On Friday April 27, 2012, history of art students of the class of 2012 and their families joined faculty and staff at the U-M Museum of Art for the annual graduation reception.

Department chair, Professor Matt Biro opened the event, followed by award presentations by the director of undergraduate studies, Professor Kevin Carr. Congratulations to all and best of luck in your future endeavors!

View the program. View the event slideshow.

2012 History of Art Undergraduate Student Awards

Henry P. Tappan Award for Academic Excellence
Emily Greer

Henry P. Tappan Award for Outstanding Performance in the History of Art Honors Program
Peter DeYoe

Henry P. Tappan Award for General Studies in the History of Art
Sarah Correa
Megan Sajewski

Henry P. Tappan Award for Outstanding Performance in a Triple Major with the History of Art
Gabby Hyunsun Park

Henry P. Tappan Award for Outstanding Service in the History of Art
Jessica Byler
Emily Hillgren
Helena Parsonage

On April 3, undergraduate art history students gathered for lunch and presentations by three U-M history of art alumni. Anna Clark, Natalie Morath, and Elizabeth Yochim gave short presentations addressing how the skills they developed as art history concentrators have translated to jobs and careers after graduation. The presentations were followed by a question and answer session. Later that afternoon, Elizabeth Yochim facilitated a pARTiciPLAY session, an experiential tour of select outdoor UMMA sculptures. This movement-based technique provides a chance to learn about the sculpture and the surrounding environment in a new way while engaging sensory and spatial awareness.

Anna Clark, freelance journalist (BA 2003)

Anna Clark is an independent journalist living in Detroit. She writes reported news features, longform nonfiction, and book reviews, and she has an omnivorous range: she most often covers literature (especially international literature), culture, health, prisons, gender, sports, and media stories. Her writing has been published in The Guardian, The American Prospect, Salon, The Nation, The Daily Beast, Grantland, The Detroit Free Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Review, and other publications. She is currently a political media correspondent for the Columbia Journalism Review. In 2011, she was a Fulbright Fellow in Nairobi, Kenya, and also has been a fellow with the Peter Jennings Center for Journalists and the Constitution. She writes the literary blog Isak (www.annaclark.net) and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Anna is a writer-in-residence with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, and on Thursday evenings, she facilitates a theater workshop at a men's prison in Macomb County, Michigan. She graduated from the University of Michigan's Residential College with highest honors, and from Warren Wilson College's MFA Program for Writers.

Natalie Morath, archivist (BA 2009)

Natalie Morath is an archivist at Eastern Michigan University's Bruce T. Halle Library. After pursuing her BA in History of Art from the University of Michigan, she attended Wayne State University's School of Library and Information Science, where she graduated with an MLIS and a Graduate Certificate in Archival Administration in 2011. Her previous experiences includes contract work for the Detroit Institute of Arts Research Library & Archive, the General Motors Design Center Archive and Special Collections, and the Edsel & Eleanor Ford Estate, where she completed projects in audio-visual preservation, cataloguing, exhibition design, and manuscript processing. She is currently pursuing her certification from the Academy of Certified Archivists.

Elizabeth Yochim, creator at Participlay & principal at Yochim Arts (BA 1995)

Elizabeth Yochim is passionate about public engagement in and around the arts. She is the creator of pARTiciPLAY; principal at Yochim Arts; and lives and works in Los Angeles, California. pARTiciPLAY produces uniquely social and interactive experiences with art and architectural environments incorporating play and movement; and Yochim Arts is a fine arts firm specializing in the appraisal and consultation of modern and contemporary paintings, prints, photographs, and sculpture for individual collectors, artists, attorneys, wealth management advisors, corporations, insurance companies, and fine art institutions.Yochim was head of the International Division at Timothy Yarger Fine Art Beverly Hills from 2003 to 2010, overseeing all aspects of producing the gallery’s national and international exhibition projects including large scale exhibitions in Bangkok, Thailand; Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, China; and Singapore. Since 2004 she has volunteered as a national facilitator and contributed to the curriculum and public programming for Turning the Wheel Productions, a non-profit youth and community outreach organization.She received her BA in art history from the University of Michigan in 1995 with a specialization in Italian Renaissance Art and has lived and traveled extensively in Italy, Argentina, and Japan before moving to California in 2001.

Click here to view the video. Click here to view the slideshow.

While all cultures have created gems of visual art, few have written much about them. This problem has stimulated historians of art repeatedly to develop cosmopolitan theories capable of engaging all artistic traditions in meaningful ways. Roger Fry in the early-twentieth century and E. H. Gombrich in mid-century discussed and compared the arts of Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe using models designed to make those arts meaningful to their readers. For these theorists, the rich record of artistic practice in China offered especially fertile ground for speculation, because throughout its history China produced a written record of art history, art theory, and criticism comparable to that of Europe. Towards the end of the twentieth century the discipline began to focus on the role of art in its historical context. The results were impressive, but broad, cross-cultural theorization took a back seat as a result.

The situation has changed during the past decade, with many prominent scholars in the humanities--James Elkins, Nicholas Mirzoeff, W.J.T. Mitchell, John Onians, and David Summers among others--writing ambitious tomes designed to overcome cultural parochialisms, searching for a common descriptive language for understanding art in its multiple functions. These scholars likewise found China’s record of art theory useful. Some have even written books about Chinese art, just as several leading historians of China have begun to write on topics spanning “East and West” in recent years. Yet none of these scholars have had the opportunity to meet together with more than a handful of experts outside their own field to discuss their common concerns together.

Room For Another View: China's Art is Disciplinary Perspective, held during winter term 2012 on the University of Michigan campus, was the first large-scale conference to provide a forum for such scholars to come together and focus on core issues in the discipline of art history. With several of the most prominent theorists from both fields present, it was the aim of the conference to explore meta-disciplinary perspectives around such topics as academies, print, landscape, gardens, fashion, canons, and the language of art itself. China scholars offered formal presentations, previews of longer essays that will be published in the Blackwell Companion to Chinese Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), but at least as important were the lively discussions that followed. These discussions included prominent scholars from across the globe as well as eminent historians, literary scholars, artists, and social scientists from the University of Michigan. During the two-day conference, men and women who have devoted much thought to cross-disciplinary study offered many nuggets of insight and wisdom that provoked and inspired all who attended.

This conference was organized by the U-M Department of History of Art and co-sponsored by the Confucius Institute at the University of Michigan and the U-M Center for Chinese Studies, with additional support from the International Institute, Institute for the Humanities, Rackham Graduate School, Office of the Vice President for Research, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; School of Art & Design, U-M Museum of Art, Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, and the Departments of Comparative Literature, Anthropology, Philosophy, and History.

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The History of Art Freer Symposium, “Barbarians, Monsters, Hybrids, and Mutants: Asian Inventions of Others,” held October 22, 2011 at the U-M Museum of Art.

When and under what circumstances do people invent the concept of “the other”? This question has been posed and responded to many times over in a largely modern, colonial, Eurocentric context. However, the invention of “others” is not simply a European prerogative: it is a practice common to cultures and societies throughout the world, past and present. This timely symposium examined these issues in a visually rich, historically grounded and contextualized collection of talks and discussions that focused critical analytic attention on the manifold Asian imagination and invention of “others.” The symposium highlighted and examined the robust and visually potent technologies of “othering” deployed in Asia by Asians past and present while addressing the multiple contexts, regional variations, and sets of interests, involved. In this way, it focused both multi-media representations of "others" and on how and why these variable constructions were mobilized around complex cross- and intra-cultural negotiations over time.

The symposium was organized by Professor Jennifer Robertson. Invited speakers were: Fabio Rambelli (University of California, Santa Barb era, Maurizio Peleggi (National University of Singapore), Ayelet Zohar (Haifa University, Israel), and  keynote speaker Ali Behdad (University of California Los Angeles). The event concluded with a panel discussion with the speakers and professors Kevin Carr, Martin Powers, Celeste Brusati, Margaret Root, Christiane Gruber, Toyota Visiting Professor Melanie Trede, and graduate student Tina Le. The audience of over 125 consisted of both graduate and undergraduate students, faculty from U-M as well as other institutions, and members of the broader community.

This Department of History of Art event was co-sponsored by the Charles Lang Freer Endowment and the U-M Museum of Art, with additional sponsorship from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; Office of the Vice President for Research; Institute for the Humanities; International Institute; Rackham School of Graduate Studies; Department of Anthropology; School of Art & Design; Department of Asian Languages & Cultures; Center for Japanese Studies; Center for Middle Eastern & North African Studies; Department of History; Department of Screen Arts & Cultures; Department of Near Eastern Studies; Center for South Asian Studies.

On Friday April 29, 2011, new history of art graduates and their families joined faculty and staff in the lobby of Tappan Hall for the annual graduation reception. 

Department chair, Professor Matt Biro opened the event, followed by award presentations by the director of undergraduate studies, Professor Rebecca Zurier. Congratulations to all and best of luck in your future endeavors!

View the slideshow.

View the program pdf.

2011 Undergraduate Award Winners

Henry P. Tappan Award for Outstanding Achievement in the History of Art Honors Program
Sarah Parker

Henry P. Tappan Award for Academic Excellence in the History of Art
Soo Yeon Shim

Henry P. Tappan Award for Outstanding Performance in a Triple Major with the History of Art
Bailey Benson

Henry P. Tappan Award for Exceptional Contributions to the Program in History of Art
Meg Urisko

Henry P. Tappan Award for Excellence in General Studies in the History of Art
Maureen Stych

Graduating Seniors 2011

History of Art Concentrators

Tashween Ali
Bailey Benson §
Michael Bosbous ~
Chelsea Brown ~
Young-Jin Cho
Mariel Cox
Sudipta Dasmunshi ~
Christina Denooyer ~
Alexandra Faivus
Clara Gamalski *
Amanda Ghourdjian ~
Jodie Gorochow
Lindsay Greenspoon
Marina Gross-Hoy ~ +
Sarah Hanson
Juliet Happy
Kelly Johnson ~
Sriya Karumanchi ~
Armineh Kasparian
Jessica Li ~
Marie Luis
Brooke Lundin
Melanie Maceachern
Katelyn McTaggart
Emily Michels
Kelsey Neighbors
Sara Olds ~
Jillian Orr
Sarah Parker *
Hillary Pine
Zoe Piontek ~
Summer Radtke ~
Nicole Schloss
Samantha Schwartz ~
Soo Yeon Shim *
Andrea Starbird
Molly Stewart
Anna Stotland +
Maureen Stych
Meg Urisko *
Chanel Von Habsburg-Lothringen ~ +
Lauren Young
* Honors ~ Double Concentration § Triple Concentration + Residential College

History of Art Minors

Sarah Belanger
Joshua Berkowitz
Michael Bou-Maroun
Maxwell Brake
Carl Burhop
Laura Cavanagh
Corey Davis
Siyi Fang
Syretta Freeman
Shalini Gannapureddy
Caitlin Gilfeather
Samuel Goodman
Courtney Graham
Kelsey Hagberg
Kenta Hayashi
Laura Heinritz
Jennifer Jacobi
Kelli Knop
Stephanie Kunkel
Jordan Lassaline
Yemina Leszczuk
Jessie Lipkowitz
Molly McKenna
Arielle Miller
Lenore Ojibway-Gifford
Gabrielle Palanca
Sarah Petty
Caroline Rooney
Ian Sinclair
Emily Stewart
Rebecca Sunde
Joyce Tseng
Laura Tyson
Christopher Williams

On April 4, four alumni returned to Tappan Hall to share their experience going from U-M to the real world. Mary Deyoe, Raquel Gimenez, Andrew Pierce, and Steve Roach each  gave a short presentation and then convened in a panel to answer questions from students followed by  a reception at the U-M Museum of Art.

History of Art students develop a sophisticated level of visual literacy, including the ability to analyze works of art and their social effects, an awareness of how values can be negotiated through visual culture, the ability to engage with a wide range of critical methods, and more. But how does this literacy translate to a job after graduation? This event helped undergraduate students answer this question and others. View the slideshow.

Raquel Gimenez (BA 2007), art director at digital advertising agency, New York, NY

Steve Roach (BA 2002), lawyer, rare coin and fine art expert appraiser and consultant, Dallas, TX

Mary DeYoe (BA 2006), former education program coordinator at U-M Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI

Andrew Pierce (BGS 1998), operations manager at Eaton Corporation

The University of Michigan Department of the History of Art featured Vishakha N. Desai, president and CEO of the Asia Society NY, at its second annual Charles Lang Freer Lecture in the Visual Arts on February 15, 2011.

Titled "The Future of Asia’s Cultural Past," the lecture illustrated how, from the time of Charles Freer in the late-nineteenth century to most of the twentieth century, “Asian art” was synonymous with pre-modern or traditional arts of Asia. Dr. Desai explained that with the arrival of contemporary arts on the scene in the last two decades, accompanied by rapid economic growth of Asian countries, especially China and India, traditional arts are now at risk of being overshadowed by the contemporary art obsessions in popular culture as well as in scholarly communities.

Watch the video.

View the slideshow.

Our 2010 symposium focused on the publishing, design, and distribution of art books and books on art in a time of rapid change in the publishing industry. The panelists, drawing on a wide range of professional experience, offered a diversity of perspectives as they reflected on both the challenges and the possibilities of publishing books in which the visual is paramount, in which images are integral and design conveys meaning. All proposed ways of moving forward in uncertain, if exciting, times.

View the slideshow.

Participants:

Joseph Imorde, professor, University of Siegen, founder of Edition Imorde, Berlin
Gloria Kury, director, Gutenberg Periscope Publishing, Ltd., Pittsburgh
Lisa Middag, publications director, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo, professor, School of Art & Design, University of Michigan
Paul Wagner, senior designer, Princeton Architectural Press, New York