The joint program’s exciting projects have been highlighted in the museum’s members’ magazine. Read more here on the current and upcoming exhibitions and the Mellon short-term fellows program!
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Recently, PhD candidates in medieval art Sam Truman and Reed O’Mara attended the opening of Lumen: The Art and Science of Light at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles! This expansive show explores the role of light in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam across the long Middle Ages. Sam worked on the show and the accompanying catalogue when she was an intern in the Getty’s medieval manuscripts department—the very same department where Reed finds herself as an intern this year! The catalogue includes Prof. Gertsman’s essay on medieval concepts of darkness.
Join us for the talk co-sponsored by the Department of Art History & Art and the Expanding Horizons Initiative on September 25 at 5 PM. Dr. Scott D. Miller, a specialist in Burgundian art, will speak about visual and material culture of late medieval itinerant courts — a fantastic and fantastically understudied topic! Dr. Miller’s visit to CWRU is part of the EHI grant supporting Prof. Elina Gertsman’s work with the Interactive Commons that aims to build a set of immersive multisensory environments.
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!
Congratulations, Susana! Susana's exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, "Fairy Tales and Fables: Illustrations and Storytelling in Art," received a rave review in the New York Times by the art critic Will Heinrich. Catch Susana's show, which is still on view through September 8th!
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!
Congratulations to Professor Henry Adams, who just published a new book on the architecture and travel drawings of his older brother, Douglas Adams. Additionally, be on the lookout for his recent article in the American Art Review on the Wyoming artist Harry Jackson, who at various times was a...
Congratulations to Marina Mandrikova on being selected for two highly prestigious fellowships! The Council of the American Overseas Research Centers named Marina a recipient of the Multi-Country Research Fellowship, funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. This fellowship supports advanced research in the humanities and...
AFTERLIVES AND LEGACIES / INTERVENTIONS IN MEDIEVAL HEBREW MANUSCRIPTS
MONDAY 1 JULY 2024
From Ashkenaz to Italy: The Giant Masoretic Bible in the Berio Civic Library of Genoa
Ilona Steimann, Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg
Andalusi Prestige and Magical Migration: The Ritual and Diasporic Legacy of the Sefer Ahavat
Sara Gardner, Department of Spanish...
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.