Getty Paper Project. Over the course of five days, participants learned about various intaglio printmaking methods and made their...

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Congratulations to Sam Truman on the opening of the exhibition Graphic Design in the Middle Ages (https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/manuscript_design/)! The show explores the role of graphic design in the making of medieval manuscripts and considers how visual elements guided the ways readers experienced their books. Sam contributed to the exhibition under the...

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Cecily Hughes, a second-year doctoral student in the department of Art History and Art studying with Professor Elina Gertsman, was surprised and delighted to learn that a painting she researched and wrote about for a private dealer had just been purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Bélizaire and the Frey Children,” was painted in 1837 and attributed to the painter Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans (c.1801-1888). The New York Times ran a short video feature on the acquisition and the painting’s vexed history, a tale of the erasure and rediscovery of a Black enslaved person. While the likeness of a young Black man was featured in the original canvas, it was then painted out, only to be uncovered through later conservation. Now identified as the fifteen-year-old Bélizaire (b.1822–d. after 1860), the sitter was an enslaved domestic purchased by Frederick Frey of New Orleans, Louisiana on 16 February, 1828. Read an excerpt from Cecily’s report by clicking below.

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The most recent issue of the news bulletin published by the International Center of Medieval Art has a plethora of features penned by our grad students! Claudia Haines writes about her ICMA-sponsored session, “Digital Medievalism,” at the 2023 Association for Art History Annual Conference at University College London (pp. 15-16). Rebekkah Hart offers an astute review of Riemenschneider and Late Medieval Alabaster exhibition, which just closed at the Cleveland Museum of Art (pp. 51-54). And Cecily Hughes, Reed O’Mara, Sam Truman, and Angie Verduci celebrate Prof. Gertsman’s Award for Excellence in Teaching Medieval Studies in a simultaneously heartfelt and hilarious reflection on her pedagogy and mentorship (pp. 41-43). Read these excerpts here.

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Please join us at 4:30 on Thursday, February 16, at the Baker-Nord Center (Clark Hall Room 206, 11130 Bellflower Road), for the Graduate Work-in-Progress talk by Reed O’Mara, “Idol Viewing and Idle Viewing: Exploring Erasures in the Munich Rashi.” Reed will discuss one of the earliest extant illuminated Hebrew manuscripts from Europe, the so-called Munich Rashi, copied in Germany in the 1230s for a wealthy Jewish patron. The commentary has an incomplete image cycle and several of its surviving paintings have been partially erased. In her lecture, Reed will consider the manuscript’s images in dialogue, addressing the way that the erasures wrought upon these images may have affected medieval viewers, and their perception of both the divine and images of the divine.

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This January, Cecily Hughes, first-year PhD student in medieval art, was able to experience Brought to Life: Painted Wood Sculpture from Europe, 1300–1700 (at SCMA from September 16, 2022–August 6, 2023). She spent the summer of 2021 contributing to the exhibition as a curatorial intern to Danielle Carrabino. The...

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