Professors Gertsman and Benay Finalists for 2023-2024 John S. Diekhoff Award

Congratulations to professors Elina Gertsman and Erin Benay, who have been selected as finalists for the 2023-2024 John S. Diekhoff Award for Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring/Teaching. The award, created in 1978, recognizes exceptional contributions to graduate student education at CWRU through exemplary advising, teaching, and mentoring.  Up to four...

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Fuse: Museum to Studio Connections

On January 27th, CWRU graduate students and faculty joined Cleveland Museum of Art curators and conservators at the Cleveland Institute of Art to learn about champlevé enamel from Cleveland-based contemporary jeweler and enamelist Ariella Har-Even firsthand. This initiative was coordinated by Ariella and Reed O’Mara, a PhD candidate in...

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This weekend, Rebekkah Hart, second-year PhD student in medieval art, presented a talk entitled “The Lithic and the Liquid in the Virgin’s Womb” at the 2024 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference in Premodern Studies at the Newberry Library. Her talk focuses on Tilman Riemenschneider’s The Virgin of the Annunciation (c....

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GAMS is delighted to announce its schedule of exciting February events! First, we will meet on Friday, Feb. 9 at 1:30 PM in Ingalls Library (Floor 2R of the Cleveland Museum of Art) to look at some amazing facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, including examples of Haggadahs, bestiaries, books of hours, Islamic manuscripts,...

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Throughout the Middle Ages, affluent women expressed their social and political power as well as their piety by commissioning luxurious art objects. Sam Truman, PhD student in medieval art, just published an article in the Getty’s News and Stories, where she explores images of these women in a broad variety of medieval manuscripts. Read it here!

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Fuse: Museum to Studio Connections is a group founded by Ariella Har-Even and me that aims to bring art historians, artists, and the institutions they work at together through workshops, collaborations, and close-looking sessions. As a part of our first series, we will be hosting an enameling workshop on January 27th, 2024...

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Our Favorite Things with PhD Student Tess Artis!

Our Favorite Thing for today is the CMA’s Sculpture of Christ and Saint John the Evangelist (c. 1300)! 🦅Tess Artis is a first year doctoral student studying medieval art with Professor Elina Gertsman.
 
“I love medieval devotional art because it was made to be loved. Today, we show our respect for this sculpture of Christ and Saint John the Evangelist (c. 1300) by preserving it behind a transparent barrier; we are close, yet removed. But we only need to look at the figures’ toes, some of which have been kissed, rubbed, and grabbed into obsolescence, to see that this object has been cherished more intimately.”

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Our Favorite Things with PhD Student Claudia Haines!

Our Favorite Thing for today is The Hours of Isabella the Catholic, Queen of Spain (1963.256)! 📖 Claudia Haines is a first-year student in the Art History PhD program, studying medieval art under Professor Elina Gertsman.
 
“Books of hours are often deemed the ‘bestsellers’ of the Middle Ages: these often richly illustrated books contain the series of prayers recited by medieval Christians at various points throughout the day, and were so widely popular that thousands of examples survive to this day, including several now in the collection of The Cleveland Museum of Art. This fifteenth-century book of hours—the Hours of Queen Isabella the Catholic—is a particularly luxurious example, and was made by a Flemish artist for the Queen of Spain. She likely would have used it as part of her private daily devotions.”

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