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UCSB HAA Winter 2014 Newsletter
Dear Friends,

The department’s Holiday Reception last December was a great success: Chancellor Henry Yang, Mrs. Dilling Yang, and David Marshall, Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts, joined the department’s friends, students, staff, and faculty for the “soft” launch of a new Undergraduate Emphasis in Museum Studies, and to celebrate our return to the revamped Arts Building. Graduate students, led by AHGSA (Art History Graduate Student Association) co-chairs Erin Travers and Diva Zumaya had decked the reception venue in a wonderful holiday theme. Thanks to the labors of our Undergraduate Program Manager Ali Mastain, the department’s Curriculum Committee chaired by Prof. Jeanette Peterson, and the Director of the Museum Studies Emphasis, Prof. Carole Paul, plans for the new emphasis were in place. Prof. Paul presented the goals of the emphasis and its interdisciplinary focus, followed by a brief address by Chancellor Yang and Dean Marshall. We expect to offer courses in the emphasis next year.

It was a pleasure to see our alumni and friends at the UCSB Reception in Chicago during the College Arts Association (CAA) Annual Meeting in February. We celebrated the recent CAA publication awards of our faculty: Prof. Peter Sturman’s exhibition catalogue, The Artful Recluse, that received the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections and Exhibition; and Prof. Jeanette Peterson’s Millard Meiss Publication Grant for her book, Visualizing Guadalupe (see details below).

As we look forward to Spring break, we are planning two important departmental events: the Graduate Student Symposium organized by our department’s graduate students on Sat April 26, 2014, and the Annual Awards Ceremony on Fri June 13, 2014. We are very pleased to add two new awards to the roster of grants made to our students, thanks to the generosity of Howard C. Fenton. The Howard C. Fenton Award for Undergraduate Research will recognize the best Honor’s Thesis among our majors, and the Howard C. Fenton Award for Graduate Research will be awarded to the best Master’s Thesis in the department.

Please save these dates, and I look forward to hearing from you.

With best wishes,
Swati

Swati Chattopadhyay
Professor and Chair
Editor, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and JSAH Online

Mark Meadow has received a Berlin Prize for Fall 2014. During his residence at the American Academy in Berlin, Prof. Meadow will work on his next book, Quiccheberg's Containers: Inventing Pragmatic Knowledge in Early-Modern Collections, a new history of sixteenth-century German collections as practical sites of knowledge production bound to the rise of the modern nation state and the emergence of a global mercantile and informational economy.

Jenni Sorkin has been awarded the American Council of Learned Society's Fellowship for next year for her project, "Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community, 1945-75." Through a series of three case studies focused on women potters, the project examines the gendered legacy of craft pedagogy as it turned outward from an object-only orientation toward an embrace of community engagement, personal enrichment, and social participation during the postwar era.

Jeanette Peterson book cover

Jeanette Peterson received the Millard Meiss Publication Grant for her book, Visualizing Guadalupe: From the Black Madonna to the Queen of the Americas, University of Texas Press (2014) from the College Arts Association.

Carole Paul has received a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to work on her book project, “The Museo Capitolino and the Origins of the Public Art Museum” during the 2014-15 academic year. Opened in 1734, the Museo Capitolino on the Capitoline Hill, or Campidoglio, in Rome was the earliest institution of international significance to manifest the definitive characteristics of the modern public art museum as it has evolved into the present day. Paul’s book will examine the origin and growth of the Capitoline and its influence on the development of modern museums from the formation of the oldest civic collection on the Campidoglio in 1471 to 1869, when the city government of Rome was radically restructured with the unification of Italy.
Monsieur Hviid Pointing to the Restoration of the Albani Antinous in the Museo Capitolino, 1780
Sturman and Tai book cover

Peter Sturman and Susan Tai’s exhibition catalogue The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century China (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art; New York: Delmonico/Prestel, 2012) won the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions from the College Arts Association. They worked with UCSB graduate student Seok Won Choi and other interns and students. Read more here.

The Art History Outreach Program, a volunteer organization of UCSB graduate and undergraduate students who offer art-oriented workshops to their local community, has established an enduring relationship with Isla Vista Elementary. So far, five undergraduate students interning with the Art, Design & Architecture Museum have made their way into the classroom, giving presentations to 3rd- and 4th-grade students on a range of subjects including German Expressionism, Impressionism, and Modern Architecture. The format of the presentation is not only geared toward providing a general background and key terms on the subject at hand, but also toward fun. At the end of the presentation, students are provided with materials to practice what they have learned. The internship aspect of the outreach program was launched in 2013 and is coordinated by graduate students Maggie Bell and Ashleigh Lynch. Below are examples of student work from 3rd- and 4th-grade students at Isla Vista Elementary School.
German Expressionism, February 13, 2014
Impressionism, February 19, 2014
2013-14 HAA Lecture Series poster

  • Forthcoming:
  • History of Art and Architecture Lecture Series, Owning Otherness.
    • May 8: "Away from chinoiserie and japonisme: New Approaches to European Collections of Asian Art in the Nineteenth Century," by Dr. Ting Chang, Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham
    • May 22: Roundtable with participants TBA.
  • The Graduate Student Association Alumni Panel will take place on Fri April 4, 12:00-3:00, Room 1332.
  • The Grad Panel will take place on Wed April 16, 5:00-6:00, Room 1332.. This is an event hosted by AHGSA for undergraduate students. The panel provides undergraduates with important information about the process of applying to graduate programs and what to expect if they are admitted.
  • The Architecture Portfolio Workshop will take place on Sat April 26, 1:00-3:00 and Sat May 17, 1:00-3:00. The workshop is an opportunity for students interested in applying to Architecture graduate programs to learn more about the application process, what an architecture portfolio is, and how to go about creating their own. This two-part workshop series will feature local architects and a UCSB graduating senior who recently applied and was admitted to an architecture graduate program.
  • The 39th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium will take place on Sat April 26, at the Loma Pelona Conference Center, Room 1108, UCSB, 9am-5pm. Entitled Documents of Culture/Documents of Barbarism, the symposium uses Walter Benjamin's comment of 1937 as its point of departure: "there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." The symposium will include graduate student speakers from UCSB along with six other universities in the US and Canada, and will feature talks that span art, architectural and visual culture from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The Keynote Address will be delivered by Professor Susan Preston Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
  • Recent:
  • January 21: Lecture by Dr. Raymond Neutra, "Dutch Uncle to the Roots of California Modern;” hosted by the Art History Association.
  • February 19: the department organized a Museums Career Panel for undergraduates exploring opportunities in the museum world.
  • February 19: Lecture by Eiman Elgewely: "Towards Virtual and Real Museum Extended Interaction."
  • February 20: Lecture by E. Randol Schoenberg: "The Recovery of Nazi-Looted Art: The Bloch-Bauer Klimt Paintings."
  • On view through March 24: The Art History Association put together an art exhibition called per*cep*tion: the study of subjectivity and objectivity in cooperation with Left Coast Books (5877 Hollister Ave, Goleta) which showcased student and local artists.

Read more about all upcoming Events here

Miriam Wattles book cover

Jeanette Peterson book

Jeanette Favrot Peterson, Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014) (forthcoming)
Meadows & Robertson book cover

Mark Meadow and Bruce Robertson, ed. and trans. The First Treatise on Museums Samuel Quiccheberg's Inscriptiones, 1565 (Getty Research Institute Press, 2013)
Chattopadhyay & White book cover

Swati Chattopadhyay and Jeremy White, eds., City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space(London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2014)
  • Ann Jensen Adams, "Temporality and the Seventeenth-century Dutch Portrait," Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, vol. 5:2 (2013).
  • Bruce Robertson wrote two essays for exhibition catalogues this fall. First, an essay for the artist Mary Heebner, about a stunning series of meditations on ancient Venus figures, Mary Heebner: The Venus Paintings, Edward Cella Art+Architecture, LA, CA 2013, for Edward Cella's gallery in Los Angeles. In addition he had a busy fall giving papers at conferences or museums from northern Canada to Mexico.
  • Volker M. Welter published an essay on the idea of the region as a city by the Scottish biologist and city designer Sir Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) in archithese (vol. 43, issue 6/2013), the leading Swiss international thematic review for architecture.
    The British online magazine Berfrois - Intellectual Jousting in the Republic of Letters recently published an article by Prof. Welter on the private home of the Hungarian-American psychoanalyst Franz Alexander in Palm Springs, CA, which was designed in 1955 by architect Walter S. White. This essay is part of Prof. Welter’s ongoing research on the work of architect Walter S. White (1917-2002) who practiced mainly in California’s Coachella Valley and in Colorado Springs, CO, and whose papers are preserved in the Architecture and Design Collection, UCSB. An exhibition of White’s designs will be shown at the Art, Design and Architecture Museum, UCSB, in Fall 2015. The exhibition and a planned catalog will be co-curated by undergraduate and graduate students from the department. If you wish to learn about how to support the W.S. White project please contact Prof. Volker M. Welter via e-mail or by calling the Department (+1-805-893-2417).
    For her recent film Lutah - A Passion for Architecture: A Life for Design director and producer Kum-Kum Bhavnani interviewed Prof. Welter on the architecture of local Santa Barbara architect Lutah Maria Riggs, most notably on her von Romberg House in Montecito from the late 1930s. The movie premiered at the 2014 Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
  • Sylvester Ogbechie was an invited speaker to Art/Histories in Transcultural Dynamics, late 19th to Early 21st Centuries, Free University, Berlin, December 5 -7, 2013. His paper title was “Art, Nationalism and Modernist Histories: Writing Art History in Nigeria and South Africa.” He also presented a lecture at Northwestern University in January 2014, titled, “Photography and Cultures of Modernity in Africa: The Ezechime Archive Project.” Also, he is chairing a panel at the upcoming ACASA (Arts Council for the African Studies Association) Triennial in New York titled Art and the Digital Revolution in Africa.
  • Swati Chattopadhyay published an essay “Visualizing the Body Politic,” in Arijit Sen and Lisa Silverman eds. Making Place: Space and Embodiment in the City (Indiana University Press, 2014). Prof. Chattopadhyay also contributed a state-of-the-field essay, “Architectural History and Spatial Imagination,” in Perspectives, the Newsletter for the American Historical Association (Winter 2014). Additionally, she presented a plenary lecture at the Envisioning the Indian City conference at Jadavpur University, Kolkata; and a lecture titled, “Of Small Spaces Forgotten,” for the Center for Visual Culture, University of Wisconsin, Madison’s Annual Lecture Series, “Global Affect, Materiality, and the Senses.”

  • Staci Gem Scheiwiller (Ph.D., 2009), Assistant Professor of Contemporary and Modern Art History at California State University, Stanislaus, has published her second book, the edited Performing the Iranian State: Visual Culture and Representations of Iranian Identity (2013).
  • Lisa Volpe (Ph.D., 2013) is currently Curator at the Wichita Art Museum.
  • Charlene G. Garfinkle (Ph.D., 1996) was invited to contribute the essay, "Corot as a Graphic Artist" and "Catalogue of Prints" (39 entries) in Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot: The Lady Leslie Ridley-Tree Collection in Context, exhibition catalogue, (Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California, 2013), and published an article, "Progress Illuminated: Two Stained Glass Windows from the 1893 Woman's Building," Woman's Art Journal, Fall/Winter 2012.
Dear Alumni: please send your news of appointments, awards and other achievements to swati at arthistory.ucsb.edu or spafford at hfa.ucsb.edu.