Our medievalists had so much fun at the Graduate Association of Medieval Studies book club event this October! We read Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon, a swashbuckling story of two unlikely friends set in about 1000 CE. Thanks to all who came to take part in our lively discussion!
Congratulations to PhD candidate in medieval art Alexandra Kaczenski on Word as Image, the exhibition she has curated for the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California! The show is on view through February 5, 2024. Word as Image, presented in the Museum’s focus gallery, highlights artworks from the Norton Simon collections that center on or subvert the idea that a text’s legibility is essential for making meaning. Spanning the comical to the political to the conceptual, Word as Image calls our attention to how we are constantly “reading the image” in and out of museum spaces. As such, artists challenge us to consider language and image anew, by positioning words as an essential part of visual culture.
Last week, students in Prof. Gertsman’s and Dr. Lutz’s Mellon collections seminar, were led by Prof. David Rothenberg (Music) in singing Salve Sancta Parens directly from the late medieval Italian gradual, where the initial letter “S” for “Salve” encloses a stunning image of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary. Listen to them here!
If you’ve spent any time in a professional small-talk setting, you know how often art comes up and how hard it can be to fumble for a response in front of your future boss. This workshop, Art Appreciation for New Professionals, taught by first-year Master’s student Sarah Frisbie, is designed for people who have no idea what is happening when they walk into a museum—and people who avoid museums altogether.
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.
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.
