Blog Tag: Testimonials

Amber N. Wiley, Ph.D. , Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture, Tulane University Historian Constance Green characterized Washington, D.C. in the early 1900s as the “undisputed center of American Negro civilization” in her 1969 book Secret City: History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital. This was America before the Harlem Renaissance, in which the average percentile […]

Marlene Nakagawa, Undergraduate student at the University of Oregon During his ongoing series of campaigns, Alexander the Great founded or renamed nearly twenty cities after himself. From Pakistan to Turkey, these cities stood as a representation (as if one was necessary) of his omnipresence in the ancient world. Over the centuries, most of the Alexandrian cities […]

Peyvand Firouzeh, PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge Aridity in the Islamic world stands in contrast to the well-known landscape architecture of Islamic gardens, where water is used generously and luxuriously. The contrast hints at creative methods of dealing with water scarcity: from man-made canals and reservoirs to cisterns and qanats (subterranean tunnel-wells), examples of which can […]

Amelia Nelson Cataloging and Digital Services Librarian Kansas City Art Institute In the spring semester the library collaborated with the Fibers Department by hosting 500 growing silkworms in one of the display cases at the library entrance. The worms were grown as part of the course “Fiber History and Properties.” The silkworms’ development was tracked […]

Katherine Murrell Instructor of Art History Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design In my class on women artists from the medieval period onward, one of the first activities students were asked to do was to work in small groups and write a list of ten female painters or sculptors active before 1950, but without looking […]

Dr. Martha Hollander Professor Hofstra University My research and teaching in art history has always focused on the ways in which a single work of art can open up an entire world of knowledge, making vivid and real the otherwise rather bland term “historical context.” For the past few years I have been working on […]

Susan Dodge-Peters Daiss McPherson Director of Education Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester The idea of bringing works of art to the bedside of patients in the hospital emerged from two interwoven aspects of my professional life: for over 25 years, I have worked as a museum educator at the Memorial Art Gallery […]

By Lera Boroditsky, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University How do artists decide whether time, death, or liberty should be personified as male or female? One suggestion comes from linguistics.  For example, Roman Jakobson (1959) reports: “The Russian painter Repin was baffled as to why Sin had been depicted as a woman by German artists: […]

Keri Cronin Department of Visual Arts faculty, Brock University In January 2011 I launched a new senior-level undergraduate course called “Picturing Animals.” This is a research-intensive course that explores the history of visual culture through a thematic focus on representations of nonhuman animals. From Albrecht Dürer to Damien Hirst, we take a critical look at […]

Elizabeth Perkins Columbia University graduate student While reading through conservation records at the National Gallery in Washington, I found many references to Giovanni Bellini’s fingerprints all over the faces in his portraits. I squinted and stared in the gallery, but despite my best efforts and the indulgence of a lenient security guard, I could not […]