History of Art and Architecture Newsletter – May 2024

Dear Friends,

At the end of my first year as chair, I am writing with enthusiasm to tell you about the vibrancy of the Department of History of Art and Architecture during the academic year of 2023–2024.  

The art history major is growing at UMass; classes are fully enrolled and students from every major across the campus are taking them. The department’s anti-racism committee is launching a new undergraduate fellowship to attract even more diverse students to the major. You will read here about how undergraduates and graduate art history students are organizing conferences, exhibitions, and events of all kinds. They are successfully competing with their peers across the world. In summer 2024, our students will intern at some of the nation’s leading art museums. Your contributions supplemented their internships, making it possible for them to pay high rent in cities such as New York.

Faculty are attracting unprecedented attention for art history at UMass. Provost Professor Charmaine Nelson received from the Mellon Foundation one of the largest, most prestigious grants in the history of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at UMass. The multimillion-dollar award will establish Professor Nelson’s groundbreaking new center, Slavery North, opening in fall 2024. You will learn here how our faculty have been productive in their teaching, research, and service. Many of them shared their work with the UMass community at the HFA Days in April.  

On campus, the department’s planned events fostered community. In October 2024, I was excited to bring to fruition a symposium honoring Distinguished Professor Walter Denny on his retirement after over 50 years of service to the university. The event brought together more than 130 alumni, colleagues, and current students who celebrated Walter’s generosity as a teacher, mentor, and scholar. The alumni council exchanged productive ideas with faculty.

Alumni are the department’s greatest resource. William McCrea and Anthony Roux have both established new endowments to fund undergraduate internships. I cannot thank alumni enough for their tremendous generosity and encouragement. Your contributions change lives, help build careers, and advance the future of art history.

As you can see, the department leads UMass and its discipline. Keep looking and thinking the way you learned to at UMass!

Sincerely,

Timothy M. Rohan
Associate Professor and Chair

Slavery North is a one-of-a-kind academic and cultural destination, where scholars, thinkers, and artists research and build community that transforms society’s understanding of the neglected histories of transatlantic slavery in Canada and the U.S. North. To date, this is the largest Mellon grant awarded to UMass Amherst.  

The three-year grant will support the development of Slavery North’s fellowship program for graduate and undergraduate students, a three-person staff, a lecture series, Black History Month panels, an academic conference, an edited academic book, a podcast series, workshops, art and cultural exhibitions, and a historical database that houses primary sources for the study of slavery in Canada and the U.S. North.

“A fellows program is at the heart of this grant so that we can grow this field of research,” says Nelson. “Since there are not many scholars studying slavery in the U.S. North and Canada, the ability to grow the field is limited. Mellon’s generous support will provide fellows with space, time, and a like-minded community in which to develop their own research and the field at a more rapid pace.”  

While most fellowship categories will have no citizenship restrictions, undergraduate fellowships will be offered exclusively to UMass Amherst and other Five Colleges’ honors students. Slavery North will also offer fellowships to visiting scholars and artists working on research or research creation in its mandate areas. The expected yearly cohort will consist of four undergraduate honors students and two artists-in-residence per year, and one fellow in each of the following categories: MA, PhD, and Visiting Research Fellow. Fellows will work together in Slavery North’s recently developed offices at the Newman Center on North Pleasant Street in Amherst.

A prominent scholar, art historian, educator, author, and the first-ever tenured Black professor of art history in Canada, Nelson says the work of Slavery North sits at the axis of three significant academic blind spots of transatlantic slavery studies: temperate climate regions where the enslaved became the minority of the population; Canada’s oft-forgotten 200-year history of slavery; and art history, which Nelson explains has been one of the last disciplines to grapple with the impacts of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery on art and cultural production, representation, and consumption.

Launched in 2020, Slavery North promotes racial inclusion, belonging, understanding, and allyship that improve people’s lives through research and education, cultural activities, artistic production, and critical conversation around difficult issues and histories. It aims to bolster public understanding of the social and cultural impacts of transatlantic slavery and its legacies, including how that history manifests in anti-Black racism today.

“If you transform people’s understanding of slavery, you allow them to understand the roots of anti-Black racism that are 500–600 years old,” says Nelson. “This problem really began in the 1400s and that’s where the stereotypes of Blackness we see today originated. All of these dimensions of anti-Black racism today—the Black maternal health crisis, for example, or that we get stopped more if we’re driving a nice car, or we get asked for an ID when paying for luxury goods—goes back to the hyper-surveillance and the brutalization of our ancestors in the period of slavery. For me, the work of Slavery North is teaching people about slavery in these specific regions, making this field more accessible to scholars doing the work, and asking the question: Which countries and regions have been allowed to forget their participation in slavery?”

To move the needle on public understanding of this research, Nelson says it’s important that the arts are a part of the conversation.  

“Most slavery studies scholars are historians, but an art historian brings an interesting perspective. European empires did not merely create archives of documents, they created a 400-year archive of art and visual culture, much of which was strategically used to justify slavery and reify Eurocentric ideals of race. Therefore, Western art has largely been about the representation of human beings within racial hierarchies,” Nelson explains. “It is crucial that knowledge of these shared histories reach the general public. But since most people do not learn about slavery by reading academic publications but [rather] through art and media, such as film, what will transform public understanding is the work of filmmakers, playwrights, painters, and performance artists. That, to me, is a huge component of this work.”  

In addition, the Mellon grant will help Slavery North ensure historical research documents, such as newspaper ads or bills of sale for enslaved people, are more accessible to scholars around the world. UMass undergraduate student research assistants will work to locate and digitize transatlantic slavery research materials and input the data into the historical archive. Summer training workshops for librarians and archivists will help unify how important historical documents across collections are tracked, catalogued, stored, archived, and digitized.

Born in Toronto to Jamaican immigrant parents, Nelson went on to complete her PhD in art history at The University of Manchester in 2001. She taught at the University of Western Ontario (2001–03) and McGill University (2003–2020). She then went on to found the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery at NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, when she was the Tier I Canada research chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement from 2020–22.  

When she joined the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2022, Nelson brought the institute with her and reimagined it as Slavery North to combine a focus on slavery in Canada and the U.S. North, with a dedicated focus on art and visual culture. As Nelson recalls, “This was an easy decision because both of these regions have historically sought to erase their participation in transatlantic slavery.” Slavery North gained official initiative status at UMass in 2022—the first step toward becoming an institute.  

With a newly developed physical space at the Newman Center, support from partners like Historic Deerfield and the grant supporting three staff members alongside cohorts of fellows, Slavery North will grow rapidly over the next three years. Nelson says, “I am deeply grateful to Mellon Foundation for this extraordinary support and show of confidence, which will allow us to undertake this transformative work.”

The larger vision for Slavery North and the Mellon-funded programs, as expressed in the grant, is to foster “redress, atonement, and reconciliation” and “be a conduit through which to confront and heal these traumatic histories. It is an academic initiative with a social justice mission.”

At UMass, Sherry has enjoyed exploring the Pioneer Valley and getting involved with the campus community over the past year. The size of the master’s cohort allows her to develop close relationships with students and faculty in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. Through teaching assistantships, Sherry has also had the pleasure of mentoring and working with undergraduate students who come from a variety of educational backgrounds, and she hopes to continue learning and engaging with the UMass community.

On behalf of a trans project on destitution, Halberstam wants to use the language of dismantling, unbuilding, and absence to envision a different mode of representation for the trans body. By referencing the works of Yves Laris Cohen, Kiyan Williams, Catherine Opie, and Del LaGrace Volcano, we can find abstract strategies of representation that invert the body and work within the wreckage as a way of revealing the labor of change and the effort that goes into trying to pull alternative systems out of and into the ruins of contemporary culture.

Professor of gender studies and English at Columbia University, Jack Halberstam is the author of seven books: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke University Press, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke University Press, 1998), In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011), Gage Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012), Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (University of California Press, 2018), and Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Duke University Press, 2020).

Every year, the University Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA) hosts the annual Eva Fierst Graduate Student Curatorial Exhibition, where participating graduate students display the culmination of a year-long independent project. This collaborative initiative between the art history and studio arts graduate programs aims to deepen each participating artist's comprehension of the intellectual and practical facets of curation within a museum setting, offering a unique curatorial experience for graduate students interested in museum careers. The program, launched by UMCA in 2006, has been supported by The Eva Fierst Student Curatorial Exhibition Fund since 2021. To learn more, view our past graduate student curatorial exhibitions.

This year, the Department of History of Art and Architecture's Simone Cambridge ’25MA joined Ruthie Baker (candidate for an MFA in studio arts) and Olivia Haynes (PhD candidate in Afro-American studies) to create the exhibition FAINT/HIDDEN/SHROUDED: Contemplating Obscurity. To open the show, the curators invited special guest nico w. okoro, a curator, educator, and writer based in New Haven, CT, to have a conversation about the show’s conception and themes.

The following exhibition text was written by the curators and can be accessed on UMCA’s website.

FAINT/HIDDEN/SHROUDED: Contemplating Obscurity invites you to uncover hidden meanings and symbols buried beneath layers, prompting inquiry into what is visible and what has been deliberately concealed. This exhibition, ranging from the tangible to the abstract, explores the interplay between remembrance and forgetting, presence and absence, and erasure and illumination. FAINT/HIDDEN/SHROUDED draws attention to the identities and intentions of artists and their work, which have been often overlooked and obscured.

The artists in the show engage in literal obscurity methods through layering and fragmentation, shadowing, and cropping. Other works in the exhibition are more abstract, remaining entirely blank or playing with less direct forms of obscurity to shed light on the underrepresented and address tensions between being recognized and remaining hidden. Selected from the University of Contemporary Art’s permanent collection, FAINT/HIDDEN/SHROUDED features exemplary works by distinguished artists, including Chakaia Booker, Elliott Erwitt, Ralph Gibson, Rashid Johnson, Jefferson Pinder, and others.

Co-curated by Ruthie Baker, an MFA candidate in studio arts; Simone Cambridge, a master’s student in history of art and architecture; and Olivia Haynes, a PhD candidate in Afro-American studies, FAINT/HIDDEN/SHROUDED: Contemplating Obscurity invites visitors to engage in patient and contemplative observation. Encouraging a measured pace, the exhibition prompts viewers to unravel the layers embedded within each work, honoring what has been concealed.

Each summer, graduate students receive funding from the department and the Graduate School to assist with their professional development. Students may, for example, intern at a local museum or enrich their language skills. The class of 2024 provided the following statements about their experiences in the summer of 2023.

This past summer, I split my time working with the Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA) in Northampton, MA, and on an exhibition project with New Local Space (NLS), based in Kingston, Jamaica.

Under the mentorship of Emma Chubb, the inaugural Charlotte Feng Ford ’83 curator of contemporary art, I completed two projects. My first project at SCMA consisted of compiling education and research materials for a recent video acquisition, the water between us remembers, so we wear this history on our skin, long for a sea-bath, and hope the salt will cure what ails us (2018) by Deborah Jack. Born in St. Maarten, Jack engages landscape, memory, and poetry in her work. The project evolved to include a film screening of her work and conversation with me as part of the lecture series Art Stockings: Dialogues on Art, Gender, and Cultural Theory, created by Alex Callender.

My second summer project with SCMA was writing artwork labels for the Targan Gallery of Contemporary Art. This project involved long hours of research, sorting through acquisition files, and reviewing and rewriting drafts of labels.

Throughout my time at SCMA, I worked remotely with NLS, where I planned exhibition logistics. I negotiated honorariums for participants in the exhibition, It comes from the head, which discusses Bahamian straw work. The exhibition is scheduled to open at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas in September 2024.

I am sincerely grateful for the support I received from the Department of History of Art and Architecture at UMass for these projects. These opportunities continue to motivate me in my professional and academic journey in the field of art history.

For the professional development grant, I was a research intern under Danielle Carrabino at the Smith College Museum of Art. My primary duty was to work on additional research of objects in their Italian Renaissance collection, many of which had long been unaddressed or updated. In total, I worked on three objects and attended curatorial and acquisition meetings, culminating in a presentation of my research to the museum staff.

Two of the objects I worked on were 16th-century Italian maiolica dishes. For Loredano Dish, I used the object file to correct the database entry, making it more precise and accessible to future researchers. The second dish, Turkish Lancer, had very little information in the file. I was able to provide an updated title, possible workshop attribution, and object function; petition to update the database photo to include the back of the dish; and provide ample scholarship to the object file. Until now, this object was invisible to any larger project that treated this specific type of dish.

Most of this internship was dedicated to a Quattrocento painting called A Scene of an Execution. The work is one of three paintings that appear to reference a chivalric romance. I worked to identify the source—it strongly suggests Boccaccio’s Il Filocolo. The imagery and literary reference solidify the hypothesis that these paintings accompanied a marriage gift on either a cassone (an ornate chest) or spagliera (a decorated headboard). Further, the stemma (coat of arms) on the Smith painting had not been clearly identified. I uncovered scholarship that presented a likely argument in favor of a clear identification of the stemma with the Manfredi family, which helps place this painting within a specific marital context: a wedding between Galeotto Manfredi and Francesco Bentivoglio in 1481. There is more work to do on this, and I aim to position this research as a publishable paper option.

I was also given the opportunity to inspect a potential acquisition, evaluate it, and discuss strategies to position it as important for a college museum. The sculpture is a 15th-century German Saint Anne with the infants Mary and Christ. Ultimately, the museum agreed to acquire the work as it filled a specific gap in the collection.

My experience at Smith College was undoubtedly essential in learning how to navigate the museum structure, both in research and in matters of acquisitions and installation planning. It was a well-rounded experience full of new insights and an opportunity to learn.

My summer internship at the Smith College Museum of Art was a transformative experience. The internship was a blend of hands-on experiences, professional development, and an insight into the functioning of an art museum.

I was involved with their spring 2024 exhibition, titled Painting the Persianate World: Portable Images on Paper, Cloth, and Clay. My contributions included attending curatorial and budgetary meetings, composing object labels, and aiding in the design of a dedicated station to introduce the poem “Shahnama” (the “Book of Kings”) to visitors.

In my second project, I delved into the museum’s collection of Persian manuscripts, focusing specifically on the “Shahnama” folios. I undertook the tasks of translating and transliterating the Persian texts found in the artworks. Additionally, I provided an extensive bibliography and assembled a list of comparable artworks from various museums and collections.

During the summer of 2023, I was able to begin studies in Filipino through the generous support of the department’s professionalization funds.

After having been accepted to the University of Wisconsin’s Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute, the program for language study in Filipino ended up being canceled due to low enrollment. I was able to contact the program director, who put me in touch with the instructor who had been scheduled to teach Filipino I, Lady Aileen Orsal. In place of attending the institute, I was able to use these funds to pay for private lessons with the instructor, maintaining the pace of the accelerated language program.

Due to the individual nature of our lessons, I was also able to request specific, directed coursework that centered on acquiring the skills necessary to complete research in this area. For example, based on the necessity of reading archival documents, we centered many grammar lessons on how to understand the structure of a sentence in order to translate it rather than just on conversational exchanges. Further, we focused sample readings on art-related texts, such as news stories about exhibitions. After completing coursework through late August, I enrolled in a [two-semester-long] Five College language program course in the fall to continue learning the language.

Over the summer, the graduate funding made it possible for me to do two summer internships.

At my first internship, I worked with the preservation department at Historic Deerfield under the supervision of Annie Rubel. The aim of this project was to provide a desk-based assessment of the Asa Stebbins House in preparation for coming preservation efforts. Through this work, I gained a better understanding of approaching research in the context of preservation, as well as pathways into preservation as a career.

At my second internship, I worked with the collections team at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art on their inventory project under the supervision of Rachel Eskridge. I learned how to navigate a museum database and do condition reporting for works on paper, and I learned about the process of planning and executing large-scale inventory projects. I concluded this internship by presenting this process to the museum and [making] recommendations for further inventory efforts. I will continue providing support to the Carle Museum in their inventory project by working with their William Steig collection.

Both of these internships also provided me with professional connections with local museums—something that was really important to me as someone planning to live and work in this region.

Alex Tievy

(she/her/ella)

I used some of the summer professionalization funds to take private lessons in learning how to read German, and I plan to eventually use the rest [of the funds] to continue improving my education in foreign languages pertinent to the study of the history of art. I found this very helpful, and I found the amount allotted to be extremely generous. I greatly appreciate being offered these funds, especially since the funds were unexpected and very useful. Receiving these funds enhanced and improved my experience in the history of art graduate program at UMass.

This year, the department welcomed five students into the cohort of 2025: Yarra Berger, Isaiah LaGrand, Sherry Shang, Yuqing Tao, and Olivia White.

I knew from the very first art history class I took at UMass—Walter Denny’s magisterial Introduction to the Visual Arts—that I wanted to be an art historian. I declared art history my primary major and took a breadth of art history courses throughout the Five Colleges in search of the artistic period and culture that would spark a lifelong passion. At the good advice of my UMass art history professors, I also studied German. In the end, I decided to pursue Roman art, thanks in part to the inspired teaching and mentoring of Laetitia La Follette at UMass and Barbara Kellum at Smith College. I wrote my honors thesis on the wall paintings and the sculptural finds from the Temple of Isis at Pompeii and graduated in 2012 with a BA in art history and English.

After UMass, I started a PhD in Roman art and archaeology at Princeton, which I will finish in 2024. I sought out a range of teaching experiences during graduate school, drawing on the broad art historical training I received at UMass, to serve as a teaching assistant for the art history survey course, Egyptian Art and Archaeology, and a class on Renaissance art. My UMass professors continued to inspire me this past semester as I taught my own course on Roman art in the Department of History of Art and Architecture.

During my graduate studies, I became increasingly interested in the modern afterlives of antiquities: the history of their excavation and ownership (provenance) and the art market where they fetch astronomical prices. Research fellowships spent in the collections of the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London and the National Archaeological Museum of Naples made me want to learn more about the history of collecting. In 2021, therefore, I decided to take an unorthodox interlude in my graduate studies by accepting a full-time job as an antiquities trafficking analyst at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. I used my art historical and archaeological background to assist with dozens of investigations into looted antiquities, helping to recover hundreds of stolen artifacts and repatriate them to countries all over the world. This work made me an expert in the antiquities market and the way looted antiquities from art-rich countries such as Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Egypt enter the market and end up in museums.

In September 2023, I left the DA’s office to finish my dissertation and pursue new opportunities in the provenance and cultural heritage fields. With luck, museums around the country were announcing new provenance-related positions at just this time, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Princeton University Art Museum, and the Worcester Art Museum. Worcester, which was searching for its first provenance research specialist, was particularly appealing to me because of the museum’s spectacular collection of Roman art, with Worcester home to the largest and finest examples of Roman floor mosaics in North America. I was thrilled when I was offered the job, which I started in February 2024. In addition to researching and documenting the history of the museum’s collections, I am also advising on acquisitions, loans, and deaccessions, and developing new ways to share provenance information with museum visitors and the public.

Elizabeth Beaudoin ’16MA (she/her)

A graduate of the master’s program in art history, Elizabeth Beaudoin recently accepted a new position as curator of history at the Longmont Museum—a municipal museum for a community of over 100,000 residents in Longmont, CO. In this role, she will oversee the care of more than 17,000 objects, over a million photographs, and hundreds of thousands of archival documents relating to the history of the area. The museum is embarking on a large expansion, and Elizabeth will be curating the museum’s new permanent history exhibit in 2025, expanding the exhibits to include more diverse stories. She also serves as a committee member of the Colorado-Wyoming Association of Museums and is on the Small Museum Committee for the American Association for State and Local History. She lives in Longmont, CO, with her two dogs, Teddy and Daisy.

Walter B. Denny

Distinguished Professor Emeritus | Islamic Art, Museum Studies, Orientalism
Emeritus Faculty as of fall 2023
Walter's Faculty Page

Walter retired from teaching on May 31, 2023. Since then, he has continued to chair the Visiting Committee of the Department of Textile Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the department celebrated its 50th anniversary in New York in October 2023. 

Currently, he has consulting projects in progress at, among others, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Textile Museum in Washington, and the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. He also advises PhD students at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and several U.S. and European universities, including one in Corfu, Greece. Walter continues to contribute high-resolution images to LUNA at UMass Amherst, including both 35-millimeter slides for digitization and original digital files, most recently from Apulia in southern Italy.

Walter serves on several editorial boards and as a director of Arcadia Players, and has an active schedule of online talks and scholarly presentations. In addition to recent in-person lectures in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, he will give the keynote address at the 15th International Conference on Oriental Carpets in Istanbul in June 2024.

Karen Kurczynski

Professor and Graduate Program Director | Modern and Contemporary Art
Karen's Faculty Page

Karen researched artworks in New York museums and galleries and interviewed artists, including Laylah Ali and Shahzia Sikander, for her book project Drawing in Color during the summer of 2023 and while on sabbatical for the fall semester. She also presented a keynote lecture on curating the 2016 University Museum of Contemporary Art (UMCA) exhibition, titled Human Animals: The Art of Cobra, at the fall conference, Museum and Avant-Garde: New Perspectives on Nordic Postwar Art and Its Institutions, at Aarhus University. She revised and resubmitted her article on Steve Locke’s #Killers drawings for peer review, and she developed themes mapped out in her “Drawing in the 1990s” article in Burlington Contemporary (June 2023) into a full-length book introduction.

Karen returned to teaching and duties as graduate program director in spring 2024. In fall 2024, she will return to teaching Modern Art, a Gen Ed course with graduate and honors sections, and a seminar titled Biology and Art that discusses issues in modern and contemporary art and science. Her essay on the drawings of Laylah Ali appeared in Ali’s spring 2024 show catalog at the Marion Art Gallery at SUNY Fredonia. The exhibition Is Anything the Matter? will travel to the UMCA in the spring of 2025.

Monika Schmitter

Professor | Italian Renaissance and Baroque
Monika's Faculty Page

At the end of serving three years as department chair, Monika is on sabbatical leave during the 2023–2024 academic year. After finishing an article related to her research on Marcantonio Michiel, which will appear in the spring 2024 issue of Source: Notes in the History of Art, Monika turned to her new project on Parmigianino’s portraits. She received a UMass Amherst faculty research grant to travel to see the portraits in various European collections in London, York, Vienna, Copenhagen, Paris, Naples, Rome, Florence, Milan, and Parma. From this research, Monika is completing an article on Parmigianino’s intriguing Portrait of a Dignitary in Vienna. She looks forward to returning to teaching next year.

Sonja Drimmer

Associate Professor | Medieval Art
Sonja's Faculty Page

Sonja had an excellent year, first filling in as acting graduate program director while Professor Karen Kurczynski was on sabbatical in the fall, then taking research leave as a mid-career fellow through the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in the spring. Supported further by grants from the International Center of Medieval Art and the Bibliographical Society of America, she traveled in both the United States and the United Kingdom conducting research for her second book devoted to politics and print media in late medieval England.

Her scholarship and public commentary on the intersection of AI and art history included an essay for Art in America magazine as well as a paper presented with Christopher Nygren (University of Pittsburgh) at the College Art Association's 112th Annual Conference. Sonja also led a workshop on the topic at the University of Missouri, where she gave an invited lecture on her book project.

Sonja's other speaking engagements included invited papers delivered at Indiana University, the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, and remote presentations for the University of Bergen and the Medieval Manuscripts Seminar at the Institute of English Studies. She also co-organized a conference with UPenn’s Ryan Eisenman at the Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University; titled The Medieval Multiple, it was supported by grants from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and UMass Amherst, among others. Finally, Sonja published “Hildegard von Bingen's Scivias in Weimar Germany: Media Theory by Hand,” in Modern Language Quarterly.

Margaret “Meg” Vickery

Lecturer, Undergraduate Program Director | Architecture
Meg's Faculty Page

Meg spent much of summer 2023 advising new students for the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, introducing recent high school graduates to the rich course offerings in our college. In the fall, she taught Nature and the Built Environment for the first time as a Gen Ed course, finding enjoyment in her students' passion and enthusiasm for the subject. As part of the course, Meg hosted Eleanor Brough, formerly of Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, who discussed the development of the Mellor Primary School extension in England and the community’s involvement with the habitat wall. University of Copenhagen’s Svava Riesto and Henriette Steiner also joined Meg’s class to discuss urban planning in Copenhagen before giving a public talk about their new book, Untold Stories: On Women, Gender, and Architecture in Denmark.

Meg has hosted several events for our undergrads, including pizza parties and our annual Success Stories: Life After the Major with alumni guests Daniel Healey, Caroline Dubinsky, Isabel Ruiz Cano, and Kara Westhoven. Meg worked with undergrads Jane Curran, Mary Zeng, Andersson Perry, Amelia Ceballos, Marcela Pareja, Ari Whittum, Maria Pitel, and Meredith Boyle on the Greenbaum Gallery exhibition Treasured Knowledge: Walter Denny and the Woven World of Carpets, which opened in October 2023 and is on display until fall 2024.

Her paper, “The Business of Childhood: Play and Nature in the Work of Marjory Allen,” will be part of a collection of essays published by De Gruyter in September 2024.

Gülru Çakmak

Associate Professor | 19th-Century European Art
Gülru's Faculty Page

Gülru was awarded the Mid-Career Post-Tenure Fellowship and spent fall 2023 on leave working on her two book manuscripts: “Osman Hamdi and the Long Duration of History” and “Materiality, Process, and Facture in English and French Sculpture at the End of the Nineteenth Century.” She also studied the Ottoman Turkish alphabet—a modified version of the Perso-Arabic script that was used in the Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey until 1928.

With the aim of advancing her fledgling skills in reading Ottoman Turkish, she has recently embarked on a collaborative effort with two scholars from Turkey to translate a theater play—written in 1872 in Ottoman Turkish by the Ottoman artist Osman Hamdi Bey—into contemporary Turkish. Only a few copies remain of the play, which has never been transcribed into the Latin alphabet or translated into modern Turkish. This translation process has provided Gülru with a deeper insight into Hamdi Bey's cultural context and his artistic contributions within the broader context of Ottoman history and culture.

Gülru was invited to participate in the British Art 1750–1910: Reflections and Futures Symposium at the Clark Art Institute, where she presented her research on British sculptor Alfred Gilbert’s Sam Wilson Chimneypiece (c.1908–1914, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds Museums and Galleries). Additionally, she continued serving as chief editor of H-France Salon, a multimedia and interdisciplinary journal of French studies. She continued her roles as a member of the editorial board of the scholarly organization H-France and as a member of the advisory board of the book series Transnational Approaches to Culture (De Gruyter). 

In spring 2024, she resumed teaching, coordinating the department’s signature large-enrollment Gen Ed survey class, History of Art: Renaissance to Present. Gülru taught the Graduate Methods Seminar and hosted two guest scholars, Professors Mary Roberts and Maura Coughlin.

Charmaine A. Nelson

Provost Professor | Black Diasporic Art and Visual Culture
Charmaine's Faculty Page

A provost professor of art history in UMass Amherst’s Department of History of Art and Architecture since 2022, Charmaine is also the director of Slavery North, an initiative that supports scholarship and research-creation on Canadian slavery and slavery in the northern United States. She recently garnered a $2.65 million Mellon Foundation grant for Slavery North, which will launch its fellowship program in 2024.

She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Black Maple Magazine, one of the only national magazines/platforms directed at Black Canadians. Black Maple Magazine was awarded an Anthem Awards silver medal for its contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the news and journalism, awareness, and media categories in 2024.

Charmaine has made groundbreaking contributions to fields such as the visual culture of slavery, race and representation; Black diaspora studies; and African American/African Canadian art history. Her seven books include The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (Routledge, 2016); and Towards an African Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance (Captus Press, 2018).

Recent book chapters include “‘She Carried with her … a Large Bundle of Wearing Apparel Belonging to Herself’: Slave Dress as Resistance in Portraiture and Fugitive Slave Advertisements,” published in The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (2023), and “The Canadian Fugitive Slave Archive: Contesting the Refugee Narrative” in The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (2023). She also published an article entitled “‘Art for Morality’s Sake’: Whiteness, Marble, and American Slavery,” for the Henry Moore Institute's Essays on Sculpture series (vol. 81, 2023).

Recent essays by Charmaine include such subjects as Norman Lear (2024), Edmonia Lewis (2024), and Edward Mitchell Bannister (2023). She also gave several lectures and presented conference papers in Canada, the United States, and Europe in 2023 and 2024. Charmaine was a consultant and on-camera expert for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Black Life: Untold Stories (2023).

Timothy Rohan

Department Chair and Associate Professor | American and European Architecture
Tim's Faculty Page

Tim became chair of the Department of History of Art and Architecture in fall 2023. He organized the symposium honoring Walter Denny in October 2023 and implemented a new web page for the department. He enjoyed meeting with alumni and would like to hear more from them. Send your latest news to Tim at @email!

He continued work on his own research and publishing about postwar architecture and late 20th-century interiors. He published an article in an edited volume and completed an invited article for a themed issue about queer interiors for art history’s journal of record, The Art Bulletin. In March, he discussed the article on an online forum on the subject he organized with The Art Bulletin and the Historic Interiors Group of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH). He gave talks at SAH’s annual conference in New Mexico and was invited to present his research at Philip Johnson’s Glass House.

Tim worked with several preservation groups. He delivered the keynote address for the Docomomo US 2023 National Symposium in New Haven and became involved with Cape Cod Modern House Trust. He is helping Cape Cod Modern develop a conservation and educational plan for Marcel Breuer’s summer house in Wellfleet, MA. Tim also worked closely with UMassBRUT, the advocacy group for modernist buildings in the UMass system. He was an active member of the UMassBRUT Executive Committee, leading several walking tours of the Amherst campus and developing new initiatives with them.

Laetitia La Follette

Professor | Ancient Art and Archaeology, Art History and Cybertechnology
Laetitia's Faculty Page

Laetitia La Follette submitted her book manuscript on the Roman marble portraits of the Licinii Crassi to Oxford University Press in August 2023. She was pleased to be asked to give an encomium for retired Professor Walter Denny at the department’s event celebrating his career in the fall of 2023. She is on leave in 2024, and Daniel Healey, a UMass art history alum, will be teaching Roman art in her stead. Laetitia is working on several new projects throughout her sabbatical, during which she will also be serving as the archaeological expert for two Archaeological Institute of America Tours: the circumnavigation of Sicily departing from Malta in June and a cruise from Athens to Rome in late September.

Ximena Gómez

Assistant Professor | American Art
Ximena's Faculty Page

Ximena Gómez finally got to experience a full year of teaching in-person since she was hired in 2019. She particularly enjoyed reprising a graduate seminar on Afro-Latin American art and successfully turned her lecture on Latin American and U.S. Latinx art into a Gen Ed class. She spent the majority of the year completing her book, still tentatively titled "Indigenous and Black Confraternities and the Creation of Visual Culture in Colonial Lima." She is delighted to announce that the book is under contract with the University of Texas Press and is scheduled to be published in 2025.

She returned to a normal life of travel last summer. In June, she went to Italy, and in July, she visited several cities in Brazil with the Traveling Research Seminar on Afro-Latin American Art, sponsored by the Getty Foundation. This summer, she will return to Peru for the first time since the pandemic, where she will conduct research for her second book, as well as a new research project called “Friend of the Devil,” in collaboration with her colleague, Marcella Hayes, assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

She gave an invited talk at Cornell University in conjunction with Colonial Crossings: Art, Identity, and Belief in the Spanish Americas, an upcoming exhibition at the Johnson Museum of Art. She also presented a paper and served as a discussant at the Renaissance Society of America's Annual Meeting. She invited Claudia Zapata, associate curator of Latino art at the Blanton Museum of Art, to give a lecture for the department on Chicano and Latinx graphic arts.

Christine I. Ho

Associate Professor | East Asian Art
Christine's Faculty Page

Christine I. Ho taught a new graduate seminar in fall 2023, Transpacific Revolutions. With a lively group of incoming and advanced graduate students, the seminar embarked upon a Pacific-centered view of modern and contemporary art that combined perspectives from Asian studies and Asian American studies. She also taught the Gen Ed course, Art and Visual Culture of East Asia, and in the spring, offered Chinese Painting, which began with two sessions of interactive painting with brush and ink. Among the interesting projects she advised during this academic year is Kayla Sit’s architectural studio independent study on Japanese joinery techniques.

Christine also gave talks on new research on the relationship between the Beijing Zoo and alternative contemporary art spaces at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a talk on Art Deco and modern Chinese artists in France at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Primarily, her academic work centered on organizing events that brought together scholars in Asia and Europe. Working with Sigrid Schmalzer in the history department, they organized a workshop, Participatory Knowledge Production in the Great Leap Forward, which brought together junior scholars in cultural history, literature, art history, and the history of science.

In collaboration with Michael Kunichika at Amherst College, she spearheaded a spring 2024 workshop, Archives of World Socialism, which was funded by a Five College Symposium Grant. This workshop brought scholars of socialism in the Soviet Bloc, Asia, and the Global South to examine the archives of the Pioneer Valley, culminating in a series of object lessons as a conduit for illuminating the dimensions of socialist internationalism. She continued to serve the field of art history and the humanities, serving on multiple committees across the College Art Association and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Nancy Noble

Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, College of Humanities and Fine Arts
Senior Lecturer in American Art
Nancy's Faculty Page

Nancy Noble co-taught The Digital Art Historian with Brian Shelburne, head of the Digital Scholarship Center at UMass. She continued as associate dean for undergraduate education in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts (HFA), in which she served as director of the college’s Advising and Career Center, ran the college’s fall and spring undergraduate recruiting events, and represented HFA on numerous university committees, including the Undergraduate Deans Council and the Enrollment Management team. She directed the college’s New Student Orientation and Transitions program throughout the summer of 2023, which included providing academic advising to over 450 new first-year and 100 transfer students, as well as conducting over 20 Come Home to Your College meetings for all new HFA students. In March 2024, she participated in a Women’s History Month panel on works by women artists in the New Britain Museum of American Art’s permanent collection.

Remembering Iris Cheney

UMass graduate William McCrea ’76 has established a new undergraduate fund in memory of Professor Iris Cheney. Below, Bill shares his memories of Professor Cheney. You may contribute to the Iris Cheney Fund:

From the university’s collection, in memory of Iris Cheney:

Isabel Bishop (American, 1902–1988), Bending Down, 1945. Ink wash on paper. UM 1997.1.
This artwork was purchased with funds donated by Gloria Russell of Wilbraham, MA, and the Monsanto Matching Gifts Program in memory of Art History Professor Iris Cheney.

This drawing by Isabel Bishop was purchased for the University Museum of Contemporary Art in memory of Professor Iris Cheney. The artwork was included in the 2018–19 exhibition Isabel Bishop's Working Women: Defying Convention at the Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield with the following description.

One of Isabel Bishop’s many insightful sketches, this work is particularly interesting for its formal qualities and combined use of ink wash and line. In this drawing, the artist captures a woman who bends down, perhaps to pick up something that she has dropped. Bishop renders the body from different perspectives, creating a circular composition. The stripes on the figure’s dress radiate from the center of the work, resulting in an interesting design. These formal elements, along with the artist’s generous use of ink wash, flattened the space within the drawing, creating an atmospheric effect. Within this compressed arrangement, Bishop’s skillful handling of line and contour helps to distinguish the figure from the background.

Walter Denny Fund

Gifts to the Walter Denny Fund honor his remarkable decades of teaching and scholarship at UMass Amherst and support the education, research opportunities, and professional development of graduate students in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. Donate now

Visit our Acknowledgements page for Professor Walter Denny to share how he impacted your education and to sign a petition to continue his teaching legacy here at UMass Amherst.

Anne Mochon Internship

Gifts to the Anne Mochon Internship provide our students with grants that help support them in unpaid or poorly paid internships so they can gain the interactive experience so critical to their professional development. Donate now »

THANK YOU FOR YOUR GENEROSITY

We are grateful for the generosity of our many alumni and friends. Your gifts to the Department of History of Art and Architecture support annual events like our guest lecture series, the Mark Roskill Symposium, and commencement prizes for graduating seniors. Gifts to the Anne Mochon Internship and the Walter Denny Fund provide our students with grants that support them in summer internships and help them gain the interactive experience so critical to their professional development. They also contribute to our ability to fund the Diversity Fellowship that promises to make a lasting, positive impact on the field of art and architecture history. You know what your art history education means to you. Please help us continue to assist students by making a gift on our website: umass.edu/arthistory/history-art-and-architecture.

For gift inquiries, please contact:

Robby O’Sullivan

Executive Director of Development

College of Humanities & Fine Arts and the Fine Arts Center

UMass Amherst Foundation

@email

We wish to thank the following individuals for their generous donations from May 2023–March 2024: