Art & Archaeology newsletter - Princeton University

& Art 

Archaeology 

Newsletter 

d e p a r t m e n t o f 

Dear Friends and Colleagues: 

This year was again one of arrivals 

and departures. We welcomed three 

new colleagues—Andy Watsky in 

Japanese, Bridget Alsdorf in 19thcentury 

European, and Chika 

Okeke-Agulu in African. 

We also concluded the hire of the distinguished 

Romanist Michael Koortbojian, who will join 

us in the fall, and we are in pursuit of another 

senior colleague in early modern art. Economy 

willing, more searches are in the offing, probably in 

classical archaeology, Byzantine, and contemporary. 

At the same time, we bid farewell to two 

cherished colleagues, T. Leslie Shear 

Jr. in classical art and archaeology 

and Yoshiaki Shimizu in Japanese. 

With enormous dedication, Bucky 

has served the department for 42 

years, Yoshi for 26 years, and they 

will be greatly missed. Sadly, more 

retirements are on the horizon. 

Next spring is the final term 

for three mainstays of the 

department—Pat Brown, 

Willy Childs, and Danny 

Ćurčić. 

A primary initiative of 

President Tilghman is to offer Princeton 

students international experience, and 

the department has contributed 

significantly to this goal. With support 

from such programs as Hellenic studies 

and Latin American studies, we sent seminars to 

Corfu last fall, to study early modern art with Pat 

Brown and Christopher Heuer, and to Mexico this 

spring, to study Pre-Columbian art with Bryan 

Just. Further trips to Rhodes, Sicily, and Rome are 

planned for our students next year. We also moved 

around this country: John Pinto and Esther da 

Costa Meyer took their seminar on 18th-century 

architecture to Virginia last fall to examine the 

work of Thomas Jefferson, and Esther will lead her 

seminar on global cities to New Orleans this spring 

to investigate post-Katrina reconstruction. In 

addition, we continue to support a few majors each 

year in museum internships abroad. 

Intellectual life in the department also 

remained vibrant. With Yve-Alain Bois, our 

colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study, 

Christopher Heuer designed a scintillating lecture 

series titled “Art as Knowledge” that brought to 

Princeton such luminaries as Joseph Leo Koerner 

of Harvard, Michael Fried of Johns Hopkins, 

and Zainab Bahrani of Columbia. The Index of 

Christian Art was active, too, with international 

conferences on Byzantine art in the fall and 

on Gothic this spring. Not to be 

outdone, the ever-busy Tang Center 

hosted a large conference on 

contemporary Chinese American 

art to complement a show on the 

same subject, “Outside In,” curated 

by Jerome Silbergeld at the Princeton 

University Art Museum, 

and the Tang Center 

feted Yoshi Shimizu 

with a scholarly 

gathering in honor 

of his work in April. 

Finally, our graduate 

students organized no 

fewer than two scholarly gatherings 

this spring: a small colloquium 

on postwar sculpture, keynoted 

by Anne Wagner of Berkeley, and a 

large conference of graduate students from across 

the land, titled “Copy That! Reproduction and 

Pedagogy.” 

After four years of many changes in the 

department, I am stepping down as chair, to be 

succeeded, I am delighted to report, by Thomas 

Leisten. Thank you for your interest and support. 

Hal Foster, chair 

2 

s p r i n g 2009 

Inside 

facult y news 

8 

Visual arts facult y 

11 

graduate student news 

15 

thesis prizes, dissertations 

16 

undergraduate news 

20 

seminar study trips 

22 

lectures, conferences, 

symposiums 

24 

tang center 

26 

marquand library 

28 

Visual resources collection 

30 

index of christian art 

32 

excaVations 

34 

news from alumni

Robert Bagley, Max Loehr and the 

Study of Chinese Bronzes: Style and 

Classification in the History of Art 

Patricia Fortini Brown et al., Paolo 

Veronese and San Sebastiano, Save 

Venice 2008 supplement 

2 

Rachael Z. DeLue et al., Fight the 

Power! The Spike Lee Reader 

Faculty News 

Robert Bagley has just finished an article on the 

methods used to execute the decoration of Chinese 

bronzes that should be published in the 2009 

volume of Artibus Asiae. His new book Max Loehr 

and the Study of Chinese Bronzes: Style and Classification 

in the History of Art (Cornell East Asia Series, 

2008) uses Chinese bronzes as a vehicle for examining 

more general questions of art-historical method. 

His article “Interpreting Prehistoric Designs,” a critique 

of Ernst Gombrich’s Sense of Order, appeared 

last year in the Warburg Institute Colloquium volume 

titled Iconography without Texts. 

In June of 2009 Bagley will deliver a paper 

titled “Gombrich among the Egyptians” at another 

Warburg colloquium, this one in honor of Gombrich’s 

centenary. Later in the year he will give a 

keynote lecture on the origin of the chromatic 

scale at an international conference on East Asian 

music at the University of Hong Kong. On the 

back burner, and likely to stay there for a while, 

is a paper on the archaeology of the mandate of 

heaven. In the 2009–10 academic year, in addition 

to his usual courses on Chinese archaeology, 

Bagley will offer a freshman seminar on metals 

in art and a 400-level seminar on ornament. Last 

spring he spoke at and greatly enjoyed a conference 

at Princeton on the Erligang civilization organized 

by graduate student Kyle Steinke and sponsored by 

the Tang Center. 

Patricia Fortini Brown continues to work on two 

book projects: The Venetian Wife: The Marriage of 

Giulia Bembo and Count Girolamo Della Torre, a 

microhistory of the marriage of a Friulian nobleman 

and the daughter of a Venetian patrician, and 

Venice outside Venice, a book on the artistic and cultural 

geography of the Venetian empire. Last fall 

she co-taught a seminar with Christopher Heuer, 

“The Island of Corfu,” which included a student 

trip to Athens and Corfu sponsored by the Program 

in Hellenic Studies (for more about this seminar, 

see page 20). In fall 2009, she will co-teach a similar 

course with John Pinto on the islands of Rhodes 

and Malta. 

During the past year, Brown gave a number 

of lectures on the Renaissance child: the Harvey 

Buchanan Lecture in Art History and the Humanities 

at Case Western Reserve University and the 

Cleveland Museum of Art, the Center for Medieval 

and Renaissance Studies Lecture at Saint Louis 

University, and the Devens Lecture at the Museum 

of Fine Arts, Boston. Invited to deliver the George 

Levitine Lecture in Art History at the Middle 

Atlantic Symposium in March 2009, she presented 

her current research interests in a lecture titled 

“Venice outside Venice: Toward a Cultural Geography 

of the Venetian Republic.” 

Her recent publications include “The Exemplary 

Life of Giulia Bembo Della Torre,” in 

Philanagnostes: Studi in onore di Marino Zorzi 

(Istituto Ellenico di Studi Bizantini, Venice, and 

Universität zu Köln, 2008); “Veronese’s Patrons,” 

in Paolo Veronese and San Sebastiano, Save Venice, 

2008 supplement; and “Where the Money Flows: 

Art Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Venice,” in Titian, 

Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, 

edited by Frederick Ilchman ’90 (Museum of Fine 

Arts, Boston, 2009). Brown serves on the executive 

committee of the Program in Hellenic Studies and 

on the board of trustees of Save Venice. 

Rachael Z. DeLue taught an undergraduate survey 

of African American art and a graduate/undergraduate 

seminar on the idea of race in American art and 

visual culture this spring. Her most recent publication, 

the essay titled “Envisioning Race in Spike 

Lee’s Bamboozled,” appeared in Fight the Power! The 

Spike Lee Reader (Peter Lang, 2009). With Allison 

Morehead of Queens University, she co-chaired a 

session at the 2009 meeting of the College Art 

Association on “The Uses of Pathology.” In addition, 

she presented a paper titled “Neither Here nor 

There: China, Global Culture, and the End of 

American Art” at “ARTiculations,” a symposium 

organized by the Tang Center for East Asian Art, 

in conjunction with the exhibition “Outside In: 

Chinese × American × Contemporary Art” at the 

Princeton University Art Museum. She is currently 

preparing an essay on art and science in America for 

a special issue of the journal American Art, which 

will appear this summer. Perhaps most importantly, 

DeLue and her husband, Erik, celebrated the arrival 

of their son, Asher Dylan DeLue, who was born on 

June 5, 2008. 

Christopher Heuer has published The City 

Rehearsed: Object, Architecture, and Print in the 

Worlds of Hans Vredeman de Vries (Routledge, 2009), 

the first sustained study of Vredeman in English, 

which offers a new perspective on printed architecture 

in early modern Europe. The book was 

supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation 

for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. In November, 

Heuer lectured on “‘Mal’occhio’: Looking 

Awry at the Renaissance” at the Courtauld Institute 

of Art. In May, he will speak at “New Urbanism 

and the Grid: The Low Countries in International 

Context. Exchanges in Theory and Practice, 1550– 

1800” in Antwerp. Heuer will spend his sabbatical 

year 2009–10 in Berlin and Williamstown, Massachusetts, 

part of it as a Fellow at the Sterling and 

spring 2009

Francine Clark Art Institute, where he will continue 

work on two new projects: a long essay on how art 

moved in early modern Europe and a book on performance 

and German art history. 

In 2008, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann was elected 

vice president of the National Committee for the 

History of Art. He was awarded a Netherlands 

Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship and a 

Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy 

in Berlin for fall 2009 and spring 2010. Because 

the department will be short-handed in the spring 

term, he will forego the spring fellowships and will 

return to Princeton to teach. 

Together with Thomas Gaehtgens of the 

Getty Research Institute, he organized sessions on 

art history as an emerging discipline at the Getty 

Research Institute and the 2009 College Art Association 

annual meeting; these sessions involved 

scholars from Nigeria, Brazil, Ecuador, Turkey, 

India, and China. He also participated in a seminar 

on Dutch art and commerce in the Indian 

Ocean and East Asia at the Netherlands Institute 

for Advanced Study in October 2008. 

In 2008, Kaufmann published the essays “The 

Geography of Art: Historiography, Issues, Perspectives,” 

in World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and 

Approaches (Valiz, 2008); and “Art and the Church 

in the Early Modern Era: The Baltic in Comparative 

Perspective,” in Art and the Church: Religious 

Art and Architecture in the Baltic Region in the 

13th–18th Centuries/Kunst und Kirche: Kirchliche 

Kunst und Architektur in der baltischen Region im 

13.–18. Jahrhundert (Tallinn, Eesti Kunstiakadeemia, 

2008). His article “Reflections on Art and 

Democracy in (East) Central Europe” appeared in 

Centropa 8:1 (2008). 

He also contributed essays and entries to 

exhibition catalogues, including “Repräsentieren, 

Rezipieren, Reproduzieren: Herrscherporträts der 

Renaissance,” in Drei Fürstenbildnisse: Meisterwerke 

der Representatio Maiestatis der Renaissance (Staatliche 

Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, 2008); with 

Heiner Borggrefe, “Rottenhammer Zeichnungen,” 

in Hans Rottenhammer: begehrt, vergessen, neu 

entdeckt (Hirmer, 2008); and Encompassing the 

Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th 

Centuries (Smithsonian Institution, 2008). He is 

currently on the committee for an upcoming 

exhibition devoted to Hans von Aachen. 

During the course of the year Kaufmann 

gave lectures on a variety of topics at the Busch- 

Reisinger Museum at Harvard University; the 

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; the Universidade 

Nova and Museu de Arte Antiga in 

Lisbon, Portugal; the Goethe Institut/Consortium 

of Universities of São Paulo, Brazil; the 

Instituto Brasileiro-Alemão in Recife, Brazil; the 

Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar; 

and the Université de Montréal. He was 

spring 2009 

Department faculty. Front row, left to right: Hal 

Foster, Yoshiaki Shimizu, Rachael DeLue, Patricia 

Fortini Brown, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Esther da Costa 

Meyer; middle row, left to right: Andrew Watsky, 

Bridget Alsdorf, John Pinto, Molly Warnock, Anne 

McCauley, Deborah Vischak, Jerome Silbergeld; 

back row, left to right: Thomas Leisten, Thomas 

DaCosta Kaufmann, Christopher Heuer (not 

pictured: Robert Bagley, William Childs, Slobodan 

Ćurčić, Brigid Doherty, Hugo Meyer, T. Leslie Shear Jr., 

Nino Zchomelidse) 

the keynote speaker at the Osmosis Conference 

at the Rijksuniversiteit Leiden and at the conferences 

“Cultural Transfer in the Age of Charles the 

Bold” at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and 

“The Low Countries at the Crossroads,” at the 

Catholic University, Leuven, Belgium. Kaufmann 

served on the board of directors and the nominating 

committee of the College Art Association and 

was a selector for the Meiss Publications Fund. He 

was also named to a fellowship committee which 

awards the large grants given by the newly founded 

European Research Council. 

Thomas Leisten served on the board of trustees of 

the Qatar Museum Authority again this year, acting 

as adviser throughout the planning and construction 

of the Qatar Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. 

He took part in the inauguration of the new 

museum last November and is now advising the 

authority during the planning stages of a new 

National Museum of Qatar, which will be housed 

in a building designed by Jean Nouvel, as well as a 

new museum of Orientalist and modern art, 

designed by Herzog and de Meuron. In addition to 

directing Princeton’s excavations at Bālis in Syria, 

Leisten is currently beginning a joint excavation, 

with Miami University, at the site of Jurash in the 

southwestern corner of Saudi Arabia, on the Yemeni 

border. Located on the major trade route between 

Aden, Yemen, and the Levant, Jurash was one of the 

Christopher Heuer, The City 

Rehearsed: Object, Architecture, 

and Print in the Worlds of Hans 

Vredeman de Vries 

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann et al., 

Drei Fürstenbildnisse: Meisterwerke 

der Representatio Maiestatis der 

Renaissance 

3 

John Blazejewski

4 

Anne McCauley et al., More Than 

One: Photographs in Sequence 

Hugo Meyer et al., Thiasos: 

Festschrift für Erwin Pochmarski 

Chika Okeke-Agulu et al., Sacred 

Waters: Arts of Mami Wata and 

Other Divinities in Africa and the 

Diaspora 

first cities to embrace Islam and played an 

important role in the Islamic history of the Arabian 

peninsula. This summer Leisten will begin excavating 

a large pre-Islamic temple/administrative 

complex at the site. 

Anne McCauley published “Francis Bruguiere and 

Lance Sieveking’s Beyond This Point (1929): An 

Experiment in Abstract Photography, Synaesthesia, 

and the Cinematic Book” in More Than One: Photographs 

in Sequence, edited by Joel Smith *01 (Yale 

University Press, 2008), a special issue of the Record 

of the Princeton University Art Museum. Her essay 

“Overexposure: Thoughts on the Triumph of Photography” 

appeared in The Meaning of Photography 

(Yale University Press, 2008). McCauley’s forthcoming 

articles include “Secret Seraglios: Tracking 

the Female Nude in the History of Nineteenth- 

Century Photography,” in Histoire de l’art du XIXe 

siècle, bilans et perspectives (Ecole du Louvre/Musée 

d’Orsay, in press), and “Alfred Stieglitz’s 

The Steerage: The Making of a Modernist Myth,” 

for a book on The Steerage, in the series Defining 

Moments in American Photography edited by 

Anthony Lee and published by the University of 

California Press. 

This year she gave the papers “From Cole to 

Coomaraswamy: Characterizing Early Museum 

Collections of Photography” at the symposium 

“Collections of Photography: From Strategies to 

Policies,” organized by the Thessaloniki Museum 

of Photography in Greece, and “Boston Gets Its 

Brahmin: Ananda Coomaraswamy and the American 

Cult for India” at the conference “Inventing 

Asia: A Symposium on American Perceptions and 

Influences around 1900” at the Isabella Stewart 

Gardner Museum. 

In the spring McCauley taught a new 400level 

seminar, “Inventing Mass Photography in the 

Collodion Era,” which included a collodion workshop 

presented by France Scully Osterman, in 

which students learned how to make ambrotypes 

and tintypes by pouring their own collodion plates 

and exposing them in a view camera. As departmental 

representative, she hosted an event for 

potential majors in art and archaeology at which 

she presented a gallery talk in the exhibition 

“Body Memory” in the Princeton University 

Art Museum. 

Hugo Meyer published the articles “Albrecht Dürer 

and the American War of Independence: A Chat on 

Joseph Plumb Martin,” in Antike Lebenswelten: 

Konstanz, Wandel, Wirkungsmacht. Festschrift für 

Ingomar Weiler zum 70. Geburtstag (Harrassowitz, 

2008), and “Polykleitos on Fingernails and Clay: 

On the Meaning of the Artist’s Puzzling Dictum, 

and Echoes of It, from Horace to Morelli and Beazley,” 

in Thiasos: Festschrift für Erwin Pochmarski 

(Phoibos, 2008). He also completed the manuscripts 

of two shorter books: The Females’ Share and 

Gods of Marriage in Greek and Roman Figural Narratives 

and Interpretations of the Past: An Art History of 

Photography in Athens between 1839 and 1875. The 

second and third parts of his multi-volume book 

project, History of Roman Art in Case Studies: Art 

and Politics–Religion and Mnemonic Culture, are 

ready for the press. He is continuing work on two 

long-term book projects: A Buoyant Mind. Aspects of 

Einstein’s Exchange with Mileva Marić and Johanna 

Fantova, based largely on archival materials in 

Princeton and Munich, and The Upper Adriatic: A 

Cultural Intersection. His earlier work on Attica will 

be part of a collaborative project on Greek portraiture 

of the Roman East. In June 2008, Meyer 

lectured on “Herodes Atticus: A Greek 2nd-Century 

Tycoon Competing with Roman Emperors” at the 

University of Vienna. 

Chika Okeke-Agulu served as chair of the visual 

and performing arts sub-theme and as program 

committee member of the African Studies Association 

Annual Conference, and was elected to the 

board of the Arts Council of the African Studies 

Association. In October, he presented the paper 

“The Politics of Form: Uche Okeke’s Illustrations 

for Achebe’s Things Fall Apart” at the “Things Fall 

Apart at 50” symposium at the University of London. 

He also spoke at “The Essential Art of African 

Textiles: Design Without End” panel at the Metropolitan 

Museum of Art in October, and returned to 

the Met in November to hold a public conversation 

with the artist El Anatsui. In February, Okeke- 

Agulu was part of the panel “Custom Markets, 

Custom Alternatives: Perspectives on Contemporary 

Practice in Africa” at the Experts Forum of 

ARCO-Madrid in Spain, and he was a presenter at 

the “Repatriation of African Art” panel organized 

by the Rutgers School of Law and the New Jersey 

Art Law Society. This May, he will speak at the discussion 

panel on the exhibition “Unbounded: New 

Art for a New Century” at the Newark Museum. 

His most recent publication is “Jack Akpan’s 

Mammy Water,” in Sacred Waters: Arts of Mami 

Wata and Other Divinities in Africa and the 

Diaspora, edited by Henry John Drewal (Indiana 

University Press, 2008). 

In the fall, together with Professor Esther da Costa 

Meyer, John Pinto offered a seminar on 18th- 

century architecture. Over the fall break, the group 

visited Virginia to study the work of Thomas Jefferson 

at Monticello, Charlottesville, and Poplar 

Forest. In January he participated in a conference 

on archaeology in the bay of Naples at the National 

Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In April, at the 

annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, 

he co-chaired, with Heather Hyde Minor 

*02, a session titled “Speaking Ruins”; one of the 

speakers was Professor Christopher Heuer. In June, 

Pinto will participate in an international conference 

on the 18th-century architect Nicola Michetti in 

Tallin, Estonia. 

spring 2009

Jerome Silbergeld published his third and final 

book on Chinese cinema, Body in Question: Image 

and Illusion in Two Chinese Films by Director Jiang 

Wen (Princeton University Press, 2008), examining 

director Jiang’s In the Heat of the Sun, which swept 

the Chinese film awards for 1994, and his bannedin-China 

Devils on the Doorstep, the Golden Palm 

award winner at Cannes in 2000. Silbergeld was 

also the principal author of the catalogue Outside 

In: Chinese × American × Contemporary Art (Yale 

University Press, 2009), which accompanied the 

exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum 

in March–June 2009, for which he was guest 

curator. The related international symposium, 

“ARTiculations,” organized by the Tang Center for 

East Asian Art, featured presentations by all six artists 

in the exhibition as well as leading scholars in 

contemporary Chinese art. Silbergeld published a 

book chapter, “Three Paradigms for the Consideration 

of Authenticity in Chinese Art,” in Perspectives 

on Connoisseurship of Chinese Painting (New Academia, 

2008), and a catalogue essay, “Words, 

Words, Words: The Madness of Xu Bing,” in 

Reading Space: The Art of Xu Bing (Colgate 

University, 2009). 

Silbergeld gave lectures and conference papers 

at Harvard University (twice), the Phoenix Art 

Museum, Ditchley Park (England), the University 

Art Museum at Berkeley, Colgate University, and 

the Peabody Essex Museum. He also organized a 

panel for the Association of Asian Studies annual 

conference on “Beijing in the Shadow of Globalization: 

The Reshaping of Urban Space in 

Contemporary Chinese Art, Architecture, Film, 

and Literature,” and he presented a paper at that 

session. 

During the year, he served on the editorial 

board of Archives of Asian Art, chaired the gallery 

committee of Asia Society in New York, chaired 

Asia Society’s committee on collecting contemporary 

art, sat on the China Institute’s gallery 

committee, and directed Princeton’s Tang Center 

for East Asian Art. He is organizing an exhibition 

of documentary photography from China from the 

years 1951–2003, scheduled to open at China 

Institute in October 2009, with a symposium 

organized by the Tang Center to be held at 

Princeton on October 24, 2009. 

Nino Zchomelidse spent the 2008–09 academic 

year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual 

Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, 

D.C., where she was a Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow. 

At the center, she continued work on a book 

on the medieval image and concepts of authenticity. 

Related to this project is an article that she recently 

completed, “The Aura of the Numinous and Its 

Reproduction: Medieval Paintings of the Savior in 

Rome and Latium.” She is also completing the 

manuscript of her new book, Art and Ritual: The 

spring 2009 

Construction of Civic Identity in Medieval Campania. 

With Giovanni Freni of the Index of Christian Art, 

she is coediting an anthology, Meaning in Motion: 

Semantics of Movement in Medieval Art and Architecture, 

to which she contributed a chapter titled 

“Descending Word and Resurrecting Christ: The 

Exultet Rolls in Southern Italy.” Zchomelidse gave 

lectures this year at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in 

Rome, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual 

Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Columbia University, 

the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in 

Munich, and the Eberhard-Karls-Universität in 

Tübingen. 

Emeritus Faculty 

Peter Bunnell contributed the preface to the exhibition 

catalogue Eye, Mind, Spirit: The Enduring 

Legacy of Minor White, edited by Nathan Lyons 

(Howard Greenberg Gallery, 2008). He also published 

an article titled “A Magazine in the Making” 

in Aperture (winter, 2008). The exhibition and 

the article on the first issue of Aperture, which was 

edited by Minor White, honored the 100th anniversary 

of his birth. White’s archive is housed in the 

Princeton University Art Museum. Bunnell continues 

on a consulting basis in the Princeton University 

Art Museum and is also supervising the dissertation 

of one graduate student. 

During the past year James Marrow published a 

monograph on a previously unknown Book of 

Hours by Simon Bening, the best-known Flemish 

manuscript painter of the first half of the 16th century, 

now in the Kolumba Museum, the art 

museum of the archbishopric of Cologne: Das Stundenbuch 

der Doña Isabel, Sammlung Renate König 

6 (Kolumba, 2008). He also contributed the chapter 

“Inventing the Passion in the Late Middle Ages” 

to The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to 

Social Drama, edited by Marcia Kupfer (Pennsylvania 

State University Press, 2008) and wrote entries 

for the catalogue of an exhibition at the State 

Library of Victoria, The Medieval Imagination: Illuminated 

Manuscripts from Cambridge, Australia and 

New Zealand, edited by Bronwyn Stocks and Nigel 

Morgan (Macmillan Publishers and the State 

Library of Victoria, 2008). 

John Wilmerding taught a lecture course on 20thcentury 

American art during the spring 2008 

semester, filling in for Professor Rachael DeLue, 

who was on leave. This spring he is again teaching 

as an adjunct, this time an American studies seminar 

on 19th-century American art, history, and 

literature. He recently led the successful search for a 

new director of the Princeton University Art 

Museum, which brought James Steward of the 

University of Michigan to campus. 

Wilmerding’s recent publications include a 

major monograph, Tom Wesselmann: His Voice and 

Jerome Silbergeld, Body in 

Question: Image and Illusion in Two 

Chinese Films by Director Jiang Wen 

Peter Bunnell et al., Eye, Mind, 

Spirit: The Enduring Legacy of 

Minor White 

The betrayal of Christ in a 

previously unknown Book of 

Hours by Simon Bening recently 

published by James Marrow in 

Das Stundenbuch der Doña Isabel 

5

6 

John Wilmerding, Tom 

Wesselmann: His Voice and Vision 

Bridget Alsdorf et al., The 

Guggenheim Museum Collection: 

A to Z 

Chika Okeke-Agulu et al., The 

Nsukka Artists and Nigerian 

Contemporary Art 

Vision (Rizzoli, 2008), and an article on Andrew 

Wyeth’s Snow Hill for the “Weekend Masterpiece” 

series in the Wall Street Journal. He is the coorganizer 

of a large retrospective of Robert 

Indiana’s later career to be shown at the Farnsworth 

Museum in Rockland, Maine, this summer. He is 

also engaged in longer-term research for a small 

exhibition at Olana in Hudson, New York, on 

Frederic Church’s drawings done in Maine. 

Wilmerding’s lectures around the 

country this year included the Clarice 

Smith Distinguished Lecture at the 

Smithsonian American Art 

Museum. 

During the year he completed 

his terms as a 

commissioner of the National 

Portrait Gallery in Washington 

and as a member of the White 

House Preservation Committee. 

He was elected to the American 

Philosophical Society and appointed 

to the board of the new Crystal Bridges 

Museum of American Art in Bentonville, 

Arkansas. He continues to serve as chairman 

of the National Gallery of Art’s board of 

trustees, and on the executive committees of the 

Guggenheim Museum and the Wyeth Foundation 

for American Art. 

New Faculty 

Bridget Alsdorf, who specializes in European art of 

the 19th and early 20th centuries, with an emphasis 

on art produced in France from the Second Empire 

to World War I, joined the department last fall as 

an assistant professor. She was educated at Yale University, 

where she earned a B.A. in art history, and 

at the University of California–Berkeley, where she 

received her Ph.D. in 2008. Her dissertation, “The 

Art of Association: Fantin-Latour and the Modern 

Group Portrait,” examines problems of individuality 

and collectivity in the group portraits of 

Henri Fantin-Latour and related works by Courbet, 

Manet, Degas, and Bazille. She is currently revising 

the manuscript for publication, as well as pursuing 

related research on the politics of revival of Dutch 

Baroque art in 19th-century France. 

In 2006–08, Alsdorf was the Chester Dale 

Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the 

Visual Arts in Washington, D.C. Previously, her 

work was funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship 

in Humanistic Studies, a Luce Foundation 

Fellowship, and a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship. She 

also has a background in curatorial work at several 

museums, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim 

Museum in New York, where, in addition to holding 

various curatorial positions, she served as 

co-author and head of research for The Guggenheim 

Museum Collection: A to Z (2001; revised edition, 

2003). 

Her article on Nicolas Poussin and Benjaminian 

allegory, “Pleasure’s Poise: Classicism and 

Baroque Allegory in Poussin’s Dance to the Music of 

Time,” was recently published in the journal The 

Seventeenth Century. She has submitted two additional 

articles for publication—one on Cézanne’s 

late still lifes and their metaphorical 

manipulation of scale and interior 

space, and another on Delacroix’s 

ambivalence toward 

photography in the age of 

art’s “vulgarization.” 

Alsdorf’s current 

research centers on the 

art and writings of the 

late-19th-century Swiss 

artist Félix Vallotton, with 

a particular focus on his 

paintings and woodcuts of 

urban crowds. She will present 

this research at the Courtauld 

Institute in June, and will spend time 

in Lausanne this summer exploring the 

Vallotton archives. She is also organizing a panel on 

“Modernism and Collectivism” for the 2010 meeting 

of the College Art Association. 

Her teaching this year has ranged from an 

introductory survey of 19th-century European art 

to a graduate seminar on crowd pictures and crowd 

theory, circa 1848–1914. This spring, she introduced 

a new course on representations of 

masculinity in modernity, cross-listed with the 

Program in the Study of Women and Gender, as 

well as a 400-level seminar, “Self and Society in 

19th-Century French Painting.” 

Bridget Alsdorf 

Chika Okeke-Agulu, who joined the department 

last fall, specializes in classical, modern, and contemporary 

African and African Diaspora art history 

and theory. He holds a joint appointment with 

Princeton’s Center for African American Studies. 

Okeke-Agulu has previously taught at the Pennsylvania 

State University and Emory University, as 

well as in Nigeria, and has been Robert Sterling 

Clark Visiting Professor of Art History at Williams 

College. He holds a B.A. and M.F.A. from the 

University of Nigeria, Nsukka, an M.A. from the 

University of South Florida, and a Ph.D. from 

Emory University. 

His academic awards include the Richard 

A. Horovitz Fund for Professional Development 

Award, the Arts Council of the African Studies 

Association Roy Sieber Dissertation Award, and the 

Roy C. Buck Award. In 2008 he was a Clark Fellow 

at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. 

Okeke-Agulu has curated many exhibitions, 

including the Nigerian section of the First Johannesburg 

Biennale (1995). With Okwui Enwezor, he 

spring 2009

Chika Okeke-Agulu 

co-organized “The Short Century: Independence 

and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994” 

(2001), which was shown in Munich, Berlin, 

Chicago, and New York. He was an academic consultant 

for Platform 4 of Documenta 11 in Kassel 

(2002) and is currently co-curating “Who Knows 

Tomorrow,” an exhibition of large-scale projects by 

five African artists at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin 

next spring. 

As an artist, he has had more than 35 oneperson 

and group exhibitions in Africa, Europe, 

the United States, and Asia. His work will be 

shown in a major exhibition of the AKA Circle of 

Exhibiting Artists in Nigeria later this year. 

Okeke-Agulu has given invited 

lectures and conference papers in 

Nigeria, Austria, Britain, Germany, 

Sweden, and the United 

States. His articles and reviews 

have appeared in the journals 

African Arts; Art South Africa; 

The Eye: A Journal of Contemporary 

Art; Feminism, Race, 

Transnationalism; Glendora 

Review; Meridians; Nka: Journal 

of Contemporary African Art; and 

others, as well as in volumes including 

Reading the Contemporary: African 

Art from Theory to the Market Place (1999), 

The Nsukka Artists and Nigerian Contemporary 

Art (2002), and Is Art History Global? (2007). 

With Okwui Enwezor, he is currently writing a 

book titled Contemporary African Art Since 1980, 

and he also is co-editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary 

African Art. 

This year Okeke-Agulu taught courses on the 

classical and traditional arts of the Yoruba and 

Igbo, on art and apartheid in South Africa, and on 

modern and contemporary African art. Next fall he 

will teach seminars on “post-Black” African American 

art, and on art and the life cycle in Africa. In 

conjunction with the latter course, he and Holly 

Ross are co-organizing “Life Objects,” the first 

African art exhibition at the Princeton University 

Art Museum, which will open in September. 

spring 2009 

Andrew Watsky returned to Princeton last fall as a 

professor of Japanese art, after 14 years on the faculty 

at Vassar College, where he taught both 

Japanese and Chinese art history. Watsky received 

his B.A. from Oberlin College and his M.A. and 

Ph.D. from Princeton, where he was the first student 

to complete a dissertation under Professor 

Yoshiaki Shimizu. His publications, which have 

focused on Japanese art of the Momoyama period— 

roughly the late 16th through the early 17th 

century—examine a range of issues, including how 

meaning is expressed in Japanese art, the role of the 

sacred, and the tea ritual. He also has an interest in 

recent Japanese art, which stems from his earlier 

career at a contemporary art gallery in Tokyo. 

Watsky’s book Chikubushima: Deploying the 

Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan (University of 

Washington Press, 2004) examined an exquisitely 

decorated lacquered wooden building hidden 

inside an older structure on a sacred island in a 

lake north of Kyoto, crossing traditional boundaries 

of art-historical research and decoding clues 

that had eluded scholars for centuries. The book 

was awarded the biennial Shimada Prize in 2006 

as an outstanding publication on the history of 

East Asian art, and, in the same year, the John 

Whitney Hall Book Prize for an outstanding 

English-language book 

on Japan or Korea. Watsky’s 

scholarship has also appeared 

in the journals Archives of 

Asian Art, Art History, and 

Monumenta Nipponica. 

In 2007–08 he 

received a John Simon 

Guggenheim Memorial 

Foundation Grant to sponsor 

his ongoing research 

project centering on the naming 

of objects of art during the 

Momoyama period, when objects 

including ceramic bowls, tea containers 

and other vessels, and even stones were given 

proper names, granting them a significance that 

often inspired writing. He has also been awarded 

grants by the Social Science Research Council, the 

American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright- 

Hays, the Japan Foundation, and the Tokyo 

National Research Institute of Cultural Properties. 

During the spring 2009 semester, Watsky and 

Professor Shimizu team-taught a course on the arts 

of Rinpa, a school of painting and applied arts that 

flourished during the Edo period (1615–1868). 

Watsky also co-organized and spoke at the two-day 

symposium honoring Shimizu’s career. 

Also active in the museum world, both as a 

graduate student and at Vassar, Watsky is serving 

as a faculty adviser to the Princeton University Art 

Museum. He is also the department’s director of 

graduate studies. 

Andrew Watsky 

The Short Century: Independence 

and Liberation Movements in 

Africa, 1945–1994, catalogue of 

the exhibition co-organized by 

Chika Okeke-Agulu 

Andrew Watsky, Chikubushima: 

Deploying the Sacred Arts in 

Momoyama Japan 

Andrew Watsky et al., Location 

7

8 

Ann Agee, Inspecting Romance, 

ceramic, 2008 

Eve Aschheim, Floe, oil and 

graphite on canvasboard, 2008 

Kip Deeds, Stuffing, acrylic paint, 

wood, and collage on panel, 2009 

Program in Visual Arts Faculty 

Ceramacist Ann Agee participated in the group 

exhibition “Dirt on Delight,” curated by Ingrid 

Schaffner and Jennelle Porter, at the Institute of 

Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. In July 2009 

the show will move to the Walker Art Museum 

in Minneapolis. Her work was also shown 

at the Katonah Museum of Art exhibition 

“Conversations in Clay” (October 2008– 

January 2009), and she gave a talk on her 

work at the School of Visual Arts in New York. 

In the summer of 2010 she will participate in a 

show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

Eve Aschheim, a painter who teaches painting 

and drawing, had a solo exhibition at the Weatherspoon 

Art Museum in Greensboro, North 

Carolina, in 2008, as the Falk Visiting Artist at 

the University of North Carolina–Greensboro. 

She participated in group exhibitions, including 

“Drawn by New York: Six Centuries of Watercolors 

and Drawings at the New-York Historical 

Society” and “The Sarah-Ann and Werner H. 

Kramarsky Gift of Contemporary Drawings,” at 

Southern Methodist University in Dallas, both 

accompanied by catalogues. In 2008 Aschheim 

was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. 

Her work is included in 560 Broadway: A New 

York Drawing Collection at Work, 1991–2006 (Yale 

University Press, 2008). Her interviews with photographer 

Seton Smith and Princeton colleague 

John O’Connor appeared in the Brooklyn Rail 

(February and September 2008). “In Conversation: 

Richard Artschwager with John Yau and Eve 

Aschheim” appeared in the Brooklyn Rail for July– 

August 2008. This spring, she was a guest lecturer 

at the University of California–Davis. 

Ben Coonley taught “Introductory Video” in fall 

2008 as a visiting lecturer. In January 2008 he 

presented a site-specific performance at the New 

Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. His 

works were also screened at a number of festivals 

and screening series, including the Fuse Box Festival 

in Austin, the Cinematexas Film Festival’s 

“Viking Funeral,” and the Glasslands Gallery in 

Brooklyn. A program of films and videos he cocurated 

with artist Michael Smith was presented 

at Light Industry in Brooklyn. In October, he 

delivered a guest lecture at the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign. 

He also directed the 

legendary New York City subway–advertising dermatologist 

Jonathan Zizmor in a video trailer 

commissioned by the final New York Underground 

Film Festival. ARTnews for November 

2008 has an article on his Internet videos and 

performance pieces. One of Coonley’s video 

installations was on view in “I Like Winners: Sport 

and Selfhood” in January–February 2009 at the 

Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery at the University of 

Nevada–Reno, and in January he presented a program 

of his work at the Austin Film Society. 

In 2008 printmaker Kip Deeds participated in five 

group exhibitions and received awards in shows at 

the State Museum of Pennsylvania and the Woodmere 

Museum in Philadelphia. In March 2009 

he had a solo exhibit of prints at H&F Fine Arts 

in suburban Washington, D.C. Deeds was also 

included in a group exhibition of etchings at the 

Free Library of Philadelphia in March 2009; the 

library purchased two of his prints in 2008. Deeds 

taught printmaking and drawing last summer at 

the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan. 

From December 2008 through January 2009, he 

was a resident artist at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, 

New York. 

Nathaniel Dorsky, the avant-garde filmmaker, 

taught two courses as a visiting professor during 

the fall semester. In his “Poetic Form in Cinema” 

course, students collaborated to produce a “Ranga” 

film, inspired by Japanese linked poetry. Dorsky’s 

new films Sarabande and Winter were shown at 

the New York, London, and Toronto film festivals. 

While on the Princeton faculty, he was invited to 

lecture at Harvard, Yale, and the Tate Modern in 

London. 

Su Friedrich is in the post-production stage of a 

feature-length documentary, tentatively titled Life 

Takes Over, about the destruction of her Brooklyn 

neighborhood, Williamsburg, by massive condo 

developments. This spring she was in Argentina for 

a retrospective of her work at the Buenos Aires Festival 

of Independent Cinema, and in Troy, New 

York, for a screening of her most recent film, From 

the Ground Up, a documentary about coffee. Her 

1996 film, Hide and Seek, a fiction/documentary 

mix about lesbians when they were children, will 

be screened in 10 venues throughout Mexico this 

spring as part of the Ambulante film festival. The 

Ties That Bind, her 1984 documentary about her 

mother’s experiences growing up in Germany during 

World War II, was shown at the New York 

Public Library as part of an exhibition of works 

by artists who have been residents at the Yaddo 

arts colony. In 2008, Friedrich was a visiting artist 

at Oberlin College, the University of Toledo, the 

University of Tennessee, and Hunter College. 

Emmet Gowin’s monograph Emmet Gowin: Photographs 

(Knopf, 1976) has been reissued by the 

German publisher Steidl, in cooperation with 

spring 2009

Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York. The Pace/ 

MacGill Gallery celebrated the reissue with an 

exhibition of his original prints from the 1970s. 

He also participated in two collaborative exhibitions 

with his son, Elijah, who is an associate 

professor of photography at the University of 

Missouri–Kansas City. In January, the Page Bond 

Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, exhibited their 

photographs from the book Maggie (Tin Roof 

Press, 2008), which honors a 98-year-old aunt, 

Margaret Cooper. Their second show, “Pull of 

Gravity,” at the Griffin Museum of Photography 

in Winchester, Massachusetts, in January–March 

2009, exhibited aerial photographs from Emmet 

Gowin: Changing the Earth (Yale University Press, 

2002), including his images of the Nevada Test 

Site, and Elijah Gowin’s recent photo-based works 

from the series “Of Falling and Floating.” 

Painter Brian Jermusyk participated in “The 

Face,” a group exhibition at the ’temporary 

Museum of Painting in Brooklyn in April 2008. 

The work of ceramicist and sculptor Steve Keister 

was included in “Angels in America,” a group 

exhibition at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago 

last September. “The Flying Saucer Project” 

was shown in “Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone” 

at the New Museum, and another work was part 

of a group exhibition at 303 Gallery in Chelsea 

(January–February 2009). Keister was a featured 

artist in Herb and Dorothy, a documentary about 

Dorothy and Herbert Vogel and their collection of 

contemporary art. As part of a gift program, Dorothy 

and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works 

for Fifty States, Keister’s work was recently distributed 

to 46 art museums across the country. He has 

been invited to participate in the exhibition 

“Interactions,” in conjunction with the National 

Council on Education at the Ceramic Arts Conference 

in Philadelphia in 2010. 

Jocelyn Lee, who teaches photography, had 

two solo shows this year, one at the University 

of Southern Maine in November, titled “While 

you were dying,” about the death of her mother, 

Andrew Moore, Palace Theater, Gary, Indiana, 2008 

spring 2009 

and another, titled “Feature Photography,” at the 

National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., 

which will be on view through August 2009. She 

was also an artist in residence at the University of 

Southern Maine. 

Photographer Andrew Moore is currently working 

on two projects—one on Detroit, and the 

other on Abu Dhabi—which will be exhibited 

and published in 2009–10. The Detroit project 

depicts a wide array of industrial and commercial 

sites, including the city’s automotive plants, and 

addresses the mythological aspect of decline in this 

American metropolis. In Abu Dhabi, Moore has 

been commissioned by NYU Abu Dhabi to create 

a portrait of the rapidly developing city, which 

will be published in conjunction with the opening 

of the new university in 2010. During the past 

year, Moore had solo shows in Atlanta, San Francisco, 

Nebraska, and Paris; he was represented at 

art fairs in Miami, Paris, Madrid, Los Angeles, and 

New York. He also contributed to Wired, Art and 

Auction, the New York Times Magazine, GEO, and 

other publications. 

In 2008, John J. O’Connor, who teaches painting 

and drawing, had solo exhibitions at Pierogi 

gallery in Brooklyn, and at the Martin Asbaek Gallery 

in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was included in 

“Art on Paper” at the Weatherspoon Art Museum 

in Greensboro, North Carolina, and was awarded 

a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in 

painting. His work was added to the collection of 

the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

Keith Sanborn was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship 

to St. Petersburg, Russia, in the fall of 

2008, where he taught a course on montage at the 

Smolny Institute and researched Russian media. 

He exhibted his video work in Kiev, Antwerp, 

Ghent, Prague, Paris, and New York this year. He 

also showed at the Russian Ethnographic Museum 

in St. Petersburg and the International Film Festival 

in Rotterdam, and performed in Jennifer 

Montgomery’s and Peggy Ahwesh’s “Alcohol, 

Tobacco, and Firearms” at the Whitney Biennial. 

Sanborn’s recent publications include an essay on 

Guy Debord’s In girum imus nocte et consumimur 

igni, in Moving Image Source (www.movingimage 

source.us), the online magazine of the Museum 

of the Moving Image in New York; “Youtube. 

world, or: Jeder Mann sein eigenes Avatar,” in 

Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube (Amsterdam: 

Institute of Network Cultures, 2008); a 

revised translation of Gil J. Wolman’s L’Anticoncept 

for the screening at the Rotterdam International 

Film Festival; and “Five Historical Instances of the 

Impossible,” in Six impossible things to do before 

breakfast, curated by Tanya Leighton, a project of 

Olga Adelantado, supported by the Centro Cultural 

Montehermoso, Spain. 

Emmet Gowin: Photographs, new 

edition, 2009 

Brian Jermusyk, Seated Model V, 

charcoal on paper, 2008 

Steve Keister, Monkey, ceramic, 

2008 

Jocelyn Lee, Pearl Sleeping, 2008 

9

John J. O’Connor, Chest and Back, 

acrylic, watercolor, graphite, and 

colored pencil on paper, 2008 

10 

Gary Schneider, Marvin, 2008 

Joan Waltemath, Hermionine’s 

Tail, oil, fluorescent, and graphite 

pigment on honeycomb 

aluminum panel, 2007–08 

Keith Sanborn, The Force of Beauty: The Beauty of 

Force, video installation, 2008 

Gary Schneider had a solo exhibition, “Flesh: The 

Portraiture of Gary Schneider,” at the Museum 

of Photographic Arts in San Diego, and his work 

appeared in group exhibitions at the Museum of 

Photographic Arts in San Diego; the Museum of 

Fine Arts, Boston; White Columns in New York 

City and the Presentation House Gallery in Vancouver, 

accompanied by a catalogue; the Galerie 

Bleu du Ciel in Lyon, France; the Museo di Roma 

in Trastevere in Rome and the Galleria Carla Sozzani 

in Milan; and the Staller Center for the Arts 

at Stony Brook University. His images were published 

in Harvard Art Museum 

Handbook (Harvard University 

Press, 2008); MFA Highlights: 

Photography (Museum of Fine 

Arts, Boston, 2008); The Theater 

of the Face: Portrait Photography 

Since 1900 (Phaidon, 

2008); New York Magazine; and 

Observer Magazine, London. 

Schneider also gave artist talks at 

the Heckscher Museum of Art 

in Huntington, New York, and 

at the Museum of Photographic 

Arts in San Diego. 

Sculptor James Seawright will 

retire at the end of this academic 

year after teaching at Princeton 

for 40 years. During most of that time he was 

the director of the Program in Visual Arts. Under 

his leadership the building at 185 Nassau Street 

underwent two restorations and expansions, and 

he introduced both tenured and professorial ranks 

to the studio faculty. In September 2008, Seawright 

participated in a group exhibition of the 

American Abstract Artists at the Painting Center 

in New York City, to commemorate the centenary 

of Esphyr Slobodkina, one of the founding members 

of the group. 

P. Adams Sitney directed the Program in Visual 

Arts for a second year while a search continued for 

a permanent director. The publication of his book 

Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the 

Tommy White, Day Dreaming, oil 

on canvas, 2008 

James Seawright, Orbits VII, aluminum and chrome 

steel, 1998 

Heritage of Emerson by Oxford University Press 

(2008) was celebrated with lectures and film 

screenings at Light Industry in Brooklyn and the 

Harvard Film Archive. Sitney was a juror at the 

Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival 

in the Czech Republic. He also published a series 

of feature articles on avant-garde filmmakers in Artforum 

and took a group of Princeton faculty and 

students to the Temenos screenings in Greece in 

June, sponsored by Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund 

fellowships of the Program in Hellenic Studies. 

Painter Joan Waltemath received a Pollock Krasner 

Grant last fall and was awarded residencies at 

the Jentel Foundation in Wyoming and the Bemis 

Center in Omaha, Nebraska, 

where she spent the fall term. 

Her work was shown in 

“Dimensions in Nature: New 

Acquisitions, 2006–8,” at the 

San Diego Museum of Art; 

“Tipping the Balance,” at the 

Drawing Room in East Hampton, 

New York; “A Roller Coaster 

in the Dark,” at Janet Kurnatowski 

in Brooklyn, the Björn 

Ressle Gallery in New York, and 

Southern New Hampshire University. 

Her interviews with 

Michael Corris about his recent 

study of Ad Reinhardt’s oeuvre, 

and with Johanna Pousette-Dart 

about her new works, appeared in the Brooklyn 

Rail. Her critical reviews discussing Rebecca Horn, 

Cora Cohen, and Jose Parla were published in the 

June, November, and winter issues of the Brooklyn 

Rail, respectively. She was a member of Artcritical’s 

review panel at the National Academy of Design in 

January and spoke at the Philadelphia University 

of the Arts symposium on drawing in February. 

In 2008, Tommy White had his third solo show, 

and the first of his sculpture, at the Harris Lieberman 

Gallery in New York City, and his painting 

was included in “Ambivalent Figuration” at Samson 

Projects in Boston. In addition to teaching at 

Princeton, he taught at Columbia University and 

at the Anderson Ranch in Vail, Colorado. 

spring 2009

Graduate Student News 

Patricia Blessing, a third-year graduate student in 

Islamic art and archaeology, also has strong interests 

in Byzantine and medieval Western art and architecture. 

In October 2008, she presented a paper, 

“Continuity in Syria after the Arab Conquest: The 

Monastery of Saint Symeon the Stylite (Qal’at 

Sim’an) near Aleppo,” at the 34th annual Byzantine 

Studies Conference, held at Rutgers University. She 

is currently revising the paper for publication. After 

passing her general examination in January, she 

spent the spring term developing her dissertation 

proposal, tentatively titled “Redefining the Lands of 

Rum? Architecture, History, and Style in Eastern 

Anatolia, 1250–1350.” Her dissertation will consider 

the interaction of Seljuk, Ilkhanid, and 

Mamluk architecture and architectural decoration 

in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Blessing 

will travel to Turkey this summer to continue her 

research in Erzurum, Sivas, Tokat, and Kayseri, 

using language skills she acquired in 2008. 

[pblessin@princeton.edu] 

Annie Bourneuf is writing her dissertation on Paul 

Klee’s art of the late 1910s, supported by a Dedalus 

Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. A paper that 

she gave at a symposium on the Bauhaus at 

Harvard University last year, “Paul Klee’s Grids 

and the Ends of Reading at the Bauhaus,” will be 

published in Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, 

Discourse, and Modernism, edited by Robin 

Schuldenfrei and Jeffrey Saletnik (Routledge, forthcoming), 

in time for the major Bauhaus exhibition 

that opens at the Museum of Modern Art this 

November. Her essay on one of Gunta Stölzl’s Bauhaus 

tapestries will appear in the catalogue of the 

Berlin version of the exhibition. Bourneuf is also 

continuing her work on Walter Benjamin’s writings 

about color, and she presented a paper, “‘Radically 

Uncolorful Painting’: Walter Benjamin and the 

Problem of Cubism,” at the conference “Image 

Necessities: A Symposium on the Media-Theoretical 

Writings of Walter Benjamin” at Princeton last 

fall. [bourneuf@princeton.edu] 

Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen is a second-year 

graduate student who is studying modern art. Her 

research interests include the history of art history, 

psychoanalysis, the history of dance in the early 

20th century, and the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk. 

In the past year her work has focused on 

the art theory of Wilhelm Worringer and on Vaslav 

Nijinsky’s ballet L’après-midi d’un faune and its relation 

to the emergence of the concept of “activation 

of the picture” in psychoanalysis and as a practice in 

early “cinema of attractions.” Her current research 

projects include the reception of Egyptian art in the 

20th century, theories and practices of relief 

spring 2009 

sculpture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, 

and the role of profile views in early-20th-century 

art and performance. In collaboration with Rachel 

Churner of Peter Freeman gallery, she is currently 

organizing an exhibition of the early work of French 

Pop artist Martial Raysse. [ebutterf@princeton.edu] 

In February, Allan Doyle gave his first College Art 

Association paper, titled “The Seine of Instruction: 

Painting and Pedagogy in Thomas Eakins’s Water 

Works.” After passing generals, he proposed a dissertation 

focusing on 19th-century French academic 

painting pedagogy. He also exhibited his paintings 

in a group show at the Sunday Gallery in New York. 

During the academic year 2009–10, he will conduct 

research for his dissertation in England and France 

with the support of a Hyde Academic Year Research 

Fellowship. [adoyle@princeton.edu] 

Nika Elder, a fourth-year graduate student in 

American art, is writing a dissertation on the role of 

language, pedagogy, and display in the still lifes of 

the late-19th-century American painter William 

M. Harnett. Last summer, with the support of a 

Hyde Summer Research Fellowship and a 

Princeton Institute for International and Regional 

Studies dissertation grant, she conducted research 

in Munich, Paris, and London on Harnett’s threeyear 

sojourn in Europe. Elder is currently a visiting 

lecturer in the Department of Art History at 

Rutgers University, where she is teaching a course 

on modern American art. She presented her articlein-progress, 

“Shift-ed Perceptions: The Fabricated 

Body in Lorna Simpson’s Shift Dress Series,” at the 

annual College Art Association conference in Los 

Angeles this spring. Elder is also the co-organizer of 

Princeton’s inaugural American studies graduate 

student conference, which will focus on the topic 

of “The Complex” and will take place this May. 

[nelder@princeton.edu] 

Last summer Leslie Geddes returned to Florence 

and Venice, with support from Italian studies, the 

Princeton Institute for International and Regional 

Studies, and the department’s Spears Fund, to 

examine manuscripts and maps relating to Renaissance 

waterworks and hydraulic practices. This fall 

she presented the proposal for her dissertation, 

“Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of Water,” which 

will examine da Vinci’s lifelong investigation of 

water within a context of emergent artistic and technical 

modes of representation in early modern Italy. 

In the spring she precepted for Professor John Pinto’s 

course “Rome: The Eternal City,” and presented 

a paper, “Undercurrents: Approaching Leonardo 

and His Water Studies,” at an interdisciplinary early 

modern works-in-progress colloquium organized by 

Tile mosaic in the courtyard of 

the Gök Medrese in Tokat, Turkey, 

built in ca. 1270–80, one of the 

monuments being studied by 

Patricia Blessing 

French Pop artist Martial Raysse, 

seen here in1966, is the focus of 

an exhibition being co-organized 

by Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen 

Victoria Sears Goldman is writing 

her dissertation on Giambattista 

Tiepolo’s Punchinello drawings; 

this example is in the Fondazione 

Giorgio Cini, Venice (detail) 

11

Johanna Heinrichs at the Rocca 

Pisani near Vicenza, designed by 

Palladio’s pupil Vincenzo Scamozzi 

12 

Megan Heuer organized a series 

of film screenings curated by 

the German conceptual artist 

Rosemarie Trockel 

Leigh Lieberman et al., The Art of 

Ancient Greece 

the Department of Italian Studies at NYU. 

[lgeddes@princeton.edu] 

Victoria Sears Goldman works in the field of 

18th-century European prints and drawings 

under the direction of Professor Thomas DaCosta 

Kaufmann. She spent the first part of the spring 

semester in Venice and Verona, where she did further 

research for her dissertation on Giambattista 

Tiepolo’s Punchinello drawings. Goldman currently 

holds two part-time internships. At the International 

Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), she 

is investigating provenances, researching works of 

art for art law cases, and contributing to a comprehensive 

database of catalogues raisonnés. She is 

also conducting World War II–related provenance 

research for the Commission for Looted Art, based 

in London. Drawing on a seminar paper she wrote 

about Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, she will 

serve as a consultant for an exhibition about Hawkins’s 

dinosaur paintings scheduled for later this year 

at the Morven Museum and Garden in Princeton. 

[vsears@princeton.edu] 

Johanna Heinrichs, a third-year graduate student 

in Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture, 

recently presented her dissertation proposal, titled 

“Between City and Country: The Residential Suburb 

in Renaissance Italy.” In October 2008, she 

traveled to Vicenza, Italy, to participate in the 50th 

annual Palladian Architecture Course at the Centro 

Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio. 

She also did preliminary dissertation research 

in Genoa. This April she presented the paper 

“Piranesi as Interpreter of the Renaissance” at the 

Frick Symposium on the History of Art in New 

York. Heinrichs also co-organized this year’s annual 

graduate student conference sponsored by Princeton’s 

Renaissance studies program. During the 

spring semester, she is precepting for Professor John 

Pinto’s course, “Rome: The Eternal City.” She has 

been awarded a Hyde Academic Year Research Fellowship 

for 2009–10. [jheinric@princeton.edu] 

Megan Heuer is a third-year graduate student 

who works on 20th-century art, with a focus on 

European modernism. She recently proposed her 

dissertation, “A New Realism: Fernand Léger, 

1919–1931,” which explores how Léger’s work in 

the 1920s was an attempt to depict material processes 

of modernization through an aesthetic that 

encompassed painting, film, and architecture. In 

the fall, she worked with Professor Brigid Doherty 

to organize a series of film screenings curated by 

the German artist Rosemarie Trockel, and she participated 

in a roundtable discussion about Trockel’s 

work during the artist’s visit to Princeton. Heuer is 

also co-editor of the journal Critical Matrix, published 

by Princeton’s Program in the Study of 

Women and Gender. This spring she edited a special 

issue on collaborative practices, which included 

work by graduate students in the departments of 

English and Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton, as 

well as contributions from contemporary artists and 

senior scholars and graduate students at other universities. 

[mheuer@princeton.edu] 

Anna Katz, a third-year graduate student, has 

joined the Joan Tisch Teaching Fellows Program 

at the Whitney Museum of American Art, designing 

and leading tours of the museum’s permanent 

collection and special exhibitions. In January she 

proposed her dissertation, “Hybrid Species: Lee 

Bontecou’s Sculpture and Works on Paper, 1958– 

1971,” which will be the first extended study of 

Bontecou’s career and body of work during the 

period of her most active, public production. In 

March, Katz presented a work-in-progress paper on 

Bontecou’s wall reliefs as part of a Department of 

Art and Archaeology colloquium, “Postwar Post- 

Sculpture?” [ackatz@princeton.edu] 

Sonja Kelley is completing her dissertation, 

“Printmaking in Post-War Sichuan: Regional Art 

Development in the People’s Republic of China, 

1949–1966.” She presented a paper, “Experiencing 

Life in the Countryside: Travel and Sichuan 

Printmaking in the Early People’s Republic of 

China,” at the annual meeting of the Association of 

Asian Studies in April. She was also a preceptor for 

the course “Introduction to Mesoamerican Visual 

Culture” during the spring 2008 semester. Kelley 

was awarded a 2008–09 Louise Wallace Hackney 

Fellowship for the Study of Chinese Art, which 

funded her dissertation research, including a monthlong 

trip to China in November. While there, she 

interviewed artists in Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing, 

and Shenzhen. She also conducted research at the 

National Library of China in Beijing and visited the 

Guanlan Print Original Industry Base in Shenzhen. 

[skelley@princeton.edu] 

Lisa Lee, a fourth-year graduate student, is working 

on her dissertation on the sculptural practices of Isa 

Genzken and Thomas Hirschhorn in relation to 

issues of genre, publicness, and avant-garde legacies. 

In February, she delivered a paper titled “Structures 

of Experience: Thomas Hirschhorn Against Architecture” 

at the College Art Association’s 2009 

meeting in Los Angeles. This spring she spoke on 

“Isa Genzken and Plastic Allegories” at a Princeton 

colloquium on postwar sculpture that she co-organized. 

Supported by a Hyde Fellowship, Lee will 

travel to London in May to attend a retrospective 

of Isa Genzken’s work at the Whitechapel Gallery. 

[lisalee@princeton.edu] 

Leigh Lieberman is a second-year graduate student 

in classical archaeology. Last fall, she participated in 

the interdisciplinary Program in the Ancient World 

seminar “Sparta and the Peloponnese.” As part of 

the course, she traveled to Greece with students and 

faculty members, sponsored by the Program in 

Hellenic Studies, and she also presented a paper 

titled “This is Not Sparta: The Development of a 

spring 2009

Spartan Identity in Taras” at the Oxford-Princeton 

Regional Dynamics Workshop in January. She gave 

another paper, titled “Satyric Divination,” at this 

year’s Archaeological Institute of America annual 

conference in Philadelphia, and she spoke again on 

the same subject at the April 2009 Classical Association 

of the Midwest conference in Minneapolis. 

Lieberman recently contributed to a catalogue of 

the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, The Art of 

Ancient Greece (Walters Art Museum, 2008). This 

summer, she will return to the Pompeii Archaeological 

Research Project, where she will serve both as 

an excavator and as the project’s registrar. 

[llieberm@princeton.edu] 

Emma Ljung, a classical archaeologist, gave a 

paper, titled “Duo labra ante fornicem posuit: The 

Arch of Scipio Africanus and the Pollution of the 

Second Punic War,” at SUNY–Buffalo last October, 

in which she explored the intersections of miasma, 

warfare, and political architecture in the Middle 

Roman Republic. She precepted for Art 100 this 

year, and found it to be a tremendously rewarding 

experience. Always interested in interdisciplinary 

studies, Ljung is currently conducting research that 

focuses on ancient economics through the lens of 

material culture. Her dissertation, “From Indemnity 

to Integration: A Comprehensive Study of the 

Economy of Aitolia in the 2nd and 1st Centuries 

b.c.,” addresses questions of an economic nature in 

a non-canonical Greek region and reevaluates the 

impact of Roman foreign policy on the Greek East. 

Since Aitolia is a largely unexplored region, much 

of her work has been done on-site in Greece. Her 

research has been supported by several grants, most 

recently from the Birgit and Gad Rausing Foundation. 

Ljung also competes enthusiastically in 

dressage on the New Jersey circuit. This summer 

she will continue her research in Aitolia, work at a 

Viking site in Sweden, and participate in an epigraphy 

project in Portugal. [eljung@princeton.edu] 

Daniel McReynolds is a sixth-year graduate student 

in early modern Italian architecture. He 

recently returned from Rome, where he was a 

fellow at the American Academy, and is now 

completing his dissertation as a Whiting Fellow in 

the Humanities. His dissertation, “Refiguring the 

Palladian Legacy: Architectural Reform in Eighteenth-Century 

Venice,” addresses the critical 

reception and interpretation of the architectural 

and literary works of the Renaissance architect 

Andrea Palladio (1508–80) by 18th-century architects 

and theorists of the Veneto. McReynolds’s 

article, “Restoring the Teatro Olimpico: Palladio’s 

Contested Legacy,” appeared in the 2009 issue of 

the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, and 

in March he presented a paper on Palladio’s “afterlife” 

in Vicenza at the Renaissance Society of 

America’s annual conference in Los Angeles. 

[dmcreyno@princeton.edu] 

spring 2009 

Matthew J. Milliner is writing a dissertation on the 

origin and dissemination of a 12th-century Byzantine 

image type, the Virgin of the Passion. His 

research at the Redemptorist archives in Brooklyn 

has been especially fruitful, and last summer he did 

field research in medieval churches in Cyprus, Kastoria, 

Skopje, Ohrid, and Priština. In the spring of 

2008 he volunteered to teach a semester of art history 

at the Albert C. Wagner Youth Correctional 

Facility in Bordentown, New Jersey. Milliner will 

again lead a team of students at the Mount 

Menoikeion Monastery Seminar in Greece this summer, 

and will present his Mount Menoikeion 

research at the Modern Greek Studies Association’s 

annual meeting in Vancouver. He will also participate 

in the Tracing Identity in the Eastern 

Mediterranean (TIEM) project at the Cyprus Institute 

in Nicosia. Milliner serves as an editor for the 

Program in Hellenic Studies, and he gives regular 

tours of the Princeton University Chapel. An article 

that emerged from his research on the chapel is 

forthcoming in the Princeton University Library 

Chronicle. [milliner@princeton.edu] 

Kate Nesin is a fourth-year modernist writing a dissertation 

on “Twombly’s Things: The Sculptures 

of Cy Twombly.” She spent this year researching, 

thinking, and writing in New York, as well as traveling 

to Texas, England, and Italy to see Twombly’s 

sculptures in person. She spent October in Rome, 

where Twombly has lived since 1959, and made a 

second trip there in March. Last summer she presented 

a talk on an early Twombly sculpture at the 

Tate Modern symposium “Cy Twombly: New Perspectives”; 

her paper has since been published in the 

autumn 2008 issue of Tate Papers. This fall Nesin 

also published a catalogue essay on Richard Serra for 

a show of the sculptor’s recent works at the Gagosian 

Gallery in London, and an essay on the problems of 

smallness and scale in postwar sculpture in Pidgin. 

This spring, she co-organized a department colloquium 

on postwar sculpture, and she continues to 

give tours and lectures at the Whitney Museum of 

American Art, where she is a teaching fellow. 

[knesin@princeton.edu] 

Jessica Paga, a fourth-year classical archaeologist, 

recently proposed her dissertation, “Architectural 

Agency and the Construction of Athenian Democracy,” 

which explores the symbiotic relationship 

between the built environment of Athens and the 

political changes of the late 6th and early 5th centuries 

b.c. She has been awarded a Hyde Academic 

Year Research Fellowship and will spend next year in 

Athens, researching and writing under the auspices 

of the American School of Classical Studies. A preliminary 

version of her article “Mapping Politics: An 

Investigation of Deme Theatres in the Fifth and 

Fourth centuries b.c.e.” is currently posted on the 

Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics 

website, www.princeton.edu/~pswpc. This 

Emma Ljung at the archaeological 

site of Ale Stenar in southern 

Sweden 

This 15th-century Virgin of the 

Passion icon by Andrea Rico 

di Candia in the Princeton 

University Art Museum inspired 

Matthew Milliner’s dissertation 

topic. Gift of Allan Marquand, 

Class of 1874 (y33) 

Kate Nesin, Richard Serra: 

Recent Works 

13 

Bruce M. White

Adedoyin Teriba lecturing at the 

Princeton University Art Museum 

14 

Silver denarius of the Roman 

emperor Augustus, one of the 

coins found at Morgantina in 

Sicily that will be published by 

D. Alexander Walthall 

Artist Arnold Change at work 

in his studio, where he was 

interviewed by Kim Wishart 

for her essay in the Princeton 

University Art Museum 

exhibition catalogue Outside 

In: Chinese × American × 

Contemporary Art 

summer Paga will again excavate at Argilos, a late 

Archaic and Classical colony near the Strymon 

River in northern Greece. [jpaga@princeton.edu] 

Gregory Seiffert, who studies Chinese art, contributed 

essays to the catalogue of the 

exhibition “Outside In: Chinese × American 

× Contemporary Art,” which 

opened this March at the Princeton University 

Art Museum. His essays focus on 

the work of two artists in the exhibition, 

Zhi Lin and Vannessa Tran. In conjunction 

with the exhibition, Seiffert also 

delivered a gallery talk titled “Cycles: 

Time and Movement in Selected Works 

from ‘Outside In’.” [gseiffer@princeton. 

edu] 

Nebojša Stanković spent last academic 

year abroad, conducting on-site research 

for his dissertation “Framing the Monastic 

Ritual: Byzantine Narthexes on Mount Athos 

(Architecture and Liturgy).” He did extensive 

study and documentation of the Mount Athos 

narthexes and also gathered comparative material 

at the Meteora monasteries and in Thessaloniki, 

where he studied the city’s Byzantine monuments 

and did research in the resources of the preservation 

service in charge of Mount Athos. His travels 

were funded by a Stanley J. Seeger summer fellowship 

and a Princeton Institute for International and 

Regional Studies dissertation research grant. 

Stanković is back in Princeton this year, writing his 

dissertation and, during the spring semester, giving 

precepts for Art 101, which he finds truly enjoyable 

and rewarding. [nstankov@princeton.edu] 

Adedoyin Teriba is a first-year graduate student 

studying the modern architecture of Africa. He 

earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture at the 

Federal University of Technology in Minna, Nigeria, 

and a master’s degree in architecture at the 

University of Oklahoma. Last fall, under the auspices 

of Princeton’s Program in African Studies, he 

gave a lecture titled “Yoruba Sacred Architecture 

and Expressionism,” highlighting the work of 

Susanne Wenger, who, during 50 years of work in 

Nigeria, reinterpreted older sacred architecture of 

the Yoruba in new forms using variants of German 

Expressionist architecture as models. Teriba also 

delivered a lecture titled “Gesture in Frank Gehry’s 

Sketches and the Ijele and Egungun Masquerades” 

at the Princeton University Art Museum as part of 

the activities connected with the museum’s exhibition 

of Frank Gehry’s drawings. This spring, he is 

working as a curatorial assistant for the upcoming 

exhibition of African art at the museum, and he 

spoke on Yoruba sacred architecture and Expressionism 

at the Black History Month symposium 

organized by the Graduate School’s Office of Academic 

Affairs and Diversity. [ateriba@princeton. 

edu] 

D. Alexander Walthall, a third-year classical 

archaeology graduate student, spoke at two conferences 

this year, including the annual meeting 

of the Archaeological Institute of America, where 

he presented a paper titled “The Relation between 

Phyletic Association and the Siting of Choregic 

Monuments in Athens and Attica during the 5th 

and 4th Centuries b.c.” Last summer, he returned 

to Aidone, Sicily, for his sixth season of work at the 

ancient Greek city of Morgantina, where he supervised 

the excavation of a Hellenistic bath complex 

and continued work on a catalogue of coins excavated 

at the site between 1982 and 2008. Walthall 

will return to Morgantina this summer to study an 

important deposit of coins from the city’s agora. 

While in Sicily, he will begin collecting data for his 

dissertation, which will address issues of private religion 

in Sicily during the Classical and Hellenistic 

periods. This year he was an intern at the Princeton 

University Art Museum, where he worked with the 

curator of ancient art, Michael Padgett. [dwalthal@ 

princeton.edu] 

Kim Wishart is currently writing her dissertation, 

titled “Collaboration in Painting Practice: Notions 

of Individuality and Quality in Chinese Art.” This 

summer she will travel to the Freer Gallery, the 

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Cleveland 

Museum of Art to study paintings related to her 

research. Her essay on the contemporary artist 

Arnold Chang, “Out of Bounds: Painting the Tradition 

in Contemporary Chinese Art,” appeared in 

the Princeton University Art Museum exhibition 

catalogue Outside In: Chinese × American × Contemporary 

Art (2009). Since July 2008, Wishart has 

been working as the Chinese art specialist in 

Marquand Library, building and managing the 

collection’s materials on East Asian Art. Her special 

projects include strengthening the reference 

collection on East Asian Art and evaluating and 

expanding Marquand’s holdings of facsimile scrolls. 

[kwishart@princeton.edu] 

spring 2009

Thesis Prizes, Dissertations 

2008 Senior Thesis Prizes 

Department of Art and Archaeology Senior 

Thesis Prize 

Lily Arbisser ’08, “Setting the Stage: Wagnerian 

Theatricality, Anti-Theatrical Modernism, and 

Robert Wilson’s Parsifal” 

Hillary Webb ’08, “‘Enchanting Spectacle’: Edith 

Wharton and the Fashioning of Space” 

Jonathan Winnerman ’08, “City of Light: Translating 

the Abstract Aten into the Topography of Amarna” 

Stella and Rensselaer W. Lee Prize 

Tamara Lewis ’08, “A Critical Engagement: Plato, 

Aristotle, and the Visual Arts of Their Time” 

Lindsay Wich ’08, “Michelangelo’s Mastery of 

the Human Body in Motion: The Assimilation of 

Anatomical Study into the Visual Arts of the Italian 

Renaissance” 

Irma S. Seitz Prize in the Field of Modern Art 

Emily Balter ’08, “Dominant Ideologies: History and 

Spectacle in Thomas Struth’s Photographs Through 

the Lens of His Mentors” 

Isabel Wilkinson ’08, “Adele Bloch-Bauer I: A Private 

Portrait in the Public Eye” 

Selena Kalvaria ’08, “Watch the Market Go Pop! An 

Analysis of Artists, Dealers, and Collectors in the 

Market for Pop Art in the 1960s” 

Frederick Barnard White Prize in Art and 

Archaeology 

Bryan Cockrell ’08, “Colorful Corrosion: Black 

Bronze and Its Enigmatic Patina” 

Aaron Weil ’08, “Artist-Diplomats and the Thirty 

Years’ War” 

Mary Emily Aull ’08, “Angel of the Black Death: 

Saint Michael in the Art and Culture of the Early 

Italian Plague Era, 1348–1400” 

Frederick Barnard White Prize in Architecture 

Jeffrey Mansfield ’08, (Architecture School), 

“Frames, Dominoes, and New Realities: Columns, 

Slabs, and the Generation of Life” 

Elizabeth Losch ’08, “Thomas Annan’s Photographs 

of the Closes of Glasgow: An Early Documentation 

Project in Context” 

Lucas Award in Visual Arts 

Meredith Thompson ’08 

Francis LeMoyne Page Visual Arts Award 

Kelsey Johnson ’08 

Louis Sudler Prize for the Arts 

Meredith Thompson ’08 

Grace May Tilton Prize in Fine Arts 

Hillary Webb ’08 (first-place co-winner) 

Lily Arbisser ’08 (second-place winner) 

spring 2009 

New Dissertation Topics 

Allan Doyle, “An Exemplary Education: Pedagogic 

Models in Jean-Léon Gérôme” (Rachael DeLue) 

Leslie Geddes, “Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of 

Water” (John Pinto) 

Johanna Heinrichs, “Between City and Country: The 

Residential Suburb in Renaissance Italy” 

(John Pinto) 

Megan Heuer, “A New Realism: Fernand Léger, 

1919–1931” (Hal Foster) 

Anna Katz, “Hybrid Species: Lee Bontecou’s 

Sculpture and Works on Paper, 1958–1971” 

(Hal Foster) 

Elizabeth Kessler-Dimin, “I Am the True Vine: 

Assimilation, Acculturation, and Appropriation 

in Religious Iconography of Late Antiquity” 

(William Childs) 

Michelle Lim, “Navigating Floating Worlds: 

Curatorial Strategies in Chinese Contemporary Art, 

1979–2009” (Jerome Silbergeld) 

Jessica Paga, “Architectural Agency and the 

Construction of Athenian Democracy” (T. Leslie 

Shear Jr.) 

Maika Pollack, “Color and Politics in Odilon 

Redon’s Still-Life Paintings and Pastels, 1894–1916” 

(Anne McCauley) 

Dissertations Recently Completed 

Jelena Bogdanović, “Canopies: The Framing 

of Sacred Space in the Byzantine Ecclesiastical 

Tradition” (Slobodan Ćurčić) 

Noam Elcott, “Into the Dark Chamber: Avant-Garde 

Photograms and the Cinematic Imaginary” (Carol 

Armstrong, Yale University) 

Kevin Hatch, “Looking for Bruce Conner, 1957–1967” 

(Hal Foster) 

Zehavi Husser, “Worshipping in Community: Jupiter 

and Roman Religion in the Early Imperial Period” 

(Hugo Meyer) 

Francesca Leoni, “The Revenge of Ahriman: 

Images of Divs in the Shahnama, ca. 1300–1600” 

(Thomas Leisten) 

Alessandra Ricci, “Reinterpretation of the ‘Palace of 

Bryas’: A Study in Byzantine Architecture, History, 

and Historiography” (Slobodan Ćurčić) 

Julia Robinson, “From Abstraction to Model: In the 

Event of George Brecht and the Conceptual Turn in 

the Art of the 1960s” (Hal Foster) 

Marta Weiss, “Dressed Up and Pasted Down: Staged 

Photography in the Victorian Album” (Peter Bunnell) 

Jay Jie Xu, “The Sanxingdui Site: Art and 

Archaeology” (Robert Bagley) 

Graduate Student 

Fellowships for 

2008–09 

Alexis Belis 

Gorham P. Stevens Fellowship, 

American School of Classical 

Studies at Athens 

Annie Bourneuf 

Dedalus Foundation Dissertation 

Fellowship 

Nika Elder 

Hyde Summer Research Award 

Sonja Kelley 

Louise Wallace Hackney 

Fellowship for the Study of 

Chinese Art 

Alex Kitnick 

Hyde Academic Year Research 

Fellowship 

Lisa Lee 


Fellowship 

Chen Liu 


Fellowship 

Emma Ljung 

Birgit and Gad Rausing 

Foundation Fellowship and 

Fredrika-Bremer-Förbundets 

Stipendiestiftelse Fellowship 

Katherine Marsengill 

Harold W. Dodds Honorific 

Fellowship 

Daniel McReynolds 

Whiting Fellowship 

Susannah Rutherglen 

Mellon/ACLS Dissertation 

Completion Fellowship and 

Whiting Fellowship 

2009 Jane Faggen 

Dissertation Prize 

Kristoffer Neville *07 

“Nicodemus Tessin the Elder and 

German Artists in Sweden in the 

Age of the Thirty Years’ War” 

15

George Vogel 

Bruce M. White 

16 

Still from Glenn Brown ’09’s 

senior thesis video, People Are 

Dying in Africa 

Madeline Carroll ’09 wrote 

a senior thesis on the Maya 

creation story, including the 

Princeton Vase of ca. a.d. 600– 

800. Museum purchase, gift of 

the Hans A. Widenmann, Class of 

1918, and Dorothy Widenmann 

Foundation (y1975-17) 

Tyler Crosby ’09 as Agamemnon in 

the Lewis Center’s production of 

Agamemnon 

Undergraduate News 

Alex Bernick ’09 worked with Bryan Just, 

curator of the arts of the ancient Americas 

at the Princeton University Art Museum, 

on a senior thesis that examines the collection 

of Pre-Columbian obsidian artifacts 

donated to the museum by former curator 

Gillette Griffin. These objects range 

from prismatic blades and notched arrowheads 

to ear spools and labrets, as well 

as material flaked into a variety of symbolic, 

zoomorphic, and anthropomorphic 

shapes. Bernick researched the provenance, the production 

methods, and the cultural context of all of 

the carved obsidian objects in the collection. He is a 

member of the junior varsity tennis team, Pi Kappa 

Alpha fraternity, and Cottage Club. He will continue 

his studies in graduate school next year and 

plans to pursue a career in museum work or academia. 

[alex.bernick@gmail.com] 

Glenn Brown ’09 is a Program 2 (Visual Arts) 

major whose senior thesis project is a half-hour 

short narrative film titled People Are Dying in Africa. 

Striking a tone somewhere between black comedy 

and neo-noir, the video juggles several 

different storylines that ultimately converge on a 

suburban New Jersey home, with tragic consequences. 

Brown has studied under Su Friedrich, 

Keith Sanborn, P. Adams Sitney, and Nathaniel 

Dorsky in the Program in Visual Arts; his adviser 

in the department is Professor Esther da Costa 

Meyer. Outside the classroom, he has spent much 

of his time on the stage performing in a variety of 

productions with the Program in Theater and 

Dance. After graduation, Brown plans to live in 

Asia, teach English, and continue working in video. 

[glennmbrown@gmail.com] 

Scott Carlson ’09, working with 

Professor Hal Foster, wrote a senior 

thesis that explored the ways in 

which minimalist art catalyzed new 

relationships among artist, object, 

and viewer. His thesis demonstrated 

minimalism’s role in 

absorbing and reshaping modernist 

discourse and providing a basis for 

new aesthetic criteria. For two 

years he also worked with Professor 

Emeritus Sam Hunter and has 

been the recipient of much knowledge and many 

wonderful stories. Carlson is a Forbes College peer 

adviser, a department representative, and a member 

of the Princeton Tower Club. He also formed an 

investment club with several friends and has enthusiastically 

pursued intramural sports and guitar 

playing. Carlson plans to participate in a service- 

oriented internship or job next year and will then 

apply to graduate programs for the following fall. 

[smc1987@gmail.com] 

Madeline Carroll ’09 wrote a senior thesis that 

compared and contextualized the colonial manuscript 

of the Popol Vuh, the Maya creation story and 

mythology, with ancient images of the epic poem on 

ceramic vessels. Bryan Just, curator of the arts of the 

ancient Americas at the Princeton University Art 

Museum, served as her adviser. During her freshman 

year, Carroll traveled to Oaxaca with a department 

seminar on Mixtec codices, and this year she visited 

a number of ancient Maya sites in the Chiapas, 

Mexico, as part of a seminar on Maya art and hieroglyphic 

writing. She also completed pre-medical 

requirements and intends to enter the field of orthopedic 

surgery. [madelineecarroll@gmail.com] 

Tyler Crosby ’09 is a painter in the department’s 

Program 2 (Visual Arts) whose work reflects the 

bright and dynamic ambience of his home town, 

Long Beach, California. He worked with two advisers 

in the Program in Visual Arts, Eve Aschheim and 

Joan Waltemath, who guided and inspired his painting. 

Crosby is also a candidate for a certificate in 

theater, and he spent much of his time outside the 

classroom in theater productions of the Lewis Center 

for the Arts, playing roles that included Christy 

Mahon in John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the 

Western World, George Tesman in Henrik Ibsen’s 

Hedda Gabler, Agamemnon in Aeschylus’s 

Agamemnon, and Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee 

Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. After graduation, 

he plans to pursue a career in acting. 

[tcrosby@alumni.princeton.edu] 

Anne Ferrer ’09 worked at the Metropolitan 

Museum of Art last summer, assisting the editorial 

department with museum publications, as well as 

creating and conducting two tours: a highlights tour 

and a tour focusing on the evolution of Venus in art. 

Drawing on her strong interests in modern art, postwar 

culture, émigré artists, and art journalism, she 

chose Condé Nast and his innovative publication 

Vanity Fair as her senior thesis topic. Working with 

Professor Anne McCauley, Ferrer researched French 

modernism in Vanity Fair in the 1920s, perusing 

every issue from 1913 to 1925 and focusing on the 

rise of modernist dance, the avant-garde, and Dadaism 

in America. Her thesis elucidates aspects of the 

modernist agenda of Nast’s magazine in relation to 

other contemporary publications, both in New York 

and overseas. Ferrer also wrote for “The Street,” a 

section of the Daily Princetonian, and she plans to 

work in art journalism after graduation. [aoferrer@ 

gmail.com] 

spring 2009

Rebecca Gold ’09 excavating at a Middle Paleolithic site at Marillac-le-Franc in France 

Laurie Frey ’09, a concentrator in the archaeology 

program, wrote her senior thesis on the policies and 

legislation governing the work of foreign archaeologists 

in Egypt. Advised by Lecturer Deborah 

Vischak, she examined the influence of both international 

standards and historical experience on the 

shaping of Egypt’s current policy toward foreign 

archaeologists. Frey also earned a certificate in the 

Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International 

Affairs. She spent the summer prior to her 

senior year interning at the Egyptian Museum in 

Cairo, where she also did research for her thesis. On 

campus, she was president of the Global Issues 

Forum, a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma, and a 

member of the Princeton Tower Club. Following 

graduation, she will attend law school and plans to 

practice art and cultural property law. [jfrey@ 

alumni.princeton.edu] 

Rebecca Gold ’09, working with Professor Anne 

McCauley, wrote a senior thesis on artist Henry 

Darger as a means of critiquing the category of 

Outsider Art. In the summer of 2007, she studied 

at the University of Bordeaux and excavated at a 

Middle Paleolithic archaeological site at Marillac-le- 

Franc, a small village in southwest France, with the 

Princeton Program in Human Origins. Outside the 

classroom, Gold performed with and was alumni 

relations chair of Quipfire, Princeton’s improv comedy 

group, and she wrote for the Nassau Weekly. On 

weekends, she was a regular host of student variety 

shows, acting as master of ceremonies for performances 

that included Tiger Night, This Is 

Princeton, a cappella shows, and pre-frosh weekends. 

She plans to work in the art world while 

continuing to perform improv and sketch comedy. 

[rebeccalgold@gmail.com] 

Juhea Kim ’09’s senior thesis examines the iconography 

of the Fountain of Life, arguing that it 

emerged from pan-cultural cosmological interests in 

Late Antique society, rather than from the theological 

doctrines of church leaders. This independence 

of Early Christian imagery from theological discourse 

contradicts the prevailing view that Early 

spring 2009 

Christian art developed as an expression of religious 

dogma. Kim’s thesis, supervised by Professor Christopher 

Heuer, was also part of her certificate in 

French language and culture, guided by Professor 

Sarah Kay in the Department of French and Italian. 

Outside of academics, Kim was a dancer with the 

Princeton University Ballet and the dance program, 

a cellist, and a general music enthusiast. She was a 

member of Terrace Club and a student guide at the 

Princeton University Art Museum, where she was 

also an intern. Last summer she interned for Devi 

Kroell, a fashion designer based in New York, and 

plans to pursue a career in fashion. [juheakim@ 

gmail.com] 

Katie Kinnear ’09, under the guidance of Professor 

John Pinto, wrote a thesis on modernism and spectacle 

in Mussolini’s Florence. Focusing primarily on 

the Giovanni Berta stadium and the Santa Maria 

Novella train station, Kinnear examined the ways in 

which the city’s artistic and architectural program 

was shaped by the fascist regime and its pursuit of a 

collective Italian identity. Her interest in the subject 

began during her semester abroad in Florence in the 

fall of her junior year. She also earned certificates in 

European cultural studies and visual arts. Her final 

mixed-media studio art show, “Home: Reflections 

after a Fire,” was an examination of the concept of 

“home” through prints, paintings, and sculptures, 

with a focus on the divide between home as a physical 

place and as a compilation of memories and 

associations. Next year she will pursue a master’s 

degree in art history at the Courtauld Institute of 

Art in London. [k.h.kinnear@gmail.com] 

Cynthia Michalak ’09, a Program 2 (Visual Arts) 

major who also earned a certificate in urban studies, 

had a senior thesis painting exhibition that centered 

on the themes of urban decay and urban renewal in 

local cities. Advised by John O’Connor and Eve 

Aschheim of the Program in Visual Arts, and 

department lecturer Molly Warnock, Michalak’s 

work was characterized by the distortion of interior 

and exterior space and a fascination with chandeliers, 

from which she created environments of 

Anne Ferrer ’09’s senior thesis 

investigates modernist dance, 

the avant-garde, and Dadaism in 

Vanity Fair during the 1920s 

Juhea Kim ’09’s senior thesis 

examines the iconography 

of the Fountain of Life; this 

example is in Garrett MS. 2, 

Department of Rare Books and 

Special Collections, Princeton 

University Library 

Katie Kinnear ’09, Missing, 

mixed media 

17

Cynthia Michalak ’09, Corner of 5th 

and I Street NW, Washington, D.C., 

oil on canvas 

Jennifer Edelstein ’09 traveled to 

Italy to study depictions of the 

myth of Cupid and Psyche 

18 

Bethlehem Church of God in Christ in Newark, New 

Jersey, one of the readapted buildings studied by 

Jacqueline Temkin ’09 

development and deterioration. Her exploration of 

Trenton, New Jersey—the city where her greatgrandparents 

settled after emigrating from Europe 

in the 1910s—played a prominent role in her work. 

By photographing the city, she also learned more 

about her family’s roots. Outside of the classroom, 

Michalak served as an officer of the Princeton 

Tower Club, president of the Orthodox Christian 

Fellowship, and volunteer solicitor for the 2009 

Annual Giving campaign. She also interned with 

the education department of the Princeton University 

Art Museum and at Shahid & Company, an 

advertising firm in New York. After graduation, 

she plans to work for a few years before pursuing 

graduate studies in art or design. 

[cynthia.michalak@gmail.com] 

Joelle Milov ’09 worked with Professor Christopher 

Heuer on her senior thesis, which offered a new 

interpretation of Titian’s nudes produced between 

1550 and 1570. Using contemporary feminist 

theory, she analyzed paintings that Titian regularly 

repeated throughout his career, including Venus and 

the Organist, Venus and the Lutenist, Danaë, and 

Venus and Cupid with a Mirror. Milov also earned a 

certificate in the Program in the Study of Women 

and Gender, and swam on the varsity women’s 

swimming team, which won the Ivy League championship 

swim meet for three consecutive years. 

She was also the co-coordinator of the Special 

Olympics swimming program and was a student 

guide at the Princeton University Art Museum. In 

the fall, Milov will enter Harvard Law School, and 

she hopes to work on issues of art law, including 

restitution and cultural heritage. [joelle.milov@ 

gmail.com] 

Mary Margaret (Maggie) O’Toole ’09, supervised 

by Professor Chika Okeke-Agulu, wrote her senior 

thesis on contemporary photographer Hank Willis 

Thomas. Her work focused not only on Thomas’s 

photography, but also on issues of Black identity 

and the intersection of consumer culture with race 

in contemporary society. O’Toole also worked with 

Eve Aschheim, John O’Connor, and other faculty 

members in the Program in Visual Arts, and she 

exhibited her paintings in a senior thesis show titled 

“Miscellaneous: Still Lifes in Color.” She was a tricaptain 

of the women’s varsity squash team, which 

won three consecutive Ivy League championships 

and three consecutive national championships in 

2007–09. In her free time, she taught art at the 

Wilson College Art Studio and was a member of the 

Tiger Inn and Princeton Against Cancer Together. 

[mary.margaret.otoole@gmail.com] 

Jacqueline Temkin ’09, who also earned a certificate 

in urban studies, worked with Professor Esther 

da Costa Meyer on a senior thesis that examines the 

adaptive re-use of buildings as churches in New Jersey 

during the 20th century. Focusing primarily on 

the implications of the automobile and suburbanization 

on religious architecture, her thesis investigates 

a variety of building types, including movie-theater 

churches, synagogue churches, storefront churches, 

and even strip-mall and motel churches. She also 

examined the impact of the increasing number of 

small, independent congregations and their efforts 

to create houses of worship with limited funding 

and without the assistance of architects. Outside the 

classroom, Temkin has been a member of the 

Princeton sailing team since her sophomore year 

and served as regatta captain in 2008. She also 

worked as a captain for Annual Giving 2009 and 

was an avid member of the Princeton Tower Club. 

After graduation, Temkin plans to pursue a career in 

advertising or jewelry design. [jltemkin@gmail.com] 

Senior Thesis Travel Grants 

Jennifer Edelstein ’09 wrote her senior thesis on 

the evolving uses of the myth of Cupid and Psyche 

in Italian Renaissance art. Under the guidance of 

Professor John Pinto, she examined how, under different 

conditions of expression, depictions of the 

myth could have significantly different meanings 

and implications. With the support of a departmental 

Robert S. Macfarlane ’54 grant, Edelstein 

traveled to Italy to study the fresco cycles of Cupid 

and Psyche in the Palazzo del Te in Mantua and in 

the Villa Farnesina and the Castel Sant’Angelo in 

Rome. On campus, she was an officer of Princeton 

Model Congress and served as the undergraduate 

treasurer of the Princeton Tower Club. After graduation, 

she will work as a corporate finance analyst 

at Lazard Frères & Co. in New York City. 

[jennifer.edelstein@gmail.com] 

Alie Fishman ’09 investigated female personifications 

of provinces of the Roman Empire in coinage 

and reliefs from the reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus 

Pius. Working under the direction of Professor 

Edward Champlin of the classics department, she 

compared the representations of Roman provinces 

created during the reigns of those two emperors 

and examined how the changes in their depictions 

spring 2009

eflected the ideology and policy of each emperor. 

Fishman received a departmental Jay Wilson ’69 

fund grant to travel to London during winter break 

to study the unparalleled collection of Roman 

Imperial coins at the British Museum. Outside the 

classroom, Fishman was co-captain of the openweight 

rowing team, and she won a gold medal 

at the under-23 world championships in 2007. 

After graduation she plans to take a year off before 

applying to master’s programs in art conservation. 

[alisonlfishman@gmail.com] 

Morgan Jacobs ’09 wrote her senior thesis on pre- 

and post-Wende film and photography; her adviser 

was Professor Brigid Doherty. Focusing on Michael 

Schmidt’s photo-essay, U-Ni-Ty, and three films by 

Wenders, Godard, and Tykwer, Jacobs explored the 

burden of Germany’s history on those four works, 

demonstrating how the apparently insurmountable 

social fragmentation and alienation in Berlin gave 

way to a regenerative process. A departmental Jay 

Wilson ’69 Senior Thesis Fund grant sponsored her 

travel to Berlin to conduct research and visit various 

museums and galleries, including Galerie Nordenhake, 

which represents Michael Schmidt. Jacobs, 

who also completed a certificate in German, 

worked in Frankfurt during the summer of 2007. 

On campus, she was co-chair of the Ivy Club’s 

weekly roundtable and served as an undergraduate 

representative for the Department of Art and 

Archaeology. After graduation, Jacobs will work for 

the investment banking division of Barclays Capital 

in New York City. [jacobs.morganm@gmail.com] 

Noah Levine ’09 at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, 

where he studied works by Gustave Courbet and 

Paul Cézanne 

Noah Levine ’09 wrote his senior thesis on the provincial 

roots of the 19th-century “Modernist” artists 

Gustave Courbet and Paul Cézanne. Under the 

guidance of Professor Bridget Alsdorf, he examined 

the stylistic, political, and philosophical connections 

between Courbet and Cézanne, the rapidly 

evolving social dynamic within which they worked, 

spring 2009 

and their influence on 20th-century Modernist art. 

As a recipient of a departmental Robert S. Macfarlane 

’54 grant, Levine traveled to France and 

England in the summer of 2008 

to explore Cézanne’s and 

Courbet’s hometowns of 

Aix-en-Provence and 

Ornans. He also examined 

paintings by both 

artists in the Musée 

d’Orsay and Musée de 

l’Orangerie in Paris and in 

the National Gallery and the 

Courtauld Institute of Art in 

London. Levine plans to enroll in law 

school or pursue work in the art market. 

[noah.e.levine@gmail.com] 

Emmelyn Stevens ’09 wrote her senior thesis, under 

the supervision of Professor Christopher Heuer, on 

the two major monastic commissions completed 

by the 17th-century Spanish artist Francisco de 

Zurbarán at the height of his career, exploring them 

in the context of his art and of the religious patronage 

of the period. She received grants from the 

department’s Jay Wilson ’69 Senior Thesis Fund and 

from the Center for the Study of Religion to travel 

to Spain to visit the two monasteries in Guadalupe 

and Jerez de la Frontera, as well as Seville, where 

Zurbarán lived and worked. In addition to majoring 

in art history, Stevens also earned a certificate in the 

Program in Environmental Studies. After graduation, 

she will travel and work for a year in various 

locations, including Argentina, where she will 

perfect her Spanish. She will then pursue either 

museum work or a career involving the environment. 

[emmy.stevens@gmail.com] 

Jacqueline Thomas ’09 worked with Professor 

Rachael Z. DeLue on a senior thesis that focused on 

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Lake George landscapes. With 

funding from a Robert S. Macfarlane ’54 grant, 

Thomas traveled to Santa Fe, New Mexico, last 

summer to visit the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and 

Research Center, where she studied contemporary 

criticism and O’Keeffe’s color swatches and personal 

library. She also examined Storm Cloud, Lake George, 

one of the key works in her thesis. During her time 

in New Mexico, Thomas also visited O’Keeffe’s 

home in Abiquiu. She later traveled to the Beinecke 

Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University 

to consult the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe 

archive, reading O’Keeffe’s correspondence from 

her time at Lake George. On campus, Thomas was 

a residential college adviser in Wilson College, an 

Orange Key tour guide, and the image resources 

assistant at the Princeton University Art Museum. 

After graduation she intends to pursue a career in 

publishing or the art world. [jacqueline.thomas@ 

gmail.com] 

Alie Fishman ’09 studied female 

personifications of the provinces 

of the Roman Empire under 

the emperors Hadrian and 

Antoninus Pius; this coin of 

Hadrian shows Egypt holding 

a sistrum, an Egyptian ritual 

musical instrument 

Morgan Jacobs ’09 traveled 

to Germany to research pre- 

and post-Wende film and 

photography, with a focus on 

Michael Schmidt’s U-Ni-Ty 

19

Byzantine frescoes in the church 

of the Pantokrator at Agios 

Markos on Corfu 

The Corfu seminar with Dimitri 

Gondicas, director of the Program 

in Hellenic Studies, at the Roman 

amphitheater in Butrint, Albania 

20 

Interior of the Virginia State 

Capitol in Richmond 

Seminar Study Trips 

Corfu Seminar Travels 

to Greece 

Last fall semester’s 400-level seminar “Venice and 

the Mediterranean: The Island of Corfu,” cotaught 

by Professors Patricia Fortini Brown and 

Christopher Heuer, focused on the island off the 

west coast of Greece that was the last overseas 

colony of Venice. The course gave 14 students— 

an equal mix of undergraduates and graduate 

students—the opportunity to study an often overlooked 

microcosm of overlapping cross-currents of 

Classical, Byzantine, Venetian, French, and British 

hegemony and culture. 

After six weeks of 

seminars on the island’s 

history, culture, artistic 

milieu, and social and 

religious life, the class 

traveled to Corfu during 

the fall semester break, 

with a brief stop in 

Athens and a day-long 

visit to Butrint in 

Albania. The 10-day trip 

was sponsored by the 

Program in Hellenic 

Studies and its Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund. 

In preparation for the trip, each student developed 

a proposal for a project to be carried out on 

the island. Their topics spanned a wide range of 

periods and media—from ancient Greek temples 

to Byzantine icons, medieval bell towers, Venetian 

wellheads, and how the island’s ancient heritage is 

interpreted in modern museum settings. 

The class’s long days began with group tours, 

exploring, for example, the 16th-century network 

of tunnels beneath the fortifications of Corfu city, 

walking the Venetian ghost town of Palia Peritheia, 

climbing to the top of the Angevin-Venetian fortress 

of Angelokastro, and visiting two tiny but 

spectacularly frescoed 11th-century churches set 

deep in the Corfiote countryside and rarely open 

to visitors. 

The class is now collaborating on a website 

that will host the results of their research. The 

website, http://web.princeton.edu/sites/Artand 

Archaeology/corfu, will feature an interactive map 

of the island with links to the students’ reports and 

the photographs. Since many of these monuments 

are poorly published, some of the material on this 

website will be the most extensive and up-to-date 

scholarship available in English. 

Perhaps even more importantly, every member 

of the class brought back the vivid experience of 

studying a jumbled palimpsest of monuments from 

many periods in a living, real-world setting—studying 

icons that still function as objects of veneration 

in churches, observing how urban life and social 

interaction are shaped by Corfu’s covered walkways, 

and sharing their observations while in the presence 

of many other monuments. 

18th-Century Architecture 

Seminar Visits Virginia 

“Architecture in Transition: The 18th Century,” 

last fall’s 400-level seminar co-taught by Professors 

John Pinto and Esther da Costa Meyer, focused on 

a period that saw the emergence of new forms of 

architecture, city planning, and landscape design, 

both in Europe and the New World. The class 

emphasized the relationship between architectural 

theory and practice, and their response to dramatic 

transformations in philosophical, political, 

cultural, and religious attitudes. 

The work and thought of Thomas Jefferson, 

who bridged the Old and New Worlds, was very 

much at the core of the seminar, and during fall 

break week the class traveled to Virginia to 

experience Jefferson’s architecture as concrete, 

three-dimensional form. The trip began with a visit 

to Poplar Forest, Jefferson’s beautifully sited rural 

retreat, whose spare octagonal design is an embodiment 

of elegant, ideal geometry. The ongoing 

restoration allowed the class to look beneath the 

surface of Jefferson’s building. 

During an afternoon spent at Monticello, the 

clear, slanting October light provided ideal conditions 

to study the details of Jefferson’s masterpiece. 

On the campus of the University of Virginia, the 

seminar was fortunate to have as its guide Richard 

Guy Wilson, chair of Virginia’s Department of 

Architectural History and a leading expert on 

Jeffersonian architecture. The trip concluded with a 

Poplar Forest, Thomas Jefferson’s rural retreat 

spring 2009

Walter F. Morris 

visit to the State Capitol building in Richmond, 

one of Jefferson’s most purely classical designs. 

The sense of Jefferson as an architect that 

the students gained by experiencing four of his 

works—close in location but very different in character—informed 

and animated every seminar after 

the class returned to Princeton. 

Procession of saints arriving in the main plaza of 

Magdalenas 

Seminar on Maya Court Art 

Tours Chiapas, Mexico 

On March 14–20, 2009, eight undergraduates, 

accompanied by their instructor, Bryan R. Just, the 

Peter Jay Sharp, Class of 1952, Curator of the Art 

of the Ancient Americas at the Princeton University 

Art Museum, and Betsy Rosasco, research 

curator in later Western art at the museum, 

enjoyed an intensive tour of Chiapas, Mexico. 

The trip, funded jointly by the department and the 

Program in Latin American Studies, was a pivotal 

component of the seminar ART 468, “Art and 

Politics of the Maya Courts,” complementing and 

contextualizing the students’ knowledge of ancient 

Maya court art gained in class and from the art 

museum’s premier collections. 

The five archaeological sites visited by the 

group ranged from Palenque, a UNESCO World 

Heritage Site with well-preserved stucco reliefs and 

some of the finest Maya limestone sculpture, to 

recently begun excavations of what may be a city 

known only from hieroglyphic inscriptions. 

Exploring these sites in person allowed the students 

to reconsider the definition of “courtly” spaces, to 

visualize and understand how Maya monumental 

art functioned within architectural contexts, and to 

decipher hieroglyphic inscriptions. The class also 

gained an intimate appreciation of the varied 

spring 2009 

biological context of Maya culture, from 

the tropical rainforest, at once thriving 

with life and in constant decay, to smoldering 

fields recently cut and burned in 

anticipation of the rainy season, to the 

cool, pine-cloaked highlands. 

The trip also provided opportunities 

for direct interaction with the modernday 

descendants of the ancient Maya, 

including an overnight stay in a Lacandón 

Maya community and a fascinating 

day witnessing ceremonial activities in 

the Tzotzil-speaking highland communities 

of San Juan Chamula and Magdalenas. 

The group was fortunate to witness one of 

Magdalenas’s most important and exuberant 

annual festivals, for the fourth week 

of Lent, which, though largely grounded 

in colonial Catholic traditions, also incorporates 

significant elements of thoroughly 

Maya thought and religious practice. 

“Global Cities” Seminar Travels 

to New Orleans 

Professor Esther da Costa Meyer’s spring 

semester graduate seminar, “Global Cities,” 

focused on how globalization has begun to 

change urban built environments irrevocably, 

integrating the local and the global and 

eroding regional boundaries. Some architects 

hail these new transnational and 

deterritorialized configurations, while others 

fiercely resist homogenization by favoring 

place-based strategies. This course examined 

the effects of globalization on cities like Los 

Angeles, Mumbai, Lagos, Dubai, and 

Shanghai, that have had to deal with spatial 

polarization, economic and environmental 

inequality, displacement, and gentrification. 

On May 8–10, da Costa Meyer and her seminar 

will travel to New Orleans, an early example 

of a “global” city, whose culture and architecture 

were shaped by influences ranging 

from Spanish and French to Caribbean 

and Creole. The class will examine the 

buildings of the past—manifested in the 

French Quarter, Creole houses, and plantation 

houses —focusing partly on issues 

of long-term preservation. They will also 

view the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina 

on the city of the 21st century, touring the 

Lower Ninth Ward and the system of levees 

designed to protect it as it rebuilds. 

By studying not only the preservation 

of the city’s historic nucleus, but also its reconstruction 

and sustainability as a viable city in the face of 

potentially overwhelming environmental threats, 

the seminar will gain a firsthand knowledge of one 

of the continent’s first global cities. 

ART 468 students explore the 

west court of the palace at 

Palenque 

Pitot House, a Creole-style 

colonial house in New Orleans 

Hurricane Katrina damage in the 

Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans 

21 

Zoë Saunders ’10

The “Art as Knowledge” lecture 

series focused on how knowledge 

is developed and conveyed by a 

wide range of objects, including 

Mesopotamian relief sculpture 

Department Lecture 

Series 

Fall 2008 

Thursday, October 2 

Alicia Walker 

Washington University 

Classical Myth and Female Morality 

in Medieval Byzantium: The Case 

of the Veroli Casket 

Tuesday, October 14 

Art as Knowledge Lecture Series 

Michael Cole 

University of Pennsylvania 

Sculpture and Urbanism in Grand 

Ducal Florence 

Tuesday, October 21 

The Kurt Weitzmann Memorial 

Lecture 

Alexei Lidov 

Research Center for Eastern 

Christian Culture, Moscow 

Hierotopy: Spatial Icons and Image- 

Paradigms in Byzantine Culture 

Thursday, November 6 

Rebecca Zorach 

University of Chicago 

A Secret Kind of Charm Not to Be 

Expressed or Discerned 

Tuesday, December 2 


Wu Hung 


Shi Tao (1642–1707) and the 

Traditional Chinese Conception 

of Ruins 

continued on page 23 

22 

Lectures, Conferences, Symposiums 

“Art as Knowledge” 

Lecture Series 

The department collaborated with the Institute for 

Advanced Study on the innovative lecture series 

“Art as Knowledge” during the 2008–09 academic 

year. Organized by the department’s Professor 

Christopher Heuer and Professor Yve-Alain Bois 

of the institute, the series offered seven lectures on 

the subject of how art develops and conveys knowledge. 

Heuer and Bois collaborated on identifying 

and inviting leading scholars from a broad range of 

art-historical disciplines to present the lectures. 

The talks by seven noted art historians from 

around the country reflected on a number of 

questions in order to examine the myriad ways in 

which art has historically affirmed—or subverted 

—what can be perceived, discovered, or learned. 

The lectures also addressed the issue of whether 

questions raised by art works are context-specific or 

have a broader epistemological value. While art has 

traditionally demonstrated a commitment to 

alternative realms of thinking, these presentations 

questioned what art objects “know” uniquely and 

to what extent this knowledge can be recovered. 

For the speakers and their topics, see the sidebars 

on this page and page 23. 

Arts of the East: Byzantine 

Studies in Princeton 

October 16, 2008 

Organized by the Index of Christian Art, this conference 

brought together 11 senior scholars to 

present papers on a wide range of topics in the field 

of Byzantine art, primarily iconographic. The daylong 

colloquium drew a sizable audience to hear 

presentations of recent research on the documentary 

image and the role of the viewer, monastic 

iconography, works of art not made by human 

hands, and other intriguing subjects. The conference 

coincided with an exhibition of some of 

Princeton’s Greek manuscripts in Firestone Library, 

and other speakers very appropriately examined 

subjects in the field of manuscript studies, including 

evidence for readership and ownership, and 

erasures and iconoclasm. For more about this conference, 

as well the roster of speakers, see page 30 

and the Index’s conference webpage, http://ica. 

princeton.edu/conference.php. 

ARTiculations 

March 7, 2009 

With an audience of more than 400 in attendance, 

the six artists whose works were shown in the 

Princeton University Art Museum exhibition “Outside 

In”—Arnold Chang, Vannessa Tran, Michael 

Cherney, Zhi Lin, Liu Dan, and Zhang Hongtu— 

gave “voice” to their art and their artistic practices. 

Their presentations included an analysis of Chinese 

landscape painting, a visual journey through an artist’s 

photographic works, an insightful dialogue 

between the artist Liu Dan and Professor Jerome 

Silbergeld, a discussion of images of construction 

that contain social commentary, a meditative poem, 

and a look at mixing styles of art and creating new 

artistic possibilities for the future. 

The artists’ presentations were complemented 

by papers given by scholars in modern and contemporary 

Chinese art, American art, and politics, all 

of whom offered different perspectives on contemporary 

art. “ARTiculations” provided a forum for 

both artists and scholars to challenge perceptions 

and biases about what is “Chinese,” what is “American,” 

and what is “contemporary” art. The Tang 

Center, which organized the conference in collaboration 

with the Princeton University Art Museum, 

plans to publish the proceedings. For more about 

this conference, see pages 24–25. 

Speakers at the graduate student symposium 

“Postwar Post-Sculpture?” (left to right): Alex Kitnick, 

Lisa Lee, Professor Anne Wagner, Anna Katz, and 

Kate Nesin 

Postwar Post-Sculpture? 

March 13, 2009 

At this afternoon of papers, responses, and discussion 

on the shifting status and unstable category of 

sculpture in the postwar period, four graduate students 

presented their work-in-progress papers on 

the objects and practices of four sculptors. Anna 

Katz spoke on “Lee Bontecou and Hybridity,” Alex 

Kitnick gave a paper on “Eduardo Paolozzi and 

spring 2009

Symbolic Space,” Lisa Lee discussed her work in a 

paper titled “Isa Genzken and Plastic Allegories,” 

and Kate Nesin gave a presentation on “Cy Twombly 

and Painted Sculpture.” The speakers addressed 

what has drawn them to the term “sculpture,” as 

well as to the terms of sculpture, in the postwar 

period, applying diverse approaches to the question 

of sculpture’s relevance and its current manifestations. 

Professor Anne Wagner, the Class of 1936 

Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art at the 

University of California–Berkeley, delivered the 

keynote lecture, “Heavy Metal,” a close reading of 

David Smith’s sculpture. 

Gothic Art and Thought 

in the Middle Ages 

March 19–20, 2009 

Responding to the wide scope and evolving interests 

of scholars currently working in the field of 

Gothic art, the Index of Christian Art organized 

this major international conference as a forum for 

recent research, overviews of the state of the field, 

and the posing of still unanswered questions. Seventeen 

leading scholars from Europe and the U.S. 

took part, speaking on topics that ranged from the 

rise of the Gothic in the northern Holy Roman 

Empire to late Gothic pictorial invention. Other 

speakers focused on questions pertaining to specific 

mediums—including Gothic ivories, glass 

paintings, enamels, and monumental sculpture—as 

well as the relationship of Gothic to Scholasticism. 

For more information about this conference and 

a list of the speakers, see page 30 and the Index’s 

conference webpage, http://ica.princeton.edu/ 

conference.php. 

Copy That! Reproduction 

and Pedagogy 

2009 Graduate Student Symposium 

March 28, 2009 

From Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s famous 

refusal to travel to Greece to see original works of 

art to today’s reliance on digital images and “virtual 

museums,” art history has been and is a discipline 

grounded in the study of reproductions. The Wölfflin 

two-slide comparison has now given way to 

the PowerPoint presentation, enabling lectures to 

shift among a seemingly infinite number of images, 

texts, videos, and websites. 

This time of shifting pedagogical paradigms 

within the discipline calls for a reassessment of 

the possibilities and limitations of learning from 

reproductions. How have different historical 

understandings of pedagogy shaped the relationship 

between the copy and the original, reshaped 

technologies of copying, and changed the reception 

of the copy? With these questions in mind, this 

spring 2009 

year’s graduate student conference, organized by 

Caroline Fowler and Amanda Bock, explored the 

intersection of the discipline of art history, pedagogy, 

and reproduction. Six graduate students from 

around the U.S. and Europe gave papers that 

probed the nature and function of copies across 

a range of time and media. The keynote speaker 

was Professor Amy Powell of the University of 

California–Irvine. 

Friends at a Brushwood Gate: 

A Symposium on East Asian 

Art in Honor of Professor 

Yoshiaki Shimizu 

April 18–19, 2009 

Most of Professor Yoshiaki Shimizu’s former graduate 

students who are active in the field of East 

Asian art gathered at Princeton to present their 

current research and enjoy the rare opportunity for 

a reunion. Senior colleagues and eminent scholars 

in East Asian art also participated throughout the 

weekend. Lothar Ledderose, Tsuji Nobuo, John 

Rosenfield, and Mimi Yiengpruksawan gave 

remarks focusing on the field of Japanese art and 

Shimizu’s contributions to it, as well as their personal 

reminiscences. Helmut Brinker, Barbara 

Ford, Richard Okada, Richard Stanley-Baker, 

Egami Yasushi, and Ann Yonemura served as panel 

chairs. The panels focused on a wide range of 

topics and revealed different methodologies, 

including the multidisciplinary approach of 

addressing religion and art in terms of vision and 

practice; an historiographical treatment of two 

topics in Japanese art history; and a reconsideration 

of the body, self, and self-fashioning in the Japanese 

visual tradition. The papers, which were enthusiastically 

received, will be published by the Tang 

Center. For more about this conference, see 

page 25. 

Princeton-Rutgers 

Senior Thesis Symposium 

April 24, 2009 

The third annual senior thesis symposium gave 

four department majors the opportunity to present 

talks based on their thesis research in a public 

forum. Like last year’s extremely successful event, 

the afternoon’s proceedings also included four 

undergraduate art history majors from Rutgers who 

were invited to present the results of their senior 

theses. The colloquium, which took place in 

McCormick Hall, was organized by departmental 

representative Professor Anne McCauley. Following 

the talks, the department hosted a reception for the 

speakers and their professors. 

Flyer for the “Friends at a 

Brushwood Gate” symposium 

honoring Yoshiaki Shimizu 

Department Lecture Series 

continued from page 22 

Thursday, December 4 


Michael Fried 

Johns Hopkins University 

Anri Sala’s “Long Sorrow” 

Tuesday, January 20 


Joseph Leo Koerner 

Harvard University 

The Unspeakable Subject of 

Hieronymus Bosch 

Spring 2009 

Wednesday, February 11 


Benjamin Buchloh 


Camera Stupida: Photographs and 

Pop in Gerhard Richter’s Early Work 

Tuesday, March 10 


Zainab Bahrani 

Columbia University 

Sovereign Power, Death, and 

Monuments 

Tuesday, April 7 


Ewa Lajer-Burcharth 


Boucher’s Promiscuity 

Thursday, April 16 

Huey Copeland 

Northwestern University 

Solar Ethics 

23

Tang Center Events 

Lecture Series 

Icons, Rituals, and Paths to 

Salvation: Three Lectures on 

the History of Japanese 

Buddhist Sculpture 

John Rosenfield 

Harvard University, Emeritus 


Bloody Mayhem 


Japan and China 


The Very End of the Law 

Seminar 


Xu Hong 

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 

The Bronze Industry of Erlitou 

Artist’s Workshop 

November 17, 19, and 20, 2008 

Zhang Hongtu 

Re-painting Two Portraits: 

Shen Zhou and Mona Lisa 

Lectures 

December 2, 2008 

Wu Hung 


Shitao (1642−1707) and the 

Traditional Concept of Ruins 

Co-sponsored by the Department 

of Art and Archaeology 

April 27, 2009 

Boreth Ly 

University of California–Santa Cruz 

Circles of Power: The Political 

Palladia of Southeast Asia 

Co-sponsored by the Buddhist 

Studies Workshop 

Symposiums 

March 7, 2009 

ARTiculations 

Organized by the P. Y. and 

Kinmay W. Tang Center for East 

Asian Art and the Princeton 

University Art Museum 

April 18–19, 2009 

Friends at a Brushwood Gate: A 

Symposium on East Asian Art in 

Honor of Professor Yoshiaki Shimizu 

From left, Liu Dan, Michael 

Cherney, Zhi Lin, Arnold Chang, 

Vannessa Tran, and Zhang 

Hongtu, the artists whose works 

were shown in the exhibition 

“Outside In: Chinese × American 

× Contemporary Art” at the 

Princeton University Art Museum 

24 

Andrea Kane 

Tang Center for East Asian Art 

The Tang Center had its most ambitious 

year ever, in both the variety and the scope 

of its activities. Director Jerome Silbergeld 

and Associate Director Dora C. Y. Ching organized 

an exhibition with the Princeton University Art 

Museum, two publications, the fourth Tang Center 

lecture series, an artist’s workshop, and two largescale 

international symposia, as well as smaller 

programs. 

In October, John Rosenfield, professor emeritus 

at Harvard University, presented a series of 

three lectures, titled “Icons, Rituals, and Paths to 

Salvation,” on Japanese Buddhist sculpture. Rosenfield 

raised questions about the ritual function of 

works of art in times of extreme social upheaval 

and the effects of social change on artistic patronage 

and practice. His lectures focused on statues 

commissioned by the monk Shunjobo Chogen 

(1122–1206), the transmission of rituals and craft 

techniques from China and their impact on Buddhist 

sculptors and builders of the late 12th–early 

13th centuries, and the changing status of Buddhist 

sculptors and the ritual function of their 

images from the 15th century to the present. 

The Tang Center lecture series, inaugurated in 

2003, is a forum for eminent scholars to present 

their current research, first in lectures and then in a 

published volume. The first book in the series, 

Jerome Silbergeld’s Body in Question: Image and 

Illusion in Two Chinese Films by Director Jiang Wen, 

distributed by Princeton University Press, was 

published last autumn. Plans are underway to 

publish two other lecture series, “Commemorative 

Chinese Landscape Painting” by Anne Clapp, 

professor emerita at Wellesley College, and Rosenfield’s 

2008 lectures. 

In November, the Tang Center held its fourth 

artist’s workshop, co-sponsored by the Council of 

the Humanities, the Program in Visual Arts, and 

the Princeton University Art Museum. Artist Zhang 

Hongtu taught a workshop titled “Re-painting Two 

Portraits: Shen Zhou and Mona Lisa,” in which 

students “repainted” a portrait using a medium and 

style different than the original. He focused on the 

issue of boundaries between cultures, teaching students 

to understand and deconstruct them in order 

to overcome the limitations of “East” and “West.” 

These artist’s workshops were one component 

of a multi-year project that culminated in the 

March opening of the exhibition “Outside In: 

Chinese × American × Contemporary Art” at the 

Princeton University Art Museum. The related 

symposium, “ARTiculations,” featured all six artists 

(Arnold Chang, Vannessa Tran, Michael Cherney, 

Title wall for the exhibition “Outside In: Chinese × 

American × Contemporary Art” 

Zhi Lin, Liu Dan, and Zhang Hongtu), the curators 

of the exhibition (Jerome Silbergeld, Cary Y. 

Liu, and Dora C. Y. Ching), along with five leading 

scholars on modern and contemporary Chinese art, 

and one expert on American art. Four of the six 

artists had previously taught multi-session workshops 

at Princeton. The exhibition, 

symposium, and exhibition catalogue 

raised the questions “what is 

Chinese?” “what is American?” 

and “what is contemporary?,” and 

challenged conventional definitions 

of geography, ethnicity, 

contemporaneity, and cultural 

Chineseness. 

All six artists in the exhibition 

are United States citizens—some 

are immigrants, some were born in 

America, some are ethnically Chinese, 

while others have adopted 

Chinese art and culture as their 

own. Though each is distinguished 

spring 2009

y their individuality, artistry, and artistic strategies, 

all six relate to one another in multiple ways, 

and all engage deeply with both Chinese and Western 

traditions. Arnold Chang, a practitioner of 

brush-and-ink painting in the tradition of the great 

literati painters, welcomes the label of “traditionalist” 

but seeks to understand his own work in a 

contemporary context. Vannessa Tran professes an 

outlook and adheres to a type of painting practice 

that could be thought of as quite Asian, yet 

it is difficult to find obvious traces of direct Asian 

influence in her art. Michael Cherney blends the 

disparate traditions of modern photography and 

classical Chinese book arts so thoroughly that a 

completely new type of art emerges. For Zhi Lin, 

art is a vehicle for social commentary. He draws 

from both European and Chinese sources, imbuing 

his work with a sense of history and viewing 

his role as that of a social critic. Liu Dan knows 

and appreciates the ancient Chinese masters, yet 

maintains his own individuality and independence. 

His artistry also has roots in both traditional Chinese 

and European styles. And Zhang Hongtu 

plays with mixing styles in a manner he describes 

as a “hybrid” of East and West. The exhibition 

catalogue presents a reassessment of “Chinese 

American contemporary art” as well as in-depth 

studies of each artist. Both the exhibition and the 

symposium were well received, with more than 400 

people in attendance on the opening day. The Tang 

Center will publish the proceedings of the symposium, 

which will include the presentations of 

the keynote speakers Michael Sullivan and Zheng 

Shengtian, as well as other leading scholars. 

In April, the Tang Center held a second largescale 

symposium, “Friends at a Brushwood Gate,” 

which honored the scholarship and teaching of 

Yoshiaki Shimizu, the Frederick Marquand Professor 

of Art and Archaeology. Shimizu has helped 

define and expand the field of Japanese art history 

and the exhibition of the arts of Japan during more 

than 35 years of teaching at Princeton and the 

University of California–Berkeley, and as curator of 

Japanese art at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, 

D.C. Fifteen of his former graduate students, 

who now work at universities, colleges, and museums 

in North America and Europe, presented their 

recent research, which demonstrated the incisive 

spring 2009 

visual analysis, philological expertise, and multidisciplinary 

inquiry that has characterized Shimizu’s 

scholarship and teaching. Several distinguished 

colleagues presented tributes to Shimizu’s accomplishments, 

as well as recollections of their 

friendships and collaborations. The well-attended 

gathering at one of the great “gates of learning” was 

a lively and convivial exchange among mentors, 

colleagues, and friends that will sustain Shimizu’s 

legacy. 

In an ongoing collaboration with Princeton’s 

art museum, the Tang Center funded the acquisition 

of several works of art for the museum’s 

permanent collection. A particularly intriguing 

acquisition this year was a Taihu rock, or Chinese 

scholar’s rock. Taihu rocks, which have been collected 

and treasured throughout Chinese history, 

are created by drilling a limestone rock and immersing 

it in Lake Tai, where it is eroded by the water, 

waves, and sands. The resulting perforated surface 

often appears natural, and the rocks have been 

likened to miniature cosmic mountains with heavenly 

grottoes and fantastic peaks. The Taihu rock 

complements the museum’s collection and will be 

useful for teaching, since many Chinese and Japanese 

paintings depict scholar’s rocks or contain 

images of such rocks in gardens, or of miniature 

potted landscapes. 

For the last several years, the Tang Center has 

also actively collected works by the artists in the 

exhibition “Outside In.” This past year, acquisitions 

include two works each by Zhang Hongtu (The 

Bikers and Fish) and Vannessa Tran (a graphite-onpaper 

drawing of a tree and an oil-on-canvas 

painting of a rose). These works contribute to the 

museum’s holdings in contemporary art and will 

also serve as tangible reminders of the exhibition. 

Plans for the coming academic year include 

a symposium on October 24 on documentary 

photography from China from 1951–2003, in conjunction 

with an exhibition organized by Jerome 

Silbergeld at China Institute in New York, and the 

fourth biennial graduate student symposium on 

East Asian art. For more information about Tang 

Center publications, symposiums, and other events, 

visit the website http://tang.princeton.edu. 

Flyer for the 

Tang Center’s 

symposium 

“ARTiculations” 

Outside In: Chinese × American 

× Contemporary Art exhibition 

catalogue 

Limestone Taihu rock, gift of the 

Tang Center to the Princeton 

University Art Museum, and 

museum purchase, Asian Art 

Department Fund (2008-65) 

25 

Bruce M. White

26 

“The Invention of Drawing” 

from Joachim von Sandrart’s 

Teutsche Academie der Bau- 

Bildhauer- und Maler-Kunst 

Portrait of Watteau by François 

Boucher from Figures de différents 

caractères, de paysages & d’étudez 

dessinées d’après nature 

Detail of the Pont Neuf area from 

Michel Turgot, Plan de Paris (1739) 

Marquand Library 

Marquand celebrated its centennial this 

year with an exhibition in Firestone 

Library organized by Marquand librarian 

Sandra Brooke and bibliographer Nicola 

Shilliam. The show, which commemorated Professor 

Allan Marquand’s 1908 donation of 4,000 

books from his personal library, consisted of some 

notable volumes from the original gift, including 

early texts by Palladio and Vignola. Also on display 

were documents from the 1880s and 1890s that 

evoked the day-to-day process of creating the collection—Marquand’s 

travel notebooks filled with 

library desiderata, along with meticulously kept 

receipts from book dealers, shippers, and bookbinders. 

Marquand continued to select and underwrite 

all of the library’s acquisitions until his death in 

1924. 

Among this year’s notable additions to the 

collection is the first printed edition of the earliest 

Renaissance treatise on art, Leon Battista Alberti’s 

De Pictvra (1540). Prior to the publication of this 

Basel edition, Alberti’s text had already achieved 

wide influence, though it circulated only in manuscript 

form. The library also acquired a greatly 

expanded edition of Joachim von Sandrart’s 

Teutsche Academie der Bau- Bildhauer- und Maler- 

Kunst (1768–75). This encyclopedic eight-volume 

survey of art history and theory from its origins to 

the late 17th century, created by Johann Jacob 

Volkmann, contains almost twice as many pages as 

the original 1675–79 edition and some 700 

superbly engraved plates. Figures de différents caractères, 

de paysages & d’étudez dessinées d’après 

nature is the first catalogue of Antoine Watteau’s 

drawings, published in 1726–28 by Jean de Julienne. 

The two elephant folio volumes contain 350 

reproductive etchings by some of the foremost 

artists of the day, including François Boucher. 

Among the recent acquisitions in ancient art 

and archaeology are Antonio del Re’s Dell’antichità 

tiburtine (1611), which includes one of the earliest 

studies of Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, and a special 

luxury edition of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s 

Description des pierres gravées du feu Baron de Stosch 

(1760), the first complete catalogue of a famous 

collection of ancient carved gems, with plates by 

the innovative Nuremburg engraver Johann Adam 

Progressive views of a Dutch town from Ed Ruscha’s Dutch Details (1971) 

Joseph Beuys’s artist’s book/catalogue for the 1967 

exhibition at the Mönchengladbach Museum 

Richard Hamilton, Towards a definitive statement on 

the coming trends in men’s wear and accessories, from 

Collected Words, 1953–82 

Schweikart. Josiah Wedgwood’s Account of the 

Barberini, Now Portland, Vase (1788), a compilation 

of texts on the famous example of Roman cameo 

glass, was published in connection with the Wedgwood 

factory’s production of 43 jasperware replicas. 

In architectural history, Marquand acquired 

Scenographiae, sive perspectivae (1563), an early 

collection of inventive compositions by the Dutch 

painter, engineer, and architect Hans Vredeman de 

Vries. Desseins de touttes les parties de l’église de Saint 

Pierre de Rome (1713), a detailed study of St. Peter’s 

basilica in Rome made for the French king in 1659 

by the engineer Jacques Tarade, includes scaled 

comparisons of St. Peter’s with Notre-Dame de 

Paris and Strasbourg cathedral. Michel Turgot’s 

Plan de Paris (1739) was commissioned during his 

tenure as provost of the city’s merchants. Its 20 

plates show minutely detailed birds’-eye views of 

the buildings, gardens, and surrounds of Paris, and 

could be assembled to form a magnificent 8½ × 

10½ foot map. Nuova raccolta delle più belle vedute 

di Roma dissegnate, e intagliate da celebri autori 

spring 2009

Motif from Eugène-Victor Collinot 

and Adalbert, vicomte de Beaumont, 

Encylopédie des arts décoratifs de l’Orient 

(1883), purchased in honor of Frances Chen 

(1771) is a book of 50 views of Rome by 

Domenico Montagu, a French engraver 

active in the Roman circle of Piranesi. 

The restoration of Wells cathedral’s 

13th-century west front in 1870–73 is 

documented in Statuary & Details of Wells 

Cathedral, a rare album of photographs by 

T. W. Phillips. 

In modern art, Marquand added to 

its collection of innovative boxed catalogues 

produced by the Mönchengladbach 

Museum, acquiring rare examples by Joseph 

Beuys (1967), Gerhard Richter (1974), and 

Marcel Broodthaers (1971). German conceptual 

artist Hans-Peter Feldman’s Bilder (1968–76) 

is a landmark portfolio of 10 variously sized 

booklets composed with studied simplicity 

from found photographs. 

A deluxe edition of Richard Hamilton’s Collected 

Words, 1953–82, includes nine original prints 

created retrospectively by the artist to explicate his 

artistic thinking in the late 1950s and early 1960s. 

Acquisitions in photography included The History 

and Practice of Photogenic Drawing on the True 

Principles of the Daguerréotype . . . (1839), a rare 

English translation by John Smythe Memes of a 

technical work by Louis Daguerre. The French 

photographic pioneer’s invention had been known 

to the public for only a few months at the time of 

this publication. Dutch Details (1971) completes 

Princeton’s collection of Ed Ruscha photo books. 

Each of its 10 panoramic fold-out pages is punctuated 

with progressive snapshots of buildings and 

bridges in four Dutch towns. 

New acquisitions in decorative arts include 

two intriguing handbooks. John Stalker and 

George Parker’s Treatise of Japaning [sic] and 

Varnishing (1688), one of the earliest chinoiserie 

pattern books published in England, includes 

designs for “Japan-work, in imitation of the Indians” 

as well as practical recipes for craftsmen, 

including formulas for lacquer and 

faux tortoiseshell. Ornements de 

la Chine, ornements du Japon, 

ornements Vénitiens, Hindous, 

Russes, etc. (1883) is a lavishly 

illustrated elephant folio consisting 

of three parts of the 

six-part Encylopédie des arts 

décoratifs de l’Orient, created 

by the ceramic manufacturers 

Eugène-Victor Collinot and 

Adalbert, vicomte de Beaumont, as 

a means of inspiring French artists and 

designers. 

spring 2009 

Nicola Shilliam 

Newly acquired periodicals include two 

notable Art Nouveau examples: Pan (Berlin, 

1895–1900) and Ver Sacrum (Vienna, 1898– 

1903), celebrated for their typographic 

design, as well as original graphic art by 

Toulouse-Lautrec, Kollwitz, Klimt, Moser, 

and others. Marquand’s finely bound copy 

of Pan includes all 106 hors texte prints. 

The run of Ver Sacrum, official organ of the 

Vienna Secession, includes some of the 

exceptionally rare special issues. Other 

modern and contemporary periodicals 

added this year include Apollon (Petrograd, 

1909–17), Art in Australia (Sydney, 

1916–42), Dinamo futurista (Rovereto, 

1933), Prisma der kunsten (Zeist, 1936–37), 

Ver y estimar (Buenos Aires, 1948–53), and 

Krater und Wolke (Cologne, 1982–90). 

Among the facsimiles purchased this 

year is a late-14th-century manuscript of 

Cecco d’Ascoli’s L’Ascerba (Biblioteca Medicea- 

Laurenziana MS. Plut. 40.52), an illustrated 

didactic poem on the natural world and philosophy. 

Cecco, a Bolognese professor of astrology, 

was executed for heresy in 1327, largely because of 

this work. 

Nicola Shilliam 

Marquand Library’s Western art history bibliographer, 

Nicola Shilliam, has a wide-ranging 

background in both the academic and museum 

worlds. After earning a B.A. in European history at 

Warwick University in the U.K., she was an Andrew 

W. Mellon Fellow in British Art at Yale, where she 

conducted dissertation research on 16th-century 

English tomb sculpture. After earning her Ph.D. at 

Warwick, she pursued curatorial studies in costume 

and textiles at the Fashion Institute of Technology 

in New York, then joined the Museum of Fine Arts, 

Boston, where she was assistant curator in the 

Department of Textiles and Costumes for 11 years. 

At the MFA she organized a number of exhibitions 

on subjects as diverse as English needlework of the 

Tudor and Stuart periods and Art Deco textiles. 

Shilliam, who joined Marquand Library in 

2001, selects recent foreign language books 

and assists librarian Sandra Brooke with 

the acquisition of rare books—scrutinizing 

dealers’ catalogues and 

online offerings for items that 

will be useful for teaching and 

research. With the recent installation 

of a rare book exhibition 

case in Marquand, Shilliam 

draws on her museum experience 

to organize informative displays of 

rare materials, with an emphasis on 

recently acquired treasures. 

Design from John Stalker and 

George Parker, Treatise of Japaning 

[sic] and Varnishing (1688), 

Elise and Wesley Wright Jr. ’51 

Marquand Book Fund 

Mlle Marcelle Lender en buste, a 

Toulouse-Lautrec lithograph from 

an 1895 issue of Pan 

The personification “Prudentia” 

from the facsimile of Cecco 

d’Ascoli’s L’Ascerba 

27

Bryan R. Just 

Dawit Petros, Proposition 2, 

Mountain, Badwater Basin, Death 

Valley, California, temporary 

sculptural installation, 2007, one 

of the images of contemporary 

African art added to Almagest 

this year 

Recently discovered sandstone 

panel depicting K’awill Mo’ as a 

captive, Toniná, ca. a.d. 692, one of 

the pre-Columbian images added 

to the Almagest database 

28 

Sample display of Department 

of Art and Archaeology images 

now available in ARTstor 

Visual Resources Collection 

This has been a year of changes and 

expanding options in the Visual Resources 

Collection (VRC), directed by Trudy 

Jacoby. As the transition to teaching with digital 

images nears completion, the VRC now produces 

very few slides, and the focus has shifted to 

expanding and improving the digital image collection. 

With the appointment of new faculty 

members, image collections in new areas of the 

curriculum are also being built: this year there have 

been major additions to Japanese, Pre-Columbian, 

and African art. The most recent architectural 

images in the Archivision Digital Research Library 

have been added to the VRC’s holdings, and collections 

covering the history of photography are 

also being augmented. 

The VRC has also instituted multiple options 

for accessing images by making the department’s 

digital image collections available through the 

ARTstor Digital Library, as well as through Princeton’s 

own Almagest database. The ARTstor 

institutional image-hosting program now allows 

users to search the department’s image collections 

and the images available to all ARTstor subscribers 

with a single search. These hosted collections are 

available to all Princeton students, faculty, and 

staff, and registered users can also upload and 

access their own images alongside images from 

ARTstor. The collections currently hosted in ARTstor 

include the VRC’s digital image collection in 

Almagest, the Saskia archive, and Archivision. 

These collections are currently updated twice a 

year, but more frequent updates are planned. 

In addition to the VRC, a number of other 

entities on campus hold digital image collections. 

At the moment, most of these are in stand-alone 

databases that have to be searched separately. 

Jacoby participated in the campus LAM (Library, 

Archive, and Museum) meeting, hosted by RLG 

Programs with the goal of improving coordination 

of and access to these resources. One priority set by 

the Princeton group was the implementation of 

federated image searching, which would allow users 

to search multiple University image resources with 

a single search. Jacoby is now heading a group that 

is examining how image searching can be enhanced. 

A number of new collections were acquired 

from scholars this year. In December, William L. 

MacDonald, professor emeritus at Smith College, 

transferred his collection of approximately 15,000 

slides to Princeton. MacDonald is the author of 

numerous books on the architecture of the Roman 

Empire, some co-authored with the department’s 

Professor John Pinto. The great strength of this 

collection is its coverage of ancient Roman architecture, 

particularly sites in remote portions of the 

former empire, but also of well-known monuments 

throughout Italy. It includes extensive documentation 

of sites in the Syrian desert, Algeria, Tunisia, 

Libya, and elsewhere, mostly taken in the 1960s and 

’70s, as well as Greek and Byzantine architecture. 

Visual Resources also continued its ongoing 

project of scanning Pinto’s slide collection, which 

includes extensive documentation of Rome, with a 

concentration on the built environment from the 

ancient period through Renaissance and later. Digital 

images of Pre-Columbian art from Bryan Just, 

curator of the arts of the ancient Americas at the 

Princeton University Art Museum, were also added 

to the database. His collection includes images of 

Aztec, Maya, and Mixtec codices, as well as a wide 

variety of sites and objects. Lucy Lo donated a collection 

of slides of Chinese subjects, including both 

objects in museums and on-site photography. 

Among the new technologies introduced this 

year is the University’s WebSpace application, 

which allows the sharing of large files and has 

already proved useful for transmitting presentations 

for visiting lecturers, PiCtor database documents, 

and large images for publication and research. The 

storage and backup of the VRC’s image collections 

have also been transferred to a more secure University 

server. New equipment available for use in 

Visual Resources includes a high-quality, large- 

format flatbed scanner. 

The Princeton/Cornell image management 

database, PiCtor, underwent further development 

this year and is now compatible with Vista and 

Access 2007 and has added fields for compliance 

with cataloguing standards and data detail. A new 

generic version was distributed without charge to 

spring 2009

other institutions who requested it, including new 

users Lafayette College, Texas Tech, and the University 

of Richmond. 

Visual Resources lost staff member Martha 

Perry, who accepted a position at the Princeton 

Public Library. Beth Wodnick joined the VRC in 

September as a senior image cataloger and support 

specialist. A native of New Jersey, she earned a B.S. 

in photography at Syracuse University, then 

worked as a photographer in the Chicago area for 

six years. After moving to Boston for graduate 

school, she joined the staff of the Fine Arts Library 

at Harvard, where she catalogued images of African 

art and architecture. While working at Harvard, 

she earned her master’s degree in library science at 

Simmons College. Drawing on her experience in 

both hands-on photography and digital cataloguing, 

Wodnick is cataloguing history of photography 

images, as well as working on other image needs 

and cataloguing procedures. She recently received a 

travel award from the Visual Resources Association 

to attend their annual conference. 

David Connelly continues to increase his 

expertise in digital photography and projection, 

and serves as a resource on digital imaging for 

the entire department. Senior cataloger Virginia 

French also works on administrative aspects of the 

collection and the database. Media specialist Marilyn 

Gazzillo provides support, instruction, and 

assistance with all classroom media. Trudy Jacoby 

serves on the Visual Resources Association Foundation’s 

board of directors, the finance committee of 

the Art Libraries Society, and the implementation 

committee of the ARLIS/VRA Summer Educational 

Institute for Visual Resources. Shari 

Kenfield is a member of the Society of 

American Archivists and continues 

the exhibition program of the 

Research Photographs Collections. 

Chris Spedaliere is now 

the resident cataloging expert 

for Pre-Columbian material, 

while Xia Wei is currently 

concentrating on building 

the digital image collections of 

Japanese art. 

Research Photographs 

Last fall, Curator of Research Photographs 

Shari Kenfield, in collaboration with Professor 

Slobodan Ćurčić, graduate student Matthew 

Milliner, and computing support specialist Julie 

Angarone, mounted an exhibition in McCormick 

Hall titled “Hidden, Discovered, and Still Overlooked: 

A Selection of Icons from Mount Sinai.” 

Conceived in conjunction with the third annual 

Kurt Weitzmann Memorial Lecture, the exhibition 

presented a series of over-life-size images of icons 

from the department’s Sinai archive. 

spring 2009 

The Princeton-Michigan-Alexandria 

expedition to the Monastery of Saint Catherine 

at Mount Sinai, organized by Weitzmann 

and George Forsyth ’23, discovered a large 

cache of previously unknown icons. While 

scholars greeted this momentous discovery 

with enthusiasm, the majority of these icons 

continue to be unpublished and overlooked. 

Weitzmann himself wrote, “There are hundreds 

of icons, especially of the more recent 

periods, which are uninteresting from the 

artistic point of view.” This exhibition presented 

some of these “uninteresting” icons, 

demonstrating that many of them are striking and 

original works of art. Preparation of the exhibition 

also resulted in the re-identification and reorganization 

of the color images in the Weitzmann archive. 

Work began this year on cataloguing and 

digitizing the photographs assembled by the 

department’s late Professor David Coffin, a scholar 

of Italian Renaissance architecture and garden 

design. His collection includes hundreds of splendid 

photographs of Renaissance and Baroque villas, 

churches, palazzos, gardens, and other monuments, 

with a particular focus on central and northern 

Italy. 

The Research Photographs Collection also 

loaned drawings, photographs, and documents 

from its Howard Crosby Butler archive to the 

National Museum in Damascus, Syria, for the 

exhibition “Pionniers et Protagonistes de 

l’Archéologie Syrienne,” one of the cultural and 

artistic events held as part of the celebration of 

Syrian culture in Damascus, which was named 

Arab Cultural Capital for 2008. 

Among the many scholars who 

drew on the Research Photographs 

Collection this year was Ilaria 

Dagnini Brey, whose forthcoming 

book, The Venus Fixers: 

The Untold Story of the Allied 

Soldiers Who Saved Italy’s Art 

during World War II, recounts 

the dramatic history of the 

U.S. Army’s Monuments, Fine 

Arts, and Archives officers, and 

their efforts to recover Italian 

artworks removed from museums and 

collections by German troops during 

World War II. For this project Kenfield 

drew on the department’s 

collection of hundreds of documentary photographs 

taken by A. Sheldon Pennoyer, who served with the 

MFAA in 1944–45. While many of these images 

depict the horrifying devastation of the war in Italy, 

others capture moments of triumph as looted works 

of art are rescued from their hiding places. 

Beth Wodnick 

The Roman arch at Timgad, 

Algeria, part of the William L. 

MacDonald collection 

An icon at Mount Sinai depicting 

St. Christopher with the head 

of a dog, one of the images in 

Research Photographs’s recent 

exhibition 

Monuments, Fine Arts, and 

Archives officers with a portable 

altar painted by Jacopo di Cione 

around 1360–65, a photograph 

from the Pennoyer collection 

29

30 

Romanesque Art and Thought in 

the Twelfth Century, edited by 

Colum Hourihane 

Late-5th- or early-6th-century 

mosaic grave slab from the church 

at Henchir-Chigarna, Tunisia, part 

of the archive of the International 

Catacomb Society recently added 

to the Index’s database 

Saint Symeon Stylites the Younger 

atop his column in a 12th-century 

fresco at Lagoudera, Cyprus, from 

the collection of photographs by 

Svetlana Tomeković now on the 

Index’s website 

Index of Christian Art 

The Index, directed by Colum Hourihane, 

had another very active year that included 

two major conferences, a new publication, 

and the acquisition and addition of several important 

archives of images. 

In October 2008, the Index sponsored the 

international conference “Arts of the East: Byzantine 

Studies in Princeton,” which coincided 

with the annual Byzantine Studies Conference, 

held this year at Rutgers University. The unifying 

theme behind all of the papers was Byzantine iconography, 

a field in which the Index’s holdings are 

particularly strong thanks to the expert work of 

Lois Drewer, the Index’s research scholar in Byzantine 

and Late Antique art. The presentations at 

the conference dealt with matters as diverse as John 

Climacus’s Heavenly Ladder, Byzantine depictions 

of towers, and the origins of heraldry in Byzantine 

art, with a focus on works of art from areas including 

Cappadocia, Egypt, Armenia, and, of course, 

Greece. The speakers included Slobodan Ćurčić, 

Anthony Cutler, Helen Evans, Catherine Jolivet- 

Lévy, Eunice Maguire, Henry Maguire, Robert 

Ousterhout, Nancy Ševčenko, Don Skemer, and 

Gary Vikan. At the conclusion of the proceedings, 

the audience of more than 200 moved to Firestone 

Library to view the exhibition “The Greek Book: 

From Papyrus to Printing,” which displayed some 

treasures from the library’s rich holdings of Byzantine 

manuscripts. 

Following the success of its conference on the 

Romanesque period two years ago, the Index 

organized a two-day symposium this March 

devoted to Gothic art. Despite the fact that much 

scholarly attention has been devoted to the Gothic, 

the papers given at this conference demonstrated 

that much still remains to be studied and properly 

understood. Even the term “Gothic” is slightly 

unsatisfactory, in that it covers an enormous geographical 

area, stretching from Ireland to Eastern 

Europe, as well as a period of many centuries. 

Some of the many local “languages” of this style 

were examined in detail at the symposium, along 

with iconographic, historical, historiographical, 

and philosophical methodologies. The conference 

honored Willibald Sauerländer, professor emeritus 

at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in 

Munich. The speakers were Barbara Drake Boehm, 

Michelle Brown, Caroline Bruzelius, Madeline 

Caviness, Danielle Gaborit-Chopin, Richard 

Marks, Stephen Murray, Amy Neff, Bernd Nicolai, 

Nina Rowe, Rocío Sánchez Ameijeiras, Lucy 

Freeman Sandler, Dany Sandron, Elizabeth 

Taburet-Delahaye, Katherine Tachau, and 

Giuseppa Zanichelli. 

Decorative column with a bust of a saint or apostle, 

10th–11th century (?), in the museum of the 

Campo Santo Teutonico in Rome 

The Index recently published Romanesque Art 

and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor 

of Walter Cahn (Penn State University Press, 2008), 

the proceedings of its two-day conference in 2006. 

Bringing together recent work by eminent scholars 

from both sides of the Atlantic, this volume 

investigates the development, meaning, and historiography 

of the term “Romanesque,” and the 

relationship of the style to nationalism. Other 

essays focus on iconographical topics, as well as 

issues of style, reception, innovation, technology, 

dating, and geographic coverage. The volume also 

includes an appraisal of the contributions made to 

the field by the conference’s honoree, the eminent 

scholar of the Romanesque, Walter Cahn, as well as 

a bibliography of his publications. 

The papers presented at the Index’s two-day 

symposium on visions, dreams, and insights in 

medieval art and thought, held in March 2008, are 

currently being edited, and publication of the volume 

is expected next year. 

The Index continued its practice of acquiring 

and cataloguing substantial collections of images 

this year. Among the recent acquisitions is the 

unique and little-known archive of the International 

Catacomb Society, based in Boston. Focusing 

on Early Christian and Jewish catacombs throughout 

the Mediterranean area, as well as on other art 

of the period, this collection of nearly 5,000 images 

is now being catalogued and added to the Index’s 

online database. These images include documentation 

of monuments at a number of little-known 

Early Christian sites in North Africa, such as the 

rich series of mosaic grave slabs at Enfidaville, Tunisia. 

In return for this generous gift, the Index will 

spring 2009

provide its cataloguing data to the Catacomb Society, 

which will make the information available to 

its own online subscribers. 

Another major donation of images to the 

Index this year came from the Blago Fund, which 

supports the documentation and preservation of 

the cultural heritage of Serbia. This ongoing project 

has conducted extensive photographic campaigns 

of monuments throughout Serbia, some of them 

never before photographed. The collection of 600 

slides and scans went to both Dumbarton Oaks in 

Washington, D.C., and to the Index, where they 

were iconographically analyzed and catalogued by 

Lois Drewer. Among the sites documented in this 

donation are the medieval monasteries at Studenica, 

Gračanica, Dečani, Sopočani, Ravanica, and 

Mileševa. 

The third archive of images acquired by the 

Index this year, also of Byzantine art, came from 

the Bibliothèque Millet in Paris, thanks to the 

efforts of Catherine Jolivet-Lévy of the Sorbonne. 

This collection was the life work of the late Svetlana 

Tomeković, who was well known as both a 

photographer and a scholar, and who gained access 

to many Byzantine sites throughout Europe and 

the Near East. Her collection of nearly 8,000 slides 

provides wide-ranging visual coverage of Byzantine 

monuments and art in Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, 

Serbia, Cyprus, Turkey, Russia, and beyond, with 

particularly rich coverage of monumental fresco 

painting. 

The Index also received permission to photograph 

and catalogue the collection of the museum 

of the Campo Santo Teutonico in Rome, a cemetery, 

church, and hospice adjacent to St. Peter’s that 

is now an institute for archeological and historical 

studies. The museum’s fine collection includes 

Early Christian sarcophagi, sculpture, inscriptions, 

Two glassblowers at work in Morgan Library 

M.873, a mid-14th-century Italian compendium 

of nearly 500 pharmaceutical illustrations recently 

catalogued by the Index 

spring 2009 

terracotta lamps, 6thcentury 

textiles from 

Egypt, metalwork, and 

a variety of everyday 

objects. 

Work also progressed 

on the Index’s 

long-term project 

of cataloguing the 

Western medieval 

manuscripts owned by 

the Morgan Library 

and Museum in New 

York. All of the manuscripts 

have been photographed, and the Index now 

holds more than 100,000 images from this extensive 

collection. The Morgan project has been an 

unbelievably rich source of material for the Index 

and has extended the time period covered by the 

Index, from 1450 to 1550, and added to the subject 

terms that are used to classify subject matter, 

which now number more than 28,000. 

Index staff continued work on digitizing and 

cataloguing several private collections of slides that 

were generously donated to the archive. During the 

last year the Index added several thousand database 

entries from these donations, including documentation 

of Cappadocian frescoes from the collection 

of Catherine Jolivet-Lévy, Lebanese frescoes contributed 

by Mat Immerzeel, Western manuscript 

illuminations donated by Alison Stones, and Italian 

Romanesque sculpture given by Dorothy Glass. 

Adelaide Bennett Hagens 

Index research scholar Adelaide Bennett Hagens 

is an expert on medieval art and iconography. She 

earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University, where she 

studied with Robert Branner and wrote a dissertation 

on Firestone Library’s Garrett MS. 28, an 

English illuminated Bible of the 1270s. Many of 

her publications and conferences papers have investigated 

Books of Hours—their prayers and the 

usages of the various hours, their medieval antecedents, 

the relationship of their texts and images, and 

aspects of their patronage. She is writing a book on 

French and Franco-Flemish Books of Hours from 

1200 to 1320, a comprehensive study that will 

include a catalogue of all known examples. 

At the Index she has catalogued a wide 

range of material, including manuscripts, 

ivories, stained glass, enamels, and seals, as well 

as other objects and media. She has also contributed 

to the Morgan Library project and recently 

completed the cataloguing of Morgan M.730, a 

French Psalter-Hours of the 1240s with nearly 500 

illuminations. 

The second and third days of 

Creation in Morgan Library and 

Museum M.730, a French Psalter- 

Hours of the 1240s photographed 

and catalogued by the Index 

The evangelist John on the facade 

of the mid-12th-century cathedral 

at Ferrara, part of the gift of 

images from Dorothy Glass 

Adelaide Bennett Hagens 

31

32 

Architect Elise Chassé draws 

the imposing remains of a large 

Roman building at Polis 

A 5th-century b.c. terracotta head 

showing the combination of 

moldmade face and handmade 

hair and wreath 

Members of the terracotta study 

team classifying some of the more 

than 30,000 terracotta sculptures 

excavated at Polis 

The lead seal of Damianos, 

archbishop of Cyprus in the 8th 

century, with the bust of a bishopsaint 

holding a Gospel book 

Excavations 

Excavations at Polis 

Chrysochous, Cyprus 

The second consecutive study season at 

Polis Chrysochous focused on the completion 

of detailed architectural drawings of 

the recent excavations, as well as intensive study of 

the buildings and objects unearthed during 20 seasons 

of digging. Under the direction of Professor 

William Childs, three architects worked tirelessly 

to complete the plans and elevation drawings of 

the large late-Hellenistic–Roman building in area 

E.G0 and the Archaic sanctuary to the northeast 

on the Peristeries plateau (area B.D7). Examination 

of the area around an early Byzantine basilica 

unearthed at a site in the village showed that further 

drawings of that area will have to made during 

the 2009 season. 

Mary Grace Weir *96 (M.A.) continued her 

study of the Classical sanctuary adjacent to the 

ancient city wall, studying the footing trenches of 

an earlier Archaic structure on the site and investigating 

further the material from an ancient pottery 

dump. Her study of the pottery has identified 

nearly 100 terracotta scoops, 

mostly fragmentary, that 

were unearthed in this 

sanctuary, primarily in the 

central area of the main 

enclosure. These objects are 

thought to have functioned 

as incense shovels, and the 

large number of them 

recovered from the Polis 

temple may reflect a long 

period of ritual activity in 

this sanctuary. 

Nancy Serwint *87 

and five students from Arizona 

State University continued the analysis and 

classification of the more than 30,000 terracotta 

sculptures unearthed by Princeton’s excavations. 

Close examination has revealed how the coroplasts 

created heads for statuettes and large-scale statues 

by using various molds for the faces and individualizing 

them with separately made applications 

of clay, often creating images of great beauty. The 

terracotta team also worked on identifying and 

classifying the more than 1,000 small votives of the 

“goddess with uplifted arms” type from a sanctuary 

at Polis. These figurines, found in sanctuaries 

throughout Cyprus, are usually associated with 

female divinities, and the many examples recovered 

from the Polis sanctuary indicate that a female fertility 

goddess, possibly of Near Eastern origin, was 

worshipped there. 

The mud-brick substructure walls of a large Roman 

building stand more than 10 feet high 

The large Roman structure with at least two 

spacious courtyards on a spur of land overlooking 

the Chrysochous bay was the focus of Tina Najbjerg 

*97’s study. Last summer’s work focused on the 

curious system of cut-stone pillars and mudbrick 

“walls” that formed the substructure of the northern 

courtyard. A small test trench was dug to clarify 

the connection between two parts of a mud-brick 

wall at the excavated area’s northern edge and to 

determine its thickness. The 10-foot-high mudbrick 

walls were cleaned, drawn, and studied in 

preparation for being backfilled. The compartments 

between these substructures were filled in antiquity 

with vast quantities of sand. Preliminary examination 

of the pottery recovered from this fill suggests, 

somewhat perplexingly, that it is Greek rather than 

Roman in date. This summer a Roman pottery 

specialist will join the team to clarify the dating of 

the pottery from this area. A magnetometer survey 

of the area will also be carried out during the 2009 

season, part of a longer-term project to create a 

computer-rendered map of the entire site. 

Olga Karagiorgou of the Research Centre for 

Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art of the Academy 

of Athens has undertaken a study of the Byzantine 

lead seals found by the Princeton excavations. 

These cast lead discs were used by church officials 

and lay individuals of high rank to authenticate 

and secure documents and packages. The 10 examples 

found at Polis range in date from the 7th to the 

11th century, and two of the latest specimens are 

rare examples of seals from Cyprus from the period 

after the reestablishment of Byzantine administrative 

control on the island. One of them belongs to 

a high official who was connected directly with the 

imperial palace in Constantinople. Further work on 

these seals should reveal more about the chronology 

of the site in the Byzantine period and its connections 

with other areas of the Byzantine world. 

spring 2009

An up-to-date account of the excavations at 

Polis, including the most recent work on the late- 

Hellenistic–Roman building in E.G0, with color 

photographs and aerial views of the site, was published 

in the journal Near Eastern Archaeology 

71:1–2 (2008). 

Excavations at Bālis, Syria 

Professor Thomas Leisten returned to Bālis in the 

summer of 2008 to direct the final season of major 

excavations at the site. His team focused on completing 

the excavation of a Shiite mosque-shrine 

about one kilometer east of the city. Earlier digging 

by the Princeton team had uncovered much of this 

elaborate mashhad, or commemorative building, 

that was probably erected in a preexisting cemetery 

in the 10th or 11th century and continued in use 

until the arrival of the Mongols in the mid-13th 

century. The core element of the complex was a 

columned courtyard leading into a prayer hall with 

three prayer niches, flanked by various side annexes 

and service rooms that included latrines and, rather 

unexpectedly, a bakery. 

Ferhan Sakal, a student at the University of 

Tübingen, draws the 12th-century tomb of a 

young boy adjacent to the central courtyard of 

the mashhad at Bālis 

This season’s excavations uncovered more 

major architectural features of this shrine complex, 

including a grand staircase that was once roofed 

with elaborately decorated corbel vaulting, or 

muqarnas. This portal, which was oriented to face 

the city of Bālis, must have served as a monumental 

entrance for the pilgrims who streamed up to 

the shrine from the town in the valley below. 

A number of tombs were also unearthed 

within the confines of the mashhad. While tombs 

are a common feature within the walls of Shiite 

shrines of this period, some of the burials at Bālis 

were very unusual: at least three of them were tiny 

infants or perhaps stillborns. Shiite sources, in fact, 

mention that there was a “shrine of miscarriages” at 

Bālis. This shrine may have owed its origins to the 

spring 2009 

fact that Bālis was on the route 

along which the family of Hussein 

ibn Ali was taken to Damascus after 

his defeat at the Battle of Karbala in 

680. The route of this procession 

from Iraq to Syria is dotted with 

commemorative shrines marking its 

progress. It is possible that one of 

the members of Hussein’s illustrious 

family, all of whom were direct 

descendents of the prophet 

Muhammad, may have miscarried 

at Bālis during this procession, 

providing the impetus for the 

practice of burying stillborns there centuries later. 

Immediately adjacent to the main entrance 

of the shrine, and just off its central courtyard, 

the team excavated a room that contained a tomb 

marker and a long inscription identifying the burial 

as that of a boy of about 12 or 13. While this is a 

normal location for a tomb in this period, the particularly 

prominent treatment of this burial may 

indicate that the youth was a direct descendent of 

the Prophet who died at Bālis. 

The excavators also uncovered a large section 

of fallen wall lying across the center of the complex. 

This substantial wall, which had a rubble core faced 

with decorative brick on both sides, had toppled 

over at its base, preserving its entire original height 

of about 12 meters. The ornamental patterns of the 

brick facing, primarily herringbone and cross 

designs, are typical of architectural brickwork in 

eastern Iraq and Syria during roughly the late 12th 

and early 13th centuries. This impressive architectural 

feature provides evidence that there was a 

major elaboration or expansion of the shrine in the 

last phase of its existence, when the patronage of 

Abbuyid rulers led to a burst of building activity 

throughout Syria and Egypt. The prominent 

burial near the entrance of the mashhad can 

also be dated to this period on the basis of its 

inscription. 

With major excavation now completed, 

the Bālis project will next focus on study and 

conservation of the site and its finds. Last 

summer a house containing a conservation lab 

was constructed on the site, with financing 

provided in part by the Department of Art 

and Archaeology. The house will be available 

to archaeologists throughout the year, and 

Leisten hopes to assemble a team of conservation 

experts whose first priority will be 

stabilizing and restoring the wall paintings of 

the 8th-century desert palace. The frescoes of 

the palace’s audience hall and adjacent rooms, 

with swirling patterns that imitate marble revetment 

flanked by engaged columns, are some of the 

finest and best-preserved examples of early Islamic 

painting in the Middle East. 

Conservator Pilar Becker 

and Director Thomas Leisten 

painstakingly excavate the grave 

of a tiny infant who was buried 

within the shrine 

A camera is raised aloft on a boom 

for overhead photography of 

the newly excavated area of the 

mashhad complex 

Hamdan, a Syrian engineer, 

drawing the ornamental brick 

facing of a massive wall that had 

toppled over in the center of the 

mashhad 

33

Jasmine Alinder ’91, Moving 

Images: Photography and the 

Japanese American Incarceration 

Elsbeth Dowd ’04’s master’s thesis 

on Caddo pottery included this 

vessel from the Clement mound 

site in southeastern Oklahoma 

George R. vB. Ennenga ’69, Gene 

Game: The New Laws of Evolution 

34 

News from Alumni 

Undergraduate Alumni 

Jasmine Alinder ’91 earned an M.A. in art history 

from the University of New Mexico and a Ph.D. 

in art history from the University of Michigan. 

Currently an assistant professor in the history 

department at the University of Wisconsin– 

Milwaukee, she has just published Moving Images: 

Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration 

(University of Illinois Press, 2009). The book examines 

the work of official government photographers, 

of renowned photographers including Dorothea 

Lange and Ansel Adams, and of Japanese-American 

photographers both during and after the incarceration. 

Jasmine was recently awarded a Charles A. 

Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American 

Council of Learned Societies to begin work on a 

new book project, a study of instances when photographs 

have played central roles in legal disputes, 

analyzing court cases and policy from the 20th and 

early 21st centuries. [jalinder@uwm.edu] 

Maya Aravind ’04 was awarded an M.A. in art 

history from Columbia University in the spring of 

2008, having completed the Modern Art: Critical 

Studies program, with a focus on neuroscience and 

art. Her master’s thesis was titled “Action, Observation, 

and Felt Imitation: How and Why We 

Respond Positively to Images of Dance.” In the fall 

of 2008 she entered medical school at the University 

of Michigan. [maya.aravind@gmail.com] 

Julie N. Books ’91 is teaching aesthetics and the 

history of Western philosophy at Shenandoah University. 

Also a lawyer, she works with her husband 

in his law firm. Julie lives on a horse farm in the 

mountains of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, 

where she trains her two horses—a thoroughbred 

and a purebred Arabian who is a grandson of 

national champion Huckleberry Bey++ and a son of 

Desperado V—and teaches dressage and hunter seat 

equitation. Having drawn and painted for many 

years, she has begun painting portraits. [jnbooks@ 

aol.com] 

Rebecca Zack Callahan ’04 is a registered nurse 

in New York City and a women’s health care nurse 

practitioner student at the University of Pennsylvania. 

In April 2008, she and Rob Callahan were 

married. [rebeccazcallahan@gmail.com] 

Ibby Caputo ’03 works as a freelance journalist and 

interns at WBUR, Boston’s NPR station, on special 

documentary projects. This summer she will be the 

Kaiser Family Foundation media intern in health 

reporting at the Washington Post. For more about 

Ibby, visit her website, www.ibbycaputo.com. 

[ecaputo@alumni.princeton.edu] 

Jamie Crapanzano ’00 is completing her first year 

at Columbia University’s Business School and will 

work in the sales and trading internship program 

at Credit Suisse this summer. [jcrapanzano10@gsb. 

columbia.edu] 

Elsbeth (Field) Dowd ’04 received her master’s 

degree in anthropology from the University of Oklahoma 

in the spring of 2008, completing an M.A. 

thesis on “Identifying Variation: A Stylistic Analysis 

of Four Caddo Pottery Assemblages from Southeastern 

Oklahoma.” She is now working on her 

Ph.D. at Oklahoma, continuing her study of Caddo 

archaeology and culture, and is enjoying getting to 

know members of the present-day Caddo Nation, 

whose ancestors made some of the finest pottery in 

the Americas, and who take a very active interest in 

historical research and preservation. [efield@ou.edu] 

Richard Dupont ’91’s site-specific installation at 

the Lever House in New York City is the subject of 

the new book Terminal Stage (Charta, 2008), with 

texts by Richard Marshall, David Hunt, and Nick 

Paumgarten. The book focuses on Richard’s installation 

of nine distorted yet hyper-accurate sculptural 

self portraits that originate from a computer scan of 

his own body. Standing slightly larger than life size 

in the transparent lobby of a landmark building in 

the center of New York City, the static “performers” 

allowed themselves to be looked at, photographed, 

and even touched by curious passersby. This new 

book and the exhibition raise philosophical issues 

about body mapping and biometric technology, 

often evoking a visceral and perceptually complex 

response in the viewer. [richarddup@yahoo.com] 

George R. vB. Ennenga ’69 is the director of GxI, 

a New York City workshop for visual art and philosophy 

(www.gxisite.net). The group has organized 

exhibitions in both private galleries and public 

museums in the U.S., Canada, Germany, and Norway. 

He recently published Gene Game: The New 

Laws of Evolution (Authorhouse, 2008), a popular 

presentation of the theory of “Artificial Evolution.” 

George’s book defines the new laws of evolution, 

discusses their ethical and operational aspects, and 

elaborates on human evolution into future worlds. 

His works in philosophy have been published in 

Engineering the Human Genome (Oxford University 

Press, 2000) and in the journal Artificial Life (MIT 

Press). George is also the CEO of the international 

development companies The Island Group and Panthena. 

[privateresorts@hotmail.com] 

Anne D. Hedeman ’74, professor of art history and 

medieval studies at the University of Illinois, has just 

published Translating the Past: Laurent de Premierfait 

and Boccaccio’s ‘De casibus’ (Getty Museum 

spring 2009

Publications, 2008), which examines the role of 

illustration in Laurent de Premierfait’s French translation 

of Giovanni Boccaccio’s “De casibus virorum 

illustrium,” a 14th-century text containing cautionary 

historical tales that exemplify the corrupting 

effects of power. The book traces the history of Laurent’s 

work and its visual translation from the first 

copies, made for the dukes of Berry and Burgundy 

in 1410–12, to manuscripts independently produced 

by artists and booksellers in Paris. Anne is 

currently writing the catalogue for and co-curating 

“Imagining the Past in France, 1250–1500,” an 

international loan exhibition at the Getty Museum 

in Los Angeles scheduled for November 2010–February 

2011. She is also part of a team working with 

the National Center for Supercomputing Applications 

to develop cyber tools for analyzing the visual 

imagery embedded in manuscripts. [ahedeman@ 

illinois.edu] 

Alexander Heilner ’93 teaches at MICA, the 

Maryland Institute College of Art, where he is professor 

of photography and digital imaging. Twice in 

the last three years he has served as the interim 

director of MICA’s master’s program in digital arts. 

His aerial photography has been included in several 

recent shows, as well as in the April 2009 issue of 

National Geographic, which featured his image of 

rows of luxury homes on Palm Jumeirah, the first of 

several artificial islands being constructed off the 

coast of Dubai. [aheilner@mica.edu] 

Alexander Heilner ’93, Palm Jumeirah, Dubai 

Steve Hellmuth ’75 is the executive vice president 

of operations and technology for NBA Entertainment, 

and is responsible for overseeing the league’s 

information technology, interactive services, broadcast 

operations, and engineering departments. He 

also oversees the development and implementation 

of standards for the design, construction, and 

operation of NBA arenas. Steve was the executive 

in charge of the first-ever live broadcast of a sports 

event in 3D HD, the 2007 NBA All-Star Game, 

and has since produced three live games, including 

the 2009 NBA All Star Saturday night, which was 

distributed live to 80 theaters in the U.S. He also 

led the launch of the NBA’s digital media archive, 

spring 2009 

the first such initiative by any major professional 

sports league. The NBA is currently digitizing the 

league’s entire video library—more than 400,000 

hours of games, highlights, and programming—to 

create an accessible file-based digital media archive. 

Steve also designed the LED lights that frame the 

backboards and signal the expiration of time, an 

innovation that has traveled around the world. 

[shellmuth@nba.com] 

William I. Homer ’51, the H. Rodney Sharp Professor 

Emeritus at the University of Delaware, has 

been awarded a grant to support his research on the 

second volume of the letters of Thomas Eakins, covering 

the years 1873–1915. Princeton University 

Press will publish the first volume, The Paris Letters 

of Thomas Eakins, this summer. Bill’s essays on the 

“lost” American Abstract Expressionist, Arthur Pinajian, 

and on contemporary sculptor Zenos Frudakis’s 

work, The United States Air Force Memorial Honor 

Guard, were also published this year. Bill’s gift of 

his papers relating to early American Modernism to 

the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in 

Santa Fe was featured in an article in Art News (January 

2009). In January he also donated 200 rare 

periodicals, museum catalogues, and ephemera to 

the University of Delaware Library. He continues to 

serve as a senior editor of American Art Review, and, 

after a hiatus of 50 years, has begun making sculpture 

again. 

Eik Kahng ’85, curator and head of the department 

of 18th- and 19th-century art at the Walters 

Art Museum in Baltimore, is one of 10 art museum 

curators nationwide selected for a fellowship at the 

Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York City. 

The program equips curators with the administrative 

and managerial skills necessary to take 

leadership roles in art museums. The sessions, 

which began in January, include instruction by professors 

at the Columbia University Business 

School and by leading museum directors, 

administrators, and trustees from around 

the country. The program also features a 

mentorship and a week-long residency at a 

museum different from the curators’ home 

institutions. Each of the fellows is also 

assigned a long-term research project to be 

presented during the concluding week in 

June. Eik is currently developing two future 

projects, one on the theorization of the representational 

properties of pastel, and one 

on the temporality of still life as life stilled, 

taking into account representations in all 

media. [ekahng@thewalters.org] 

Emy Kim ’02 recently joined Period Furniture 

Conservation LLC in New York City (www.period 

furnitureconservation.com) as an assistant objects 

conservator. The studio specializes in the conservation 

of fine furniture from the 14th through the 

20th century, and draws its clientele from museums, 

Anne D. Hedeman ’74, Translating 

the Past: Laurent de Premierfait and 

Boccaccio’s ‘De casibus’ 

The Paris Letters of Thomas Eakins, 

edited by William I. Homer ’51 

Julian Kreimer ’98, Lite Tree 

35

36 

Mary Levkoff ’75, Hearst 

the Collector 

W. Barksdale Maynard ’88, 

Woodrow Wilson: Princeton to 

the Presidency 

Sarah Hermanson Meister ’94, 

Picturing New York: Photographs 

from The Museum of Modern Art 

private collectors, and designers around the world. 

Emy assists in various types of furniture treatments, 

from structural issues to surface finishes. She brings 

an expertise in objects conservation to the studio, 

having received an M.A. in art history, with an 

advanced certificate in conservation, from the Conservation 

Center of New York University’s Institute 

of Fine Arts in May 2008. She also earned an M.A. 

in art history from Williams College in 2004 and 

was a Judith M. Lenett fellow at the Williamstown 

Conservation Center. She has worked on projects at 

the Brooklyn Museum, the Cloisters, the Metropolitan 

Museum of Art, the Cooper-Hewitt National 

Design Museum, and NYU’s Villa la Pietra in Florence. 

[emy.kim@gmail.com] 

Julian Kreimer ’98’s recent paintings were included 

in a two-person show at the Lenore Gray Gallery 

in Providence, Rhode Island. In December 2008– 

January 2009, several of his paintings were shown 

in the exhibition “Innerworld of the Outerworld,” 

curated by Marco Breuer at Von Lintel Gallery in 

Chelsea. Julian is currently teaching studio and 

interdisciplinary courses in the Graduate Studies 

Division at the Rhode Island School of Design, as 

well as studio classes at Pratt Institute in New York 

and the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. After 

writing for Modern Painters for several years, he has 

been writing for Art in America since 2006; his 

most recent feature, on the artist Lois Dodd, 

appeared in the November 2008 issue. [julian@ 

juliankreimer.com] 

Stephanie Leitch ’91, who teaches Northern 

Renaissance art at Florida State University, investigates 

non-European others in early modern print 

culture. She recently published “The Wild Man, 

Charlemagne, and the German Body” in the journal 

Art History (June 2008). Her article on Hans 

Burgkmair and Augsburg humanists, “Burgkmair’s 

Peoples of Africa and India (1508) and the Origins 

of Ethnography in Print,” will appear in the June 

2009 issue of the Art Bulletin. She is currently writing 

a book on “Mapping Ethnography in Early 

Modern Germany.” [sleitch@fsu.edu] 

Mary Levkoff ’75, curator of European sculpture 

and classical antiquities at the Los Angeles County 

Museum of Art, has published Hearst the Collector 

(Abrams, 2008), a wide-ranging study of William 

Randolph Hearst’s collections that accompanied 

her exhibition at LACMA (November 2008– 

February 2009). Mary’s study of the 19th-century 

ceramic sculptures that she acquired for LACMA’s 

collection was published in La sculpture au XIXe 

siècle: mélanges pour Anne Pingeot (Nicolas Chaudun, 

2008), and her article on Hearst’s collections 

of classical antiquities appeared in Apollo magazine 

(October 2008). In November, she lectured on 

“Hearst and Spain” at the symposium in honor of 

Jonathan Brown *64 at the Frick Collection in New 

York. She has been named to the comité scientifique 

for a 2009 Paris colloquium on French Renaissance 

sculpture organized by the Institut national de 

l’Histoire de l’Art. She also contributed to the exhibition 

catalogues The Color of Life: Polychromy in 

Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present (Getty Villa, 

2008) and Cast in Bronze: French Sculpture from 

Renaissance to Revolution (Musée du Louvre/Metropolitan 

Museum of Art/J. Paul Getty Museum, 

2009). Mary has recently been appointed supervisory 

curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the 

National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. 

David Maisel ’84 published two monographs last 

year. Library of Dust (Chronicle Books, 2008) 

depicts the strangely beautiful corroded copper 

canisters containing the unclaimed cremated 

remains of patients from an Oregon psychiatric 

hospital. Cascade Effect (Nazraeli Press, 2008) published 

images made by David more than 20 years 

ago of clear-cut logging sites in Maine. His exhibition 

“Library of Dust” was shown last fall at the 

Haines Gallery in San Francisco and the Blue Sky 

Gallery in Portland, Oregon. David’s work was also 

exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris as part of 

the inaugural Prix Pictet Award in Photography, 

which focuses on issues of sustainability. The exhibition 

will travel to Dubai and other locales. His 

photographs were also included in the exhibition 

“First Doubt: Optical Confusion in Modern 

Photography” at the Yale University Art Gallery, 

accompanied by a catalogue. David’s “Library of 

Dust” series was the subject of an article in X-tra 

Contemporary Art Quarterly (fall 2008) and a 

feature article by Karen Lang in the British Journal 

of Photography (November 29, 2008). [david@ 

davidmaisel.com] 

Pete Maruca ’87’s construction firm, Orion General 

Contractors, recently won Remodeling Magazine’s 

2008 National Platinum Award for the Best Whole 

House Green Remodel. The project involved dismantling 

a 180-year-old bank barn, which had been 

slated for demolition, and reconstructing it 60 miles 

away for use as a guest/party house in Devon, Pennsylvania. 

[pmaruca@oriongc.com] 

W. Barksdale Maynard ’88, a lecturer in the School 

of Architecture at Princeton, published two books 

last year. Woodrow Wilson: Princeton to the Presidency 

(Yale University Press, 2008) is a revisionist account 

of the life of the controversial Tiger, focusing on 

how Wilson’s Princeton years influenced the ideas 

and worldview he later applied in politics, and 

showing how his career in the White House 

repeated his Princeton experiences with uncanny 

precision. The book provides an unprecedented 

inside view of a hard-fighting president who tried 

first to remake a university, and then to remake the 

world. The Financial Times called the book “riveting 

and beautifully written.” Barksdale’s second book, 

Buildings of Delaware (University of Virginia Press, 

2008), a volume in the Society of Architectural 

spring 2009

Historians series Buildings of the United States, is the 

first comprehensive survey of the entire 

architectural history of the “First State.” The 

monuments documented in this heavily illustrated 

book range from an ancient Dutch dike of 1660 

and colonial smokehouses in the Kent County 

countryside to an intact International Style 1940s 

elementary school in the city of Wilmington and a 

recently completed, cutting-edge cable-stay bridge. 

[wbmaynard@verizon.net] 

Sarah Hermanson Meister ’94 has 

organized the exhibition “Picturing 

New York: Photographs from The 

Museum of Modern Art.” The show 

includes nearly 150 photographs 

from the Museum of Modern Art’s 

collections, ranging in date from 

1888 to 2005 and representing the 

work of 90 photographers, from 

Alfred Stieglitz to Cindy Sherman, 

and Helen Levitt to Garry Winogrand. 

The exhibition opened at 

La Casa Encendida in Madrid in 

March, will move to the Museo di 

arte moderna e contemporanea di 

Trento e Rovereto this summer, 

and will end its tour at the Irish 

Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. 

Sarah was recently promoted 

to curator of photographs at the Museum of 

Modern Art. [sarahmeister@mac.com] 

Jim Melchert ’52 was recently in South Korea, 

where he chaired the jury for the Fifth World 

Ceramic Biennale 2009, which opened on April 

25. The jury selected 186 works from 3,196 applications 

submitted by artists from 70 countries. 

The sponsoring organization is the World Ceramic 

Exposition Foundation. Jim is professor emeritus at 

the University of California–Berkeley. [jfmelchert@ 

gmail.com] 

Christine Mugnolo ’01, associate professor of fine 

art at Antelope Valley College in Lancaster, California, 

collaborated on the book Bombing Ploesti 

(Red Hen Press, 2008). The book combines the 

poetry of Charles Hood, a professor of English at 

Antelope Valley College, with Christine’s 37 illustrations 

in black wash, ink, crayon, and charcoal. 

The poem describes an American bombing mission 

that targeted Nazi oil fields in Ploesti, Romania. 

Most of the images in the book are derived from 

photographs and videos of the event, combined 

with elements taken from B-24 flight manual cartoons, 

B-24 nose art, and POWs’ illustrations of 

plane crashes. By combining poetry and art on facing 

pages, the book creates a dialogue about history 

that helps to explore the truth and humanity inside 

the inhumanity of war. Christine is currently at 

work on a second project illustrating Hood’s poetry. 

[cemugnolo@yahoo.com] 

spring 2009 

Re-creation of Henry VIII’s 

writing box by Brody 

Neuenschwander ’81 

Brody Neuenschwander ’81 had a solo show of 

recent work at the Neuhoff Gallery in New York 

in January and February of this year. In March he 

mounted a very large project in the Belgian city of 

Mechelen: a sound and light installation on and in 

the cathedral and its tower. For three months the 

roof of the cathedral was transformed into a moving 

poem by means of laser-projected text, an extended 

meditation on the meaning of towers. Brody 

worked with historian David Starkey on a new 

documentary on Henry VIII, which aired in the 

U.K. in March, creating numerous 

period documents, filmed calligraphy, 

and various props, including a 

detailed recreation of Henry VIII’s 

writing box. For more information 

about Brody’s recent projects, visit his 

website, www.bnart.be. 

[brody.n@skynet.be] 

Robert M. Peck ’74 recently 

co-authored All in the Bones: A 

Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse 

Hawkins (Academy of Natural Sciences 

of Philadelphia, 2008), the 

first full-length biography of one 

of the most versatile natural history 

artists of the Victorian age. 

Hawkins created hundreds of 

scientifically accurate illustrations 

of long-extinct creatures and made the world’s first 

life-size reconstructions of dinosaurs and other prehistoric 

creatures. In 1854, his sculptures at the 

Crystal Palace in London captured the attention of 

millions of people and introduced the world to 

“dinosauromania.” Traveling to America in 

1868, Hawkins created the first articulated 

dinosaur skeleton for public display. One cast 

was exhibited at the Academy of Natural Sciences 

in Philadelphia, and a second cast was 

made for Princeton. Hawkins also painted 17 

large oils of prehistoric life that were exhibited 

in Nassau Hall from 1871 to 1900 and then in 

Guyot Hall from 1909 to 2000. In this new 

book, Valerie Bramwell, the artist’s great-greatgreat-granddaughter, 

focuses on the complex 

personal life and times of Hawkins, while Bob, 

who is curator of art and artifacts and senior 

fellow at the Academy of Natural Sciences, 

examines the artist’s contributions to science 

and art. [peck@ansp.org] 

Jessica Davis Powers ’97 is the Gilbert M. 

Denman, Jr., Curator of Western Antiquities 

at the San Antonio Museum of Art. In 2007 and 

early 2008, she organized the reinstallation of the 

museum’s Greek and Roman collection, which 

reopened in March. Her overview of the collection 

and the reinstalled galleries was the cover story in 

the February 2008 issue of Apollo, and she delivered 

lectures on the reinstallation project in San 

Christine Mugnolo ’01 and Charles 

Hood, Bombing Ploesti 

Robert M. Peck ’74 and Valerie 

Bramwell, All in the Bones: 

A Biography of Benjamin 

Waterhouse Hawkins 

Jessica Davis Powers ’97 directed 

the reinstallation of the San 

Antonio Museum of Art’s Greek 

and Roman collection 

37 

Peggy Tenison

38 

Allan W. Shearer ’88 et al., Land 

Use Scenarios: Environmental 

Consequences of Development 

Josephine Sittenfeld ’02, 

Ethan, Puffer’s Pond 

14th-century b.c. hematite 

cylinder seal, part of the 

exhibition organized by 

Joanna S. Smith ’87 at the 

Cyprus Museum 

Antonio and Austin. In conjunction with the 

reopening, she also organized the symposium 

“Roman Sculpture in the 21st Century: New 

Perspectives on Ancient Images” at the museum. 

She continues to do research on Roman sculpture 

and the decoration of houses in Pompeii. [jessica. 

powers@samuseum.org] 

Matthew H. Robb ’94 completed his dissertation, 

on the apartment compounds of Teotihuacán, at 

Yale University in 2007. The dissertation, supervised 

by Mary E. Miller ’75, won the Frances 

Blanshard Fellowship Award and was recently recognized 

with an honorable mention from the 

Association of Latin American Art. From New 

Haven he went to Saint Louis, where he was the 

Mellon Fellow in Pre-Columbian Art at the Saint 

Louis Art Museum. He was promoted to assistant 

curator of ancient American and Native American 

art at the museum in January 

2009. He has also been 

a lecturer at Washington 

University in Saint Louis, 

teaching a class on the art 

and architecture of ancient 

Mesoamerica. [matthew. 

robb@slam.org] 

Allan W. Shearer ’88 is on 

leave from his position as 

assistant professor of landscape 

architecture at 

Rutgers this year and is a 

Donald D. Harrington Faculty 

Fellow at the University 

of Texas–Austin. He is 

investigating the role of climate change within theories 

of the built environment. When not working 

in a library, he is learning how to two-step. Allan is 

also the lead author of Land Use Scenarios: Environmental 

Consequences of Development (CRC Press 

and Taylor & Francis, 2009), an interdisciplinary 

project that considers how to approach and assess 

uncertainties related to the 

shaping of the built environment. 

[ashearer@aesop. 

rutgers.edu] 

Mark Sheinkman ’85 will 

have a solo exhibition of 

paintings in October 2009 

at Von Lintel Gallery in 

New York. A solo exhibition 

was on view from February–April 2009 at the 

Museum Gegenstandfreier Kunst in Otterndorf, 

Germany, and was accompanied by a catalogue. A 

solo exhibition recently closed at Fruehsorge Contemporary 

Drawings in Berlin, and another solo 

exhibition of work acquired by the Grand Rapids 

Art Museum in Michigan was shown at the 

museum last summer and fall. Mark’s work was 

recently exhibited in group shows at the Museo de 

Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente in Segovia, 

Spain; the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, 

Ohio; the Memorial Art Gallery at the University 

of Rochester, New York; and Gallery Joe in Philadelphia. 

His other group exhibitions during the 

past year have been at museums in Texas, Kansas, 

Arkansas, Wyoming, Iowa, and Washington. For 

further information, visit www.marksheinkman. 

com. [info@marksheinkman.com] 

Josephine Sittenfeld ’02 earned an M.F.A. in photography 

at the Rhode Island School of Design 

(RISD) in 2008, where she won the T. C. Colley 

Scholarship for her documentary film about two 

families raising children who are on the autism spectrum. 

Jo’s work has been included in group shows at 

Soho Photo in New York City; the Museum of Fine 

Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Albuquerque 

Museum; and the Vermont Center for Photography 

in Brattleboro. She is currently an adjunct instructor 

at RISD. Some of her work can be seen at http:// 

josittenfeld.com. [jo@josittenfeld.com] 

Joanna S. Smith ’87 spent the 2008–09 academic 

year at the Institute for Advanced Study in 

Princeton as the Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth 

Fellow of Historical Studies, working on a 

book titled Artistic Exchange in the Mediterranean 

Bronze Age World. She also curated an exhibition at 

the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia, Cyprus, about the 

art and archaeology of the village of Phlamoudhi. 

The exhibit, “Views from Phlamoudhi, Cyprus,” 

which will run from June 18 through September 18, 

2009, celebrates the return to Cyprus of archaeological 

materials brought to New York in the 1970s 

after their excavation by a team from Columbia 

University, where Joanna teaches. Most of these 

objects, primarily Late Bronze Age and Iron Age (ca. 

1650–300 b.c.) ceramic vessels, pottery sherds, 

metal objects, and terracotta figures, were unpublished 

until 2000. At that time, Joanna organized 

the Phlamoudhi Archaeological Project with a team 

of students to study, analyze, publish, and return the 

material. The first volume of the publication series, 

Views from Phlamoudhi, Cyprus, published by the 

American Schools of Oriental Research, appeared in 

2008. [jss245@columbia.edu] 

Mary Stewart ’83 has entered the master’s program 

in American Studies at George Washington University, 

while continuing as vice president for external 

affairs at public broadcaster WETA in Washington, 

D.C. [mstewart@weta.com] 

Alan Weinstein ’61 had a solo show of his paintings 

at Telfair Peet Theatre Art Gallery at Auburn 

University in February–March of this year. The 

exhibition, titled “Woods,” coincided with a production 

of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods and 

included Alan’s “woods” paintings from 1996–2006. 

The works ranged from studies for large folding 

screens to examples of divided canvases painted in 

spring 2009

2004–07. Last December, he mounted an exhibition 

of his recent paintings and cut canvases at his 

studio in Iowa City. Alan also works in printmaking 

and drawing, and his work is in the permanent collections 

of the Library of Congress, the National 

Gallery in Melbourne, Australia, and many other 

public and university museums and galleries. For 

more about Alan’s art and recent exhibitions, visit 

his website www.alanweinstein.com. 

[alan@alanweinstein.com] 

Ford Weiskittel ’68 is the executive director of the 

Trireme Trust USA, which has initiated a project to 

bring to New York City a full-scale working replica 

of the legendary 170-oared Athenian trireme of the 

5th century b.c., the ship that won the naval battle 

of Salamis and so preserved Greek freedom and 

Ford Weiskittel ’68’s organization is bringing this 

reconstruction of a Classical Greek trireme to 

New York 

democracy. A series of sea-trials will take place in 

New York Harbor in the summer of 2010, culminating 

in a row from the tip of Manhattan around 

the Statue of Liberty on July 4. The ship will be in 

New York Harbor for viewing by the public from 

about mid-April through the end of September 

2010, and plans are also being made to exhibit the 

vessel at the Maritime Museum at South Street 

Seaport. The team also hopes to visit the United 

Nations on Peace Day to highlight how former 

weapons can be turned into instruments of international 

understanding and goodwill. For further 

information, visit the website www.trireme.org. A 

former professor of classics at Hobart and William 

Smith Colleges, where he was chair of the classics 

department from 1979 until 1986, Ford also 

founded the rowing program at the college, served 

as its first coach, and rowed at the Henley Royal 

Regatta in England. In 2007 he received the Heron 

Award from William Smith for his contributions to 

athletics at the college. [director@trireme.org] 

Victoria Will ’03 is a staff photographer at the New 

York Post. She also does a variety of editorial work 

for various magazines, including BlackBook, where 

she is a regular contributor. She is continuing work 

on a project that she began during her junior year at 

Princeton: a series on adults with Down Syndrome 

spring 2009 

and other mental disabilities. A mixture of portraiture 

and documentary/reportage work, Victoria’s 

project will increase awareness of the ways in which 

adults with disabilities can live on their own and 

function independently in society. [victoria.will@ 

gmail.com] 

Graduate Alumni 

Peter Barberie *07 has been appointed curator of 

photographs at the Alfred Stieglitz Center in the 

Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs 

of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. From 2003–07 

he was the Horace W. Goldsmith Curatorial Fellow 

in Photography at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 

where he organized the exhibition “Looking at 

Atget” (2005) and co-organized the exhibition 

“Dreaming in Black and White: Photography at the 

Julien Levy Gallery” (2006). In the spring of 2008, 

he was the guest curator of “Close Encounters: Portraits 

of Artists and Writers by Irving Penn” at the 

Morgan Library and Museum in New York, which 

showcased a group of 67 portraits of notable subjects 

by Irving Penn acquired by the Morgan Library 

and Museum in 2007. Peter’s article “Marville’s Seriality” 

was recently published in a special issue of the 

Record of the Princeton University Art Museum. 

Anthony Barbieri-Low *01’s recent book, Artisans 

in Early Imperial China (University of Washington 

Press, 2007), has been awarded two major book 

prizes: the James Henry Breasted Prize of the American 

Historical Association, for the best book in any 

field of history before a.d. 1000, and the Charles 

Rufus Morey Book Award of the College Art Association, 

for distinguished books on the history of art. 

Tony teaches in the Department of History at the 

University of California–Santa Barbara. 

[barbieri-low@history.ucsb.edu] 

Andrea Bayer *90 edited and contributed to Art 

and Love in Renaissance Italy (Metropolitan Museum 

of Art and Yale University Press, 2008), the catalogue 

of an exhibition that she organized for the 

Metropolitan Museum of Art; it is currently at the 

Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, where it will 

be shown through June 14, 2009. This volume is 

the first comprehensive examination of the entire 

range of artwork inspired by Renaissance rituals of 

love and marriage. These works represent the pinnacle 

of the tradition, which began in the early 

Renaissance, of commemorating betrothals, marriages, 

and the births of children by commissioning 

extraordinary objects or exchanging them as gifts. 

The approximately 150 works, dating from about 

1400 to the mid-16th century, include objects ranging 

from maiolica, glassware, and jewelry to nuptial 

portraits, birth trays, and allegories of love and marriage. 

One section of the catalogue examines prints 

and drawings of erotic subjects. The volume also 

documents the increasingly inventive approach to 

Alan Weinstein ’61 with some of 

his recent works 

Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, 

edited and with contributions by 

Andrea Bayer *90 

Virginia Bower *77 (M.A.) et al., 

Brush, Clay, Wood: The Nancy 

and Ed Rosenthal Collection of 

Chinese Art 

39

40 

Jonathan Brown *64, Collected 

Writings on Velázquez 

James Clifton *87 and Leslie 

Scattone, The Plains of Mars: 

European War Prints, 1500–1825, 

from the Collection of the Sarah 

Campbell Blaffer Foundation 

Brian Curran *97, The Egyptian 

Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient 

Egypt in Early Modern Italy 

the subjects of love and marriage that culminated in 

paintings by some of the greatest artists of the 

Renaissance, including Giulio Romano, Lorenzo 

Lotto, and Titian. The authors of the catalogue 

include Deborah Krohn ’83 *87 (M.A.) and Jacqueline 

Musacchio *95. Andrea is curator in the 

Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan 

Museum of Art. [andrea.bayer@ 

metmuseum.org] 

Virginia Bower *77 (M.A.) contributed to Brush, 

Clay, Wood: The Nancy and Ed Rosenthal Collection 

of Chinese Art, the catalogue of an exhibition held 

in 2008 at the Taft Museum in Cincinnati. She also 

published an article on a Chinese ceramic pillow in 

the Kresge Art Museum at Michigan State University, 

which appeared in the Kresge Art Museum 50th 

Anniversary Bulletin. In both 2007 and 2008, she 

was the lecturer on educational tours of China 

sponsored by the American Museum of Natural 

History in New York. [virginiabower@hotmail. 

com] 

Jonathan Brown *64, the Carroll and Milton 

Petrie Professor of Fine Arts at New York University, 

recently published Collected Writings on 

Velázquez (Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica 

and Yale University Press, 2008). The volume 

brings together 32 of his articles and other texts on 

Velázquez from a variety of scholarly journals and 

exhibition catalogues published between 1964 and 

2006. Several appear in English for the first time, 

and the book also includes one previously unpublished 

lecture. “The Hispanic World of Jonathan 

Brown: A Symposium in Honor of Jonathan 

Brown” was held at the Frick Collection and the 

Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, last 

May. A second two-day convocation in his honor, 

“Collecting Spanish Art: Spain’s Golden Age and 

America’s Gilded Age: A Symposium in Honor of 

Jonathan Brown,” was hosted by the Center for the 

History of Collecting in America (Frick Art Reference 

Library) and the Centro de Estudios Europa 

Hispánica at the Frick Collection in November 

2008. The Frick plans to publish the papers presented 

by 11 scholars and curators from the U.S., 

Spain, and Canada. 

Nick Camerlenghi *07 is an assistant professor at 

Louisiana State University’s School of Art, where he 

teaches courses in medieval art and is advising three 

master’s theses. He hosted the Harvey Stahl Memorial 

Lecture at LSU, sponsored by the International 

Center for Medieval Arts. Among other activities 

this year, he lectured at the Savannah College of Art 

and Design, Tulane University, and the Pontifical 

Institute of Christian Archaeology in Rome; he also 

participated in the annual medieval conference at 

Kalamazoo. He is currently completing a book proposal, 

based on his dissertation, provisionally titled 

“Biography of a Basilica: San Paolo fuori le mura in 

Rome.” In his free time, he has been perfecting his 

renditions of classic Louisiana dishes. [ncamerle@ 

lsu.edu] 

James Clifton *87 has been the director of the 

Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and curator of 

Renaissance and Baroque painting at the Museum 

of Fine Arts, Houston, since 1994. His most recent 

essays are “Truly a Worship Experience? Christian 

Art in Secular Museums,” in Res (autumn 2007); 

and “A Lutheran Image on the Title-Page of the 

Last Bible without a Confessional Label,” in Ephemerides 

Theologicae Lovanienses (2008). With Leslie 

Scattone, he co-curated the exhibition “The Plains 

of Mars: European War Prints, 1500–1825, from 

the Collection of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation.” 

The first graphic print survey of the theme 

of war in the early modern period, it was on view at 

the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, through May 

10, 2009, and was accompanied by a catalogue published 

by Yale University Press. [jclifton@mfah.org] 

Robert Conway *82 (M.A.) has completed his 

book, A Meticulous Serenity: The Prints of Clinton 

Adams, A Catalogue Raisonné: 1948–1997, which is 

now in production at the University of New Mexico 

Press and is scheduled for publication this fall. His 

other forthcoming monograph, In the Company of 

His Heroes: The Prints of Nathan Oliveira, A Catalogue 

Raisonné: 1950–2010 (Fine Arts Museums of 

San Francisco and University of California Press), 

has been rescheduled to appear in conjunction with 

a major exhibition of Oliveira’s work in fall 2011. 

Bob has been appointed director of the Conner 

Family Trust, San Francisco, which administers the 

estate of Bay Area artist Bruce Conner (1933– 

2008), and he has been invited to be part of the 

curatorial team for the 2012 George Bellows 

retrospective exhibition being organized by the 

National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. 

[bc54@earthlink.net] 

Tracy E. Cooper *90 gave nearly a dozen presentations 

on Palladio in 2008, the 500th anniversary of 

the architect’s birth, in venues from Venice, Italy, to 

Venice, California. At the invitation of Pierre de la 

Ruffinière du Prey *73, she was the MacDonald 

Stewart Lecturer in Venetian Culture in the Department 

of Art at Queen’s University in Ontario. Her 

chapter “Patricians and Citizens” was published in 

the volume Venice, edited by P. Humfrey, volume 2 

of Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance, edited 

by Marcia Hall (Cambridge University Press, 

2008); it was reviewed by Princeton’s Professor 

Emeritus Theodore K. Rabb in The Art Newspaper. 

Tracy was promoted to full professor in the Department 

of Art History in the Tyler School of Art at 

Temple University in Philadelphia. During fall 

2008, as interim chair, she planned the move of 

the department to their new home in a building 

designed by Carlos Jimenez. [t.cooper@temple.edu] 

spring 2009

Brian Curran *97, associate professor of art history 

at Penn State University, recently published The 

Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt 

in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, 

2007). This book uncovers the deep roots of 

fascination with ancient Egypt in the Italian Renaissance, 

examining how Egyptian antiquity and its 

artifacts exerted an influence on patrons, artists, 

and spectators of the period that was every bit as 

powerful as their more familiar Greek and Roman 

counterparts. It also demonstrates that the emergence 

of ancient Egypt as a distinct category of 

historical knowledge during this first wave of 

European Egyptomania was one of Renaissance 

humanism’s great accomplishments. Brian’s book 

Obelisk: A History, co-authored with Anthony 

Grafton, Pamela O. Long, and Benjamin Weiss, is 

forthcoming from MIT Press. The recipient of several 

Penn State University awards for excellence in 

teaching, as well as a recent fellowship at the Villa I 

Tatti in Florence, Brian was recently named a resident 

scholar in the Institute of Arts and Humanities 

at Penn State for the spring 2010 semester, to support 

the completion of his next book project, “Past, 

Present, and Place in Italian Renaissance Art.” 

[bac18@psu.edu] 

Pierre du Prey *73 edited and contributed the 

introduction and conclusion to an issue of the 

Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture 

in Canada (volume 33:1, 2008) devoted to the 

genesis and recent restoration of the Canadian 

Memorial to the Missing of World War I at Vimy 

Ridge in France. The publication places the Vimy 

Monument within the contexts of World War I 

monuments generally and the oeuvre of its sculptor/architect 

Walter Allward in particular. The 

cover of the issue features Pierre’s photograph of 

Vimy at dusk, or as the French fittingly call it, 

l’heure bleue. Pierre is the Queen’s University 

Research Chair at Queen’s University in Kingston, 

Ontario. [pduprey@queensu.ca] 

David Farmer *81 served as interim president and 

CEO of the Center for Maine Contemporary Art 

last year as they searched for a new director. The 

staff of the CMCA, a 55-year-old institution 

housed in a renovated 19th-century structure in 

Rockport, Maine, creates exhibition programs of 

work by Maine artists and develops educational 

activities. Working for this excellent institution was 

great fun, but also made him realize how much he 

values retirement. He was also recruited to organize 

an exhibition for the Dahesh Museum of Art, from 

which he retired as founding director in 2002. 

“In Pursuit of the Exotic: Artists Abroad in 19th- 

Century Egypt and the Holy Land” was shown in 

March–April 2009 at the Palitz Gallery of Lubin 

House, a New York City townhouse owned by 

Syracuse University. This was the first of two initial 

spring 2009 

collaborative projects between Syracuse University 

and the Dahesh Museum. David also teaches art 

history at University College at Rockland, a local 

center of the University of Maine–Augusta. 

[lftfield@roadrunner.com] 

Mary E. Frank *06 completed her term as president 

of the board of trustees of the Miami Art Museum. 

The highlights of her presidency included heading 

the successful search for a new director, engaging the 

Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron to design the 

museum’s new building, launching a $100 million 

capital campaign, and securing significant gifts of 

art. Renaissance Venice continues to be the focus of 

her work as an independent scholar. She is a member 

of the projects committee of Save Venice, Inc., 

and has raised money for restoration of the ceiling 

paintings in the church of San Sebastiano. Her article 

on Veronese’s Esther was published in the 2008 

Save Venice journal, and her review of Richard Goy’s 

Building Renaissance Venice appeared in Renaissance 

Quarterly. Also active as a lecturer, she spoke last 

year at Florida International University in Miami, 

and this spring gave lectures for Save Venice in New 

York and Boston, the latter in conjunction with the 

exhibition “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in 

Renaissance Venice,” curated by Frederick Ilchman 

’90. The Arts Business Council of Miami recognized 

Mary’s contributions to the city of Miami 

with an award last year, and this March she received 

an American Red Cross Spectrum Cultural Award 

for her work in both Miami and Venice. [mary@ 

mefrank.com] 

Marcy B. Freedman *81 (M.A.) created performance 

art this year at venues including Apex Art 

and Canon’s Walk in New York City, the Wexner 

Center in Ohio, the Silvermine Guild in Connecticut, 

and Gallery RFD in Georgia. As a member of 

several collaboratives, including The Cathouse Associates, 

she has created sculptural installations for the 

Peekskill Project and for the exhibition “Barefoot & 

Illiterate: ‘Not Shoes’ and ‘Not Books’” in Crotonon-Hudson. 

A retrospective of paintings by her 

group EYE was featured at the Paramount Center 

for the Arts, and a video documentation of their 

working process was screened at the Hat Factory, 

both in Peekskill, New York. With Gene Panczenko, 

she produced several new video installations, and 

last spring they were awarded a prize by Thom Collins 

of the Neuberger Museum. This year Marcy 

presented one of her short stories at the Katonah 

Museum and a short poem at the Hudson Valley 

Center for Contemporary Art. In 2009, she will 

read at the Dramatist’s Guild in New York City. She 

is preparing a lecture series titled “The Artist in the 

Mirror: Self-Portraits from the Renaissance to the 

Present” for the Katonah Museum, and she will also 

speak at libraries in New York and California. 

[mbf@bestweb.net] 

Herzog & de Meuron’s proposal 

for the new building of the Miami 

Art Museum, where Mary E. Frank 

*06 was president of the board of 

trustees 

Marcy B. Freedman *81 (M.A.) 

contributed to the exhibition 

“Barefoot & Illiterate” 

Melissa McCormick *00, Tosa 

Mitsunobu and the Small Scroll in 

Medieval Japan 

41

42 

Kevin Moore *02 et al., American 

Paintings at Harvard, Volume 2: 

Paintings, Watercolors, Pastels, 

and Stained Glass by Artists Born 

1826–1856 

Roberta J. M. Olson *76, Drawn 

by New York: Six Centuries of 

Watercolors and Drawings at the 

New-York Historical Society 

Elective Affinities: Testing Word and 

Image Relationships, coedited by 

Véronique Plesch *94 

Andrew Hershberger *01, associate professor of 

contemporary art history at Bowling Green State 

University, is under contract with Blackwell Publishing 

(Oxford and Boston) for an edited volume 

titled Photographic Theory. On his 2008–09 sabbatical, 

Andrew was the inaugural Teti Library Fellow 

at the New Hampshire Institute of Art, where he 

did research in the NHIA’s newly donated Teti collection 

of rare photography books, which includes 

Edward Steichen’s own set of Camera Work. This 

spring (Easter/Trinity Term), he continued his sabbatical 

in England as the Holgate Research Fellow 

at Durham University, where he was affiliated with 

both the Durham Institute of Advanced Study and 

the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography 

Studies, and as a visiting fellow at Wolfson and 

St. Hilda’s Colleges at the University of Oxford. 

Andrew’s recent publications include the co- 

authored article “I Like Teaching Because I Learn 

from It” in Art Journal (spring 2009). [aehersh@ 

bgnet.bgsu.edu] 

Robert J. H. Janson-La Palme *75, professor 

emeritus at Washington College, is enjoying retirement 

in his Maryland home near the Chesapeake 

Bay and has continued to write reviews of art books 

and also a review essay for Renaissance Quarterly. In 

addition, he has sponsored for the nearby academic 

community a series of distinguished speakers, 

including Nicholas Penny, Jonathan Brown *64, the 

late Robert Rosenblum, Paul Barolsky, Thomas 

Crow, and Peter Humfrey. Their lectures on a wide 

variety of topics in European art have been enthusiastically 

received by large audiences. 

Robert S. Mattison *85 curated the exhibition 

“Stephen Antonakos: Retrospective,” a 50-year retrospective 

of the important light artist’s works at the 

Allentown Art Museum, and he wrote the accompanying 

catalogue, Stephen Antonakos: The Power of 

Light. He also contributed to Robert Rauschenberg: 

Critica e obra de 1949–1974 (Público Serralves, 

2008) and wrote the exhibition catalogue A Way of 

Knowing: The Recent Art of Karina Aguilera Skvirsky. 

Bob also oversaw the reinstallation of the 

modern collection at the Allentown Art Museum 

and was consultant and narrator for the documentary 

film Shattering Boundaries: Grace Hartigan, 

which premiered this summer at the New Museum 

of Contemporary Art in New York City. He is the 

Marshall R. Metzgar Professor of Art History at 

Lafayette College. [mattisor@lafayette.edu] 

Melissa McCormick *00 teaches Japanese art and 

culture at Harvard University, where she is the 

John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities. 

Her new book, Tosa Mitsunobu and the Small 

Scroll in Medieval Japan (University of Washington 

Press, 2009), is the first in-depth study of shortstory 

small scrolls (ko-e), one of the most visually 

appealing forms of early Japanese narrative painting, 

which demanded a new kind of intimate 

engagement on the part of the viewer. She is 

currently at work on a book-length study, titled 

Monochroma: Female Authorship and Medieval Japanese 

Narrative Painting, of a group of illustrated 

narrative scrolls created by and for women in the 

16th century. Her research on representations of 

The Tale of Genji, an ongoing scholarly interest, was 

featured in an NHK television special that aired in 

Japan in November 2008. She also helped launch a 

new website for Harvard’s program in East Asian 

art history, www.fas.harvard.edu/~eaah. 

[mccorm@fas.harvard.edu] 

Elizabeth Moodey *02 has accepted a tenure-track 

position at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches 

medieval art. Her book Illuminated Crusader Histories 

for Philip the Good of Burgundy is forthcoming 

from Brepols. [elizabeth.j.moodey@vanderbilt.edu] 

Kevin Moore *02 was a major contributor to 

American Paintings at Harvard, Volume 2: Paintings, 

Watercolors, Pastels, and Stained Glass by Artists Born 

1826–1856 (Yale University Press, 2008), and contributed 

the essay “Cruising and Transcendence in 

the Photographs of Minor White” to More Than 

One: Photographs in Sequence, edited by Joel Smith 

*01 (Yale University Press, 2008), a special issue of 

the Record of the Princeton University Art Museum. 

Kevin also advises private collectors and is working 

on his book and exhibition on color photography 

of the 1970s, which will open at the Cincinnati Art 

Museum next year. [fultonstreet.us@gmail.com] 

Roberta J. M. Olson *76, curator of drawings at 

the New-York Historical Society, has published the 

catalogue of a major exhibition she organized, 

Drawn by New York: Six Centuries of Watercolors and 

Drawings at the New-York Historical Society (New- 

York Historical Society in association with D. Giles 

Limited, 2008). The exhibition also traveled to the 

Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, 

and the Taft Museum of Art. Among her recent 

articles are: “George Harvey’s Anglo-American 

Atmospheric Landscapes,” in The Magazine 

Antiques; “Comets, Charisma, and Celebrity: Reflections 

on Their Deep Impact,” in Proceedings of the 

VUB/ESO Workshop on Deep Impact as a World 

Observatory Event; “The Discovery of a Cache of 

Over 200 Sixteenth-Century Avian Watercolors: A 

Missing Chapter in the History of Ornithological 

Illustration,” in Master Drawings; “St. Benedict Sees 

the Light: Asam’s Solar Eclipses as Metaphor,” in 

Religion and the Arts; “John James Audubon: Artist, 

Naturalist and Adventurer,” in Great Natural Historians; 

and “Two Symbols of French Taste and Power 

Come to America,” in La Circulation des oeuvres 

d’art, 1789–1848 (The Circulation of Works of Art 

in the Revolutionary Era, 1789–1848). Other 

exhibitions that she curated at the New-York Historical 

Society include three in the series “Audubon’s 

Aviary,” subtitled “Natural Selection” (2007), 

“Portraits of Endangered Species” (2008), and 

spring 2009

“Some Things Old, Some Things Borrowed, but 

Most Things New” (2009). 

Véronique Plesch *94 was promoted to full professor 

at Colby College and was elected president of 

the International Association of Word and Image 

Studies and to the steering committee of the New 

England Medieval Conference. She recently coedited 

Elective Affinities: Testing Word and Image 

Relationships (Rodopi, 2009). Her essay “Destruction 

or Preservation?: The Meaning of Graffiti at 

Religious Sites” will be published in Art, Piety, and 

Destruction in European Religion, 1500–1700, 

edited by Virginia Raguin (Ashgate, forthcoming), 

and “Memory and Intermediality in Maggie Libby’s 

Portraits of Colby Women” will appear in a volume 

edited by Stephanie Moore Glaser in honor of 

Claus Clüver, Media inter media: Intermediality in 

the Arts (Rodopi, forthcoming). She contributed 

entries to the catalogue 50 Years of Collecting at the 

Colby College Museum of Art, which will be published 

for this summer’s anniversary celebrations. 

With her colleague David Simon, she curated for 

the Colby College Museum an exhibition of 

medieval objects from the Walters Art Museum and 

organized a series of related public events. In October, 

she spoke at the University of New Hampshire 

on her research on graffiti on frescoes and will present 

a paper on that subject at the Sixteenth Century 

Studies conference in Geneva in May. [vbplesch@ 

colby.edu] 

Paul Richelson *74, chief curator of the Mobile 

Museum of Art, contributed to Alabama Masters: 

Artists and Their Work (Alabama State Council on 

the Arts, 2008). The book, which was supported 

by the American Masterpieces Award from the 

National Endowment for the Arts, presents an 

overview of 49 important 20th-century Alabama 

artists, illustrated by works from Alabama art 

museums. For the non-profit Collectors of Wood 

Art for Sculpture Objects & Functional Art, SOFA 

Chicago 2008, Paul curated the exhibition “A Perfect 

Marriage: Wood and Color,” which included 

23 international wood artists, and wrote essays in 

the accompanying catalogue and the SOFA 2008 

catalogue. For the SOFA public lecture series he 

organized a six-person panel on “Enhancing 

Nature: Color and Wood.” At the Mobile Museum 

of Art, Paul helped organize the 2008 retrospective 

exhibition of the work of Tennessee-based furniture 

maker and sculptor Craig Nutt, “Craig Nutt: 

Certified Organic,” and edited its catalogue. Nutt 

began his career as a reproductive furniture maker 

in Northport, Alabama, in the late 1970s, but is 

best known for his later “vegetable” furniture with 

their carved and polychromed forms. [richelson@ 

cityofmobile.org] 

Peter Rohowsky *75 (M.A.) is executive manager 

of The Art Archive, a leading international picture 

agency that supplies images of fine and decorative 

spring 2009 

arts, personages, and historical photography to text, 

trade, and academic publishers. Last fall he chaired 

an American Society of Picture Professionals panel 

on photo journalism and fine art photography. 

[psr6680@aol.com] 

Andy Shanken *99 has just published 194X: Architecture, 

Planning, and Consumer Culture on the 

American Home Front (University of Minnesota 

Press, 2009). His book focuses on the visionary 

designs and idealistic rhetoric of American architecture 

during World War II, when architects turned 

their energies from the built to the unbuilt, redefining 

themselves as planners and creating original 

designs to excite the public about postwar architecture. 

194X shows that architecture’s wartime 

partnership with corporate America was founded on 

shared anxieties and ideals that brought business 

and architecture together in innovative ways. 

Although the unexpected prosperity of the postwar 

era made the architecture of 194X obsolete before it 

could be built and led to its exclusion from the story 

of 20th-century American architecture, the book 

makes clear that its anticipatory rhetoric and designs 

played a crucial role in the widespread acceptance 

of modernist architecture. Andy is an assistant professor 

of architectural history at the University of 

California–Berkeley. [ashanken@berkley.edu] 

Margaret Rose Vendryes *97 received tenure at 

CUNY in 2006, then, in the following year, moved 

to the Boston area, where she is continuing her 

research and writing as an independent scholar. Her 

recent book, Barthé: A Life in Sculpture (University 

Press of Mississippi, 2008), is the most in-depth 

study of the life and art of Richmond Barthé 

(1909–89), the first modern African American 

sculptor to achieve real critical success. She is also 

the exhibition curator and catalogue editor of the 

upcoming exhibition “Beyond the Blues: Reflections 

on African America from the Amistad Research 

Center Fine Arts Collection,” which will be on view 

at the New Orleans Museum of Art from April 

through July 2010. This will be the first large-scale 

exhibition of this collection, and plans for the show 

to travel are in progress. Margaret Rose is also 

spending more time at her easel, completing a series 

of paintings that has been an ongoing project for 

more than six years. [mrvendryes@gmail.com] 

Joshua P. Waterman *07 has completed his collaboration 

with Maryan W. Ainsworth on the 

catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 

early German paintings, and he has now taken the 

position of Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial 

Fellow in the Department of European 

Painting before 1900 at the Philadelphia 

Museum of Art. [jwaterman@ 

philamuseum.org] 

Andy Shanken *99, 194X: 

Architecture, Planning, and 

Consumer Culture on the American 

Home Front 

Margaret Rose Vendryes *97, 

Barthé: A Life in Sculpture 

43

The Department of Art and Archaeology 

Newsletter is produced by the 

Publications Office of the Department 

of Art and Archaeology and 

the Office of Communications, 

Princeton University. 

Editor: Christopher Moss 

Design: Megan Peterson 

Photography: John Blazejewski, 

Patricia Blessing, William Childs, 

Dora C. Y. Ching, Alexis Cohen, 

David Connelly, Sally Davidson, 

Colum Hourihane, Bryan R. Just, 

Andrea Kane, Thomas Leisten, 

Walter F. Morris, Christopher 

Moss, Zoë Saunders, Nancy 

Serwint, Peggy Tenison, George 

Vogel, D. Alexander Walthall, 

Bruce M. White, Kim Wishart 

Illustrations: JoAnn Boscarino 

Cover illustration: Headdress of 

the Efut peoples of the Cross River 

region, Nigeria; late 19th–20th 

century; animal skin, wood, 

natural fibers, and vegetable 

pigments. Princeton University Art 

Museum, 1997-6. Gift of the 

Friends of the Princeton University 

Art Museum on the occasion of the 

250th Anniversary of Princeton 

University (photo: Bruce M. White) 

Department of Art and Archaeology 

newsletters are available in PDF 

format on the Web at www. 

princeton.edu/artandarchaeology/ 

publications/index.xml. 

Copyright © 2009 by 

The Trustees of Princeton University 

In the Nation’s Service and 

in the Service of All Nations 

P R I N T E D U S I N G 1 0 0 % W I N D E N E R G Y 

44 

Department of Art and Archaeology 

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