We were delighted to host the curatorial talk for the Creation and (Re)Birth Exhibition on November 14 to a full house! Co-curators Prof. Elina Gertsman and Dr. Gerhard Lutz talked about the concept of the exhibition and then focused on specific objects, with the all-important participation from Dr. Sonya Rhee Mace and three PhD students — Zoe Appleby, Rebekkah Hart, and Cecily Hughes. The repeat of the event, this time for the university audience, will take place on January 22.
We are delighted to announce that Alex Kaczenski, a doctoral candidate in medieval art, just started her new position as the Assistant Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art! Alex joins LACMA from the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, where she has been a curatorial assistant. LACMA’s vast European painting collection comprises works ranging from the twelfth to the early twentieth century. In her role as Assistant Curator of European Painting and Sculpture, Alex will be responsible for collection research and development through exhibitions, publications, and acquisitions.
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!
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!
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!