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.
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.
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.