21st Annual Graduate Symposium in Nineteenth-Century Art
Saturday & Sunday, March 16–17, 2024, 1 to 4 PM ET
Co-sponsored by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) and the Dahesh Museum of Art. This event will be held online.
Register for Saturday, March 16 at: http://tinyurl.com/Symposium-1
Register for Sunday, March 17 at: http://tinyurl.com/Symposium-2
Special thanks to the Dahesh Museum of Art for the Dahesh Museum of Art Prize for the Best Paper(s), a gift from the Mervat Zahid Cultural Foundation
Saturday, March 16, 2024
Register for Saturday, March 16 at: http://tinyurl.com/Symposium-1
1 PM: Welcome: Nancy Locke, Pennsylvania State University, President, Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art; Amira Zahid, Trustee, Dahesh Museum of Art.
1:10 – 2:30 PM: First Session & Discussion:
Marilyn Satin Kushner, New-York Historical Society, Moderator.
Rebecca Yuste, Columbia University, “Nature’s Neoclassicism: Antiquity and Extraction in the Palace of Mines, Mexico City (1797-1813).”
Yuste examines the life of Neoclassicism as it moved from Europe to the Americas, using the Palace of Mines, designed by Manuel de Tolsà, as a case study. Here, the aesthetic theory of buen gusto came together with Bourbon economic reforms to create an architecture designed, ultimately, to know and control the earth.
Rebecca Yuste is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, where she is completing her dissertation, “The Drawing, the Garden and the School: Natural History and the Visual Arts in the Novohispanic Enlightenment (1787-1813).” She holds an AB from Princeton University, where she won the Frederick Barnard White Award in Architecture. Rebecca has held positions at the Institute for Studies on Latin America Art (ISLAA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Princeton University Art Museum, and, most recently was the Rockefeller Brothers Curatorial Fellow at the Hispanic Society of America. She is editing a forthcoming issue of VISTAS: Critical Approaches to Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art, and her translation of Viollet-le-Duc’s “Flore” will appear in West 86th in 2025.
Kiki Barnes, City University of New York, “‘Fiercely the red sun descending’: Thomas Moran and The Song of Hiawatha.”
Barnes analyzes the American painter Thomas Moran’s attempt to produce an illustrated edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Ojibwe-inspired epic poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Unique in the context of his career, Moran’s extant illustrations help reexamine the perception of Indigeneity around the 1876 U.S. Centennial.
Kiki Barnes is a doctoral candidate completing her dissertation at the City University of New York on landscapes of the Americas and their connections to popular literature, 1865-1900. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She has been a Curatorial Intern at the American Federation of Art and Mellon Curatorial Fellow in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Colton Klein, Yale University, “Material Reconstruction: Ecologies of Metal in an 1887 Photograph of Disabled Union Veterans.”
In 1887, eighteen disabled Union veterans of the American Civil War posed for a photograph wearing badges—composed of copper forged by enslaved metalworks—recast from Confederate cannons implicated in their disabilities. Klein applies ecologies of metal to mine the photograph’s shadow histories of extraction, race, violence, and disability.
Colton Klein is a doctoral student at Yale University where he is a Whitney Humanities Center Fellow in the Environmental Humanities. His dissertation studies intersectional ecologies of materials and environmental histories in the United States in the visual culture of the nineteenth-century United States. He holds a BA from Washington and Lee University and an MA from Columbia University. He has been a curatorial intern at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he was also a curatorial assistant in prewar art.
2:30 – 2:40 PM: Break
2:40 – 3:40 PM: Second Session & Discussion. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Seton Hall University, and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Moderator
Arielle Fields, Pennsylvania State University, “It’s Very Middle Class: The Visual Culture of Nurseries in Britain, 1880-1900.”
Fields explores the entangled ideals of middle-class identity, motherhood, and visual culture in nineteenth-century Britain. By analyzing nursery objects, she demonstrates that the commerce in nursery furnishings established a nursery aesthetic, and that the visual culture of the nursery transformed Victorian motherhood into a performance of femininity.
Arielle Fields is a doctoral candidate at Pennsylvania State University completing her dissertation on the emergence of nurseries as a social and literal construct in nineteenth-century Britain. She holds a BA from Kenyon College and an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She has presented aspects of her research at SECAC.
Caitlin Chan, Stanford University, “Beyond the Window: Searching for Invisible Origins, from William Henry Fox Talbot’s “The Oriel Window” (1835) to Artificial Intelligence-generated Images.”
Chan’s presentation is the culmination of her ongoing project to ground Artificial Intelligence aesthetics in a longer genealogy of art history, ultimately finding resonance in another pioneering moment of image-making in the early nineteenth century.
Caitlin Chan is a doctoral student at Stanford University, having previously completed a BA at George Washington University. She has presented her research at College Art Association annual conferences, the Association for Art History annual conference, and Columbia University. At Stanford, she is a Leadership in Inclusive Teaching Fellow and the recipient of the Jeanette and William Hayden Jones Fellowship in American Art and Culture. Previously she was an intern at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
3:40 – 4:00 PM: Discussion among Participants
Sunday, March 17, 2024
Register for Sunday, March 17 at: http://tinyurl.com/Symposium-2
1:00 PM: Welcome: Nancy Locke, President, AHNCA, and J. David Farmer, Director of Exhibitions, Dahesh Museum of Art
1:10 – 2:30 PM: Third Session & Discussion, Patricia Mainardi, Graduate Center, City University of New York, AHNCA Program Coordinator, Moderator
Eve Rosekind, Washington University in St. Louis, “Costume à l’Algérienne: An Empire of Fashion and Mass Consumption in Charles Cordier’s Paris.”
Algeria – its people and products – became highly visible in Paris after French colonization in the 1830s when art, fashion magazines, and stores offered Algerian-inspired, mass-produced objects to consumers. Rosekind examines the production of Charles Cordier’s Algerian sculptures and the transformation of the burnous, a long cloak with a pointed hood, as part of this larger display of empire in Paris.
Eve Rosekind is a doctoral candidate at Washington University, where she is completing her dissertation, “France Producing Egypt: The Material Cultures of Orientalism, 1869-1922.” She holds a BA from Johns Hopkins University and an MA from Williams College. She has been an intern at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art and the Washington DC National Portrait Gallery; previously she was Curatorial Assistant for European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Benjamin Price, Princeton University and the Museum of Modern Art, “Nihilism and the Anarchist Imagination in Camille Pissarro’s Turpitudes Sociales (1889).”
Price studies Camille Pissarro’s Turpitudes Sociales (1889) in order to interrogate the role of nihilistic critique in the artist’s political imagination. His argument centers the response of Esther Isaacson (Pissarro’s niece) and, following her, asks whether the philosophical position of the drawings might be an inescapable one for anarchist thinking in the late nineteenth century.
Benjamin Price is completing his dissertation, “Anarchist Art and Cultures of Science in Fin-de-Siècle France,” at Princeton University. He holds a BA with honors from Trinity College, Dublin, and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art where he received the 2018 Paule Vézelay Prize for the best dissertation on modern and contemporary art. He is currently a Mellon-Marron Research Consortium fellow at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Zhu Wenqi, The University of Hong Kong, The New Oriental “Other”: Understanding Racial Stereotypes in Western Satirical Magazines of Meiji Japan.”
Zhu investigates the portrayal of Japanese people in manga and comic magazines that were published during the Meiji era (1868–1912). She argues that periodicals such as Tôbaé and La Vie Japonaise intentionally depicted the Japanese as an inferior race, despite rising Japanese military and industrial power, in order to safeguard the ethnocentric views of their expatriate readership.
Zhu Wenqi is a doctoral candidate at the University of Hong Kong, where she is completing a dissertation analyzing imagery of East Asia in Western illustrated newspapers and magazines during the nineteenth century. She completed her BA and MPhil at the University of Hong Kong and was an exchange student at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Louis Cha Postgraduate Research Fellowship, HKU Conference and Travel Grant, Hong Kong Museum Society’s Travel Grant, Pilot Scheme for International Experience, and Andrew Wyld Research Support Grant.
2:30 – 2:40 PM: Break
2:40 – 3:40 PM: Fourth Session & Discussion, J. David Farmer, Dahesh Museum of Art, Moderator
Maur Dessauvage, Columbia University, “Building an Imperial Body: Karl Friedrich Schinkel and the German Constitution, c. 1817.”
Dessauvage examines the relationship between architectural and legal-political issues in post-Napoleonic Prussia through a close analysis of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Triumphal Arch, arguing that the painting visualized the transition between the eighteenth-century ancien régime and nineteenth-century bourgeois society.
Maur Dessauvage is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, currently completing his dissertation “The Sovereignty of Style,” examining the relationship between architecture, law, and state-building in nineteenth-century German lands. His research has been supported by the Getty Institute and the Buell Center. He has presented his research at the College Art Association Conference and University of Cambridge among other venues.
Samantha Small, City University of New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Fremdkörper: Franz von Stuck and Blackness in Wilhelmine Germany.”
Small interrogates Bavarian Symbolist artist Franz von Stuck’s Black figures in light of contemporary perceptions of race in Wilhelmine Germany (1890-1918). Examined here for the first time, these figures are positioned amidst social and artistic trends, including Germany’s belated colonialism, and visual spectacles such as advertisements and “Human Zoos”(Völkerschauen).
Samantha Small is a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York, where she is completing her dissertation “Franz von Stuck, Painter Provocateur.” She holds a BA from George Washington University and an MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Her dissertation has been supported by the Fulbright Program and a Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Venetian Research Grant. She has held positions in the curatorial departments of the Guggenheim Museum and the Blanton Museum, and is currently Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow in the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
3:40 – 4:00 PM: Discussion among Participants
2023–2024 Jury: Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, J. David Farmer, Marilyn Satin Kushner, Nancy Locke, Patricia Mainardi; Technical Director: Caroline Koch
For the complete program: https://www.ahnca.org; www.daheshmuseum.org. For further information: info@daheshmuseum.org