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!
This academic year, the Department will be particularly well represented at the International Congress! Take a look at the program to see Reed O’Mara’s session on Jewish Women in the Middle Ages; Cecily Hughes’s and Rebekkah Hart’s session on Scales of Devotion and Embodied Religious Experience, inspired by the directed study they completed last year; Sarah Frisbie’s session on medieval graffiti; and Prof. Gertsman’s session on medieval materialities, fueled by the graduate seminar on the same topic that she recently taught. And, of course, the Interactive Commons will bring our fabulous medieval spaces apps to the Congress as well, the Red Monastery and Immersive Realms. View calls for papers and submit your abstract here!
The CWRU Office of Research and Technology recently featured Prof. Benay’s work in this video! It is the first faculty spotlight to focus on a member of any Humanities department. Prof. Benay has published three books and numerous articles related to global circulation and artistic production in early modern Italy.
We are thrilled to share Prof. Benay’s feature article, published in Panorama, the flagship journal of the Association of Historians of American Art! This essay argues for the central role of the Karamu Artists in the cultivation of a midwestern African American art market from the 1930s-1980 and positions printmaking as a prominent, rather than peripheral, medium in the Black Arts Movement. The Karamu Artists will be the subject of a historic exhibition and catalogue (published by Yale University Press) at the Cleveland Museum of Art in March, 2025. The exhibition will be curated by Professor Benay and Dr. Britany Salsbury, Curator of Prints and Drawings, with the collaboration of CWRU graduate students in a Mellon seminar taught this year.
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.
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.