Vanderbilt University History of Art Blog

Sheri Shaneyfelt Receives the Ellen Gregg Ingalls Award for Excellence in Classroom Teaching

Sheri Shaneyfelt, principal senior lecturer in the history of art, was among six Vanderbilt academic leaders honored by Chancellor Nicholas Zeppos at the April 5 Spring Faculty Assembly with awards recognizing their teaching, research, service and commitment to diversity. Shaneyfelt received the Ellen Gregg Ingalls Award for Excellence in Classroom Teaching—a cash prize of $5,000 and an engraved pewter Washington Camp Cup.

Her letter of support reads: “Her popularity stems from the fact that she works very hard to make her expectations for student performance clear, provides students the support they need to meet those expectations, and generally supports student success in every way possible.”

A specialist in Italian Renaissance Art, she also teaches courses in Northern European Renaissance and in Western European Baroque Art. Described as a dedicated and beloved undergraduate teacher, she is deeply devoted to mentoring students in her role as director of undergraduate studies. Shaneyfelt regularly receives near-perfect course evaluations, and her classes are always oversubscribed.

She also maintains an active research agenda in Italian Renaissance art, with a focus on Renaissance Umbria, particularly the Società del 1496, the school of Pietro Perugino, and painting and workshop practices in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, including Perugino and the early Raphael, and the artists Giannicola di Paolo and Eusebio da San Giorgio.

Nominations for the Ingalls Award are made by the undergraduates based on the nominee’s concern for an individual student’s learning, the organization and engagement of classroom presentation, the clarity and fairness of criteria for awarding grades, and accessibility and helpfulness outside of class. The chancellor makes the final selection from these undergraduate nominations.

 *Chancellor Nicholas Zeppos, Ellen Gregg Ingalls Award for Excellence in Classroom Teaching recipient Sheri Shaneyfelt, and Faculty Senate Chair Geoffrey Fleming. (Photo courtesy Joe Howell/Vanderbilt News Services)

 

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 9, 2018 in Events, HART, News, Vanderbilt University, VRC

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Christopher Johns Presents Paper at Symposium Focused on the Art of the Gesù

Christopher Johns, Norman L and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art, delivered a paper, “Giovanni Battista Gaulli and the ‘Adoration of the Most Holy Name’: Painting and Piety in Late Baroque Rome,” at a symposium April 5-6 hosted by the Fairfield University Art Museum and held in conjunction with the current exhibition THE HOLY NAME Art of the Gesù: Bernini and his Age.

Johns’ paper considered the profoundly impressive ceiling fresco by Giovanni Battista Gaulli on the vault of the mother church of the Society of Jesus in Rome, Il Gesù, in the context of late Baroque mysticism and the Ecclesia Triumphans of the Catholic Reformation. As a celebration of visionary mysticism and a visualization of the Jesuits’ struggle against heresy, The Triumph of the Most Holy Name is the first colossally-scaled celebration of the exalted status of the Order in the Catholic Church of the seventeenth century. It exercised enormous influence on Jesuit art patronage, not only in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, but also globally in the context of the missions.

“Today, the splendid fresco has become emblematic of late Baroque mystical imagery in Roman ceiling painting before the dawn of Catholic enlightenment and Neoclassicism,” said Johns, a member of the planning committee for the landmark exhibition featuring artistic treasures from the Roman church of the Gesù never before seen in America.

Organized to commemorate Fairfield University’s 75th anniversary, the exhibition  (on view through May 19) features Bernini’s bust of Roberto Bellarmino (patron saint of Fairfield University), Gaulli’s monumental painted wood model of the apse, a gilt bronze altar sculpture by the versatile painter, draftsman and sculptor Ciro Ferri, the sumptuous jeweled cartegloria from the altar of Saint Ignatius, and the magnificent embroidered chasuble of the church’s great benefactor, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. These masterpieces are joined by more than fifty paintings, sculptures, rare books, precious objects, drawings, prints, and historical documents by Bernini, Domenichino, Gaulli, Ciro Ferri, Carlo Maratti, and Andrea Pozzo, among other Italian Baroque masters, on loan from American museums and private collections.

Johns co-edited the catalogue (Saint Joseph’s University Press, Philadelphia), with Linda Wolk-Simon, director and chief curator of the Fairfield University Art Museum, who described it as “the most important and substantial study in any language devoted to the Gesù.” Richly illustrated with 246 color images, the catalogue is comprised of thirteen essays by an international team of specialists in Italian Baroque sacred art and religious culture followed by a checklist of the works of art in the exhibition. Johns contributed an essay entitled “The Fortunes of the Society of Jesus: Ecclesia Triumphans to Dominus Ac Redemptor.”

The objects in the exhibition were selected for “their artistic and historical significance and their relationship to the Jesuits and the Gesù during their joint first century,” wrote Wolk-Simon, “but the converging narrative threads cannot be explored by objects alone. The essays in this volume by a roster of distinguished scholars give authoritative weight, nuance, and substance to the exhibition’s rich panoply of themes, exploring in depth the constellation of personalities, politics, ideas and faith that gave rise to the Society and its mother church.”

*Giovanni Battista Gaulli, The Adoration of the Most Holy Name, and detail, IHS Christogram, 1676-1679. Rome, Church of the Gesù. Photographs: courtesy Prof. Sheri F. Shaneyfelt, Vanderbilt’s History of Art Department

 

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 9, 2018 in Conferences, Events, HART, Lectures, News, VRC

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HART Alumna Jelena Bogdanović to Lecture on the Canopy and the Byzantine Church

Architectural historian and HART alumna Jelena Bogdanović, MA’02, will present a lecture entitled “The Canopy and the Byzantine Church” on Saturday, April 14, at 3 pm in Room G-23 of Vanderbilt Divinity School. Bogdanović, associate professor of architectural history and theory at Iowa State University, will examine the canopy—a four-columned structure with a roof—as an iconic image of the Temple and highlight its use in the architectural design and visual arts of Christians in Byzantium, medieval Serbia, and the eastern Mediterranean.

Drawing on the conclusions of her monograph, The Framing of Sacred Space: The Canopy and the Byzantine Church (Oxford University Press, 2017), she will address how the canopy was used to reaffirm architectural, symbolic, and sacred ties between the Old and New Covenants in Byzantine Christianity. Bogdanović offers the first study of canopies and their function as symbolic units in Byzantine churches. Canopies were architectural objects that provided design integrity, but they were also seen as a bridge between the physical and the transcendental realms.

Her areas of scholarly expertise include cross-cultural and religious themes in the medieval Byzantine, Slavic, Western European, and Islamic architecture of the Balkans and the Mediterranean. A leading historian of Serbian medieval art and architecture at Iowa State, she holds an engineering degree in architecture from the University of Belgrade, a master of arts degree in the history of art from Vanderbilt, and a master of arts and doctoral degrees in art and archaeology from Princeton.

Immediately following Bogdanović’s presentation there will be a gallery tour of “Eikon: A Triple Encounter” in room G-20 of the Divinity School. Curated by Julia Liden, candidate for the master of theological studies degree, the exhibit serves to illustrate the central role such frescoes played in communicating Christianity to the faithful. These large works were created in the medieval fresco technique by Zdenka Živković (1921-2011), the internationally recognized fresco copyist and restorer who sought to produce a large number of copies of frescoes, especially from endangered churches and monasteries in Serbia and Macedonia.

Drawn from Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery’s collection of Živković’s full-scale fresco copies created from the original paintings found in Macedonian and Serbian monasteries, the exhibit will remain on view through April 20. Gallery hours for “Eikon: A Triple Encounter” are Monday, Wednesday and Friday from noon to 2 pm in room G-20 (ground floor of the Divinity School).

On Friday, April 13, the History of Art Department will host a coffee hour for Bogdanović in the Visual Resources Center, Cohen Hall 134, from 1:00 to 2:00 pm. Faculty, students, staff and alumni are invited to attend.

Sponsored by Religion in the Arts and Contemporary Culture & Sacred Borders, the current Divinity School exhibit is in conjunction with Bogdanovic’s lecture. Additional sponsors are the Department of History of Art, the Program in Classical and Mediterranean Studies, the Department of History, and the Department of Religious Studies.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 6, 2018 in Divinity School, Events, HART, Lectures, News, Student/Alumni, Vanderbilt University, VRC

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Shelby Merritt Presents Poster at VRA 2018 Conference, Philadelphia, PA

In late March, I represented Vanderbilt’s History of Art Visual Resources Center at the Visual Resources Association’s 35th Annual Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This year’s conference theme was “Workshop of the World”, a theme which played on the nineteenth-century nickname for Philadelphia as an important center of industry.

The highlight of the conference was the engaging and inspiring keynote speech given by Jane Golden, longtime Executive Director of Mural Arts Philadelphia. Mural Arts Philadelphia is part social program, part art collaborative. Golden recounted the journey of the organization from its origin in the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network of the 1980s, to a small city agency in the 1990s, to its current place as the nation’s largest and most robust mural program. She emphasized the importance of civic engagement, delivering art to the public “as a civil service,” and the role of visual arts in community building and urban transformation.

Conference highlights included two sessions addressing the question of access: “Images for Scholarly Publication: Rights and Reproductions Perspectives“, in which representatives of several Philadelphia museums discussed how they make images of their collections available to researchers, publishers, and the broader public; and “Digital, Visual, Tactile: Expanding Access to Specialized Collections”, which focused on different methods of expanding the digital reach of physical collections that might otherwise be difficult to access.

As a participant in the conference’s poster session, I presented “Teaching Students to Visualize Art Historical Data with Tableau Public”. The poster addressed my recent foray into teaching a new data analysis and visualization tool to Professor Rebecca VanDiver’s fall 2017 course, Women in Art Since 1850. The poster was well-received, with many conference attendees expressing their interest in encouraging their own faculty members to incorporate similar digital tools in the classroom.

— Shelby Merritt

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on April 4, 2018 in Conferences, Digital Humanities, Events, HART, News, Technology, VRC

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Exhibition of Portraits by Everett Raymond Kinstler and Live Painting Demonstration Marked by Record Attendance

The current Fine Arts Gallery’s exhibition America Creative: Portraits by Everett Raymond Kinstler explores the works of America’s foremost portrait artist. Kinstler’s career has spanned over 70 years, and he has painted more than 2,000 individuals, including eight US presidents. More than 300 people attended the opening reception on March 23, setting a record attendance for a gallery opening. The exhibit is on display in Cohen Memorial Hall on the Peabody campus through July 14. An Arts Break about America Creative is currently airing on WNPT. Tune in!

The Fine Arts Gallery also had the pleasure and privilege of hosting Kinstler on March 24 for a live painting demonstration with Eddie George, actor and former Tennessee Titans star running back during the opening weekend of the exhibition. Here is a video of his performance in case you couldn’t make it to the event or want to watch it again: Painting demonstration by Everett Raymond Kinstler with Eddie George (3/24/2018)

 

 

 

 

 

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on March 29, 2018 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, Lectures, Nashville Arts, News, VRC

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Wond’ry Exhibit Opening March 29 Takes Digital Humanities into Three Dimensions

A new exhibit at the Wond’ry showcasing the work of Vanderbilt’s Slave Societies Digital Archive (SSDA) team will feature some unusual pieces of digital preservation: 3D-printed replicas of valuable artifacts from cultures linked to the Atlantic slave trade. The Vanderbilt community is invited to visit the exhibit and learn more about the SSDA at a reception on Thursday, March 29, at 4 p.m. in the second-floor common space at the Wond’ry.

“I call what we do ‘guerilla preservation,’” said Jane Landers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History and director of SSDA, the oldest and largest open-access clearinghouse of digital records relating to the Atlantic slave trade. It is hosted by the Jean and Alexander Heard Library’s Special Collections.

Landers and her team travel to towns and villages across South America and the Caribbean, high-resolution scanning cameras in tow, in search of any documentation related to the Atlantic slave trade or slave society that may be stored away in churches, town halls and even family attics. Many of these ledgers, letters, books and other documents are in perilously fragile shape, as centuries of moisture, fungus and insects have taken their toll.

In many cases, Landers and her team leave the scanning equipment with the community and train residents to continue the work—and when it’s complete, one copy of the data goes to the SSDA while the other one stays with the community. “It’s not an extractive, exploitative process,” she said. “It’s one which preserves and makes these materials accessible to everyone.”

Over the years, Landers has also acquired a variety of artifacts related to the cultures she works to preserve, including statues of African gods and Catholic saints, as well as masks and artwork. Landers was hesitant to display these important items outside of a museum setting, so she turned to a different type of digital technology to find a solution: a 3D printer.

“We were very fortunate to be able to collaborate with the Wond’ry and Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital, said Angela Sutton, a postdoc working with Landers. Sutton took the artifacts to the pediatric radiology department where Sumit Pruthi, associate professor of radiology, medical resident Hansen Bow and medical design engineer Steven Lewis used a 360-degree surface scanner to capture highly detailed images of each object. “For some of the smaller objects it was more difficult to do because they were dark-colored, so the shadows couldn’t be picked up as well,” she said. “Dr. Pruthi volunteered to send those through a CT scanner instead.”

These design files were uploaded to 3D printers at Pruthi’s lab and the Wond’ry Makerspace, where the objects were replicated in lightweight plastic. Sutton then painted the objects to match the originals.

“What’s so cool about this project is that it takes the physical item into the digital realm and then back into the physical,” said Kevin Galloway, research assistant professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Wond’ry Makerspace.

Like the scanned records, the design files and documentation about the original objects are publicly available online to anyone who wants to reproduce them with their own 3D printer.

The SSDA exhibit is located in room 210 at the Wond’ry and will be open through the end of the spring semester.

*Article courtesy of MyVU/Vanderbilt News (March 23, 2018)

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on March 28, 2018 in Digital Humanities, Events, HART, News, Technology, VRC

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Rebecca VanDiver Attends Community Writing Session for Women Faculty

Rebecca VanDiver, assistant professor of African American art, was among 16 women faculty attending a writing session on March 2 offered by the Office of Inclusive Excellence. Designed to build community as well as offer dedicated time to work on writing projects, future sessions will be held from 8:30-11:00 a.m. on April 6, May 4 and June 8 in Kissam 210. The sessions include breakfast and a short presentation from a senior faculty member followed by dedicated writing time.

“We want to offer the faculty community a space where colleagues can enter into freely, dedicate personal time toward scholarship, and build a peer network across campus,” said Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence Melissa Thomas-Hunt. “Early in my career, I found that a supportive peer group made it easier to invest in my writing and advance my scholarship.”

VanDiver attended the first session that featured Peabody professor Anna Cristina da Silva, director of learning, diversity and urban studies, who shared how persistent pursuit of her writing goals combined with the ongoing support of mentors and colleagues helped her succeed in academia.

“It was exciting to be a part of this group of like-minded faculty, and I look forward to future events of this nature,” said VanDiver, adding that she gained invaluable insight from the session and encourages other women faculty to register for one of the three remaining sessions offered by the Office of Inclusive Excellence.

*Rebecca VanDiver (far left, front row) pictured with other women faculty at March 2 writing session sponsored by Office of Inclusive Excellence (photograph courtesy of myVU/Vanderbilt University)

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on March 26, 2018 in Events, HART, Lectures, News, VRC

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“Eikon: A Triple Encounter” Exhibition Opens at the Divinity School on March 23

Drawn from Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery’s collection of Zdenka Živković’s full-scale fresco copies created from the original paintings found in Macedonian and Serbian monasteries, the exhibition “Eikon: A Triple Encounter” opens Friday, March 23, at the Divinity School, room G-20, with a gallery reception from 4 to 6 pm. The exhibit will remain on view through April 20.

Curated by Julia Liden, MTS’18, the exhibit serves to illustrate the central role such frescoes played in communicating Christianity to the faithful. These large works were created in the medieval fresco technique by Zdenka Živković (1921-2011), the internationally recognized fresco copyist and restorer who sought to produce a large number of copies of frescoes, especially from endangered churches and monasteries in Serbia and Macedonia. Their presentation in the Divinity School exhibit will be augmented by icons and other devotional objects.

In 1986 the artist was present at the initial showing of her works in an exhibit in the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, which was then housed in the Old Gym. As part of the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Collection, they were later on display in an exhibit entitled “Byzantium: Art and Ritual” (February 11-March 21, 1999), which was curated by Joseph Mella, gallery director and curator.

Sponsored by Religion in the Arts and Contemporary Culture & Sacred Borders, the current Divinity School exhibit is in conjunction with the lecture, “The Canopy and the Byzantine Church,” presented by HART alumna Jelena Bogdanovic, MA’02, associate professor of architecture, Iowa State University, on Saturday, April 14, at 3 pm in the Divinity School, room G-23. Following her lecture, there will be a gallery tour of the “Eikon: A Triple Encounter” exhibit. Additional sponsors for Bogdanovic’s lecture are the Department of History of Art, the Program in Classical and Mediterranean Studies, the Department of History, and the Department of Religious Studies.

Liden, a candidate for the master of theological studies degree this year, has worked as a research assistant in the area of Syriac studies with David Michelson, assistant professor of the history of Christianity at the Divinity School. She and Michelson curated the exhibit “Syriac: Preserving an Endangered World Culture,” currently on view in Cohen Memorial Hall, which showcases the enduring presence of Syriac culture around the globe.

Gallery hours for “Eikon: A Triple Encounter” are Monday, Wednesday and Friday from noon to 2 pm in room G-20 (ground floor) of the Divinity School; and by appointment (religionandarts@vanderbilt.edu).

Photograph of Zdenka Živković courtesy of Jan a Goran Živković a Vuk Petrović. Beograd, April 2011.

 

 

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on March 22, 2018 in Divinity School, Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, News, VRC

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David Jianwei Zhang to Present Digital Humanities Lecture on March 27

In 2016 Peking University established its own Experimental Teaching Center for Virtual Reality and Simulation in Archaeology. Faculty and students in Peking University’s Department of Cultural Heritage Studies are now systematically investigating and documenting historical buildings in China using such technologies as panoramic photography, photogrammetry, and 3D scanning. They hope to incorporate these technologies in the research, teaching, and exhibition of cultural heritage sites.

David Jianwei Zhang, chair and assistant professor of the Department of Cultural Heritage Studies in the School of Archaeology & Museology, Peking University, will present a lecture on Tuesday, March 27, at 3 pm in Buttrick Hall 344. His lecture is entitled “Turning Historical Buildings into a Digital Research Database: Technology, Methodology and Challenges.”

Zhang will discuss the case of the Kaihua Monastery, an 11th-century Buddhist monastery in the Taihang Mountain range of north central China, to demonstrate the methods that scholars at Peking University are using to advance their research and teaching with digital technology.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on March 21, 2018 in Digital Humanities, Events, HART, Lectures, News, Technology, VRC

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Fine Arts Gallery Opening March 23 with “America Creative: Portraits by Everett Raymond Kinstler”

Portraits of leaders in the arts, painted by one of their own, are the focus of the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery whose latest exhibit, America Creative: Portraits by Everett Raymond Kinstler, showcases the storytelling skill of the country’s foremost living portraitist and celebrates a generation of creativity.The exhibit opens with a gallery reception from 5 to 7 pm on Friday, March 23, in Cohen Memorial Hall and remains on view through July 14.

It comes as no surprise that Kinstler is a master storyteller in words as well as images, and the gallery is delighted to host the artist for a lecture and demonstration on Saturday, March 24, from 3 to 4:30 pm in Sarratt Cinema. The sitter at this event will be Eddie George, former star running back for the Tennessee Titans who has become an actor since his retirement from professional football. Tickets to the March 24 event are free of charge but must be reserved in advance through the Sarratt Box Office..

Everett Raymond Kinstler, now 91 years old and often compared to John Singer Sargent, is America’s foremost portrait painter. In his career, he has rendered portraits of more than 2,000 individuals—leaders in almost every professional field, including eight United States presidents. America Creative explores how the eye of an artist sees kindred souls whose life’s work is also in the arts, whether visual, musical, performing, or literary. Kinstler’s vibrant, impressionist style imbues an otherwise static medium with the energy and vitality of his sitters, enlivening their personalities for us today and telling the stories of their lives.

Spanning the years from 1952 through 2015, these portraits cover the lengthy career of a successful artist who has truly honed his craft. They also capture a generation of creative leaders in this country. Thanks to loans from the artist and from several institutions, including the National Portrait Gallery and the National Academy Museum, the exhibition includes what Kinstler considers his own best work: “sculptor Alexander Calder in his studio; a beautifully rendered bust-length likeness of singer Marian Anderson that now resides at the Harvard Club; the social critic and author, Tom Wolfe, striking an elegant standing pose; plus a lively and energetic oil sketch of his close friend Tony Bennett,” wrote art historian and HART alumna Susan Knowles in the March 2018 issue of the Nashville Arts Magazine.

America Creative: Portraits by Everett Raymond Kinstler is the third in a three-part series on portraiture organized by the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery. The exhibition is curated by Joseph Mella, director, and Margaret Walker, assistant curator, with special thanks to the artist, Peggy Kinstler, and Michael Shane Neal. At the close of the exhibition, this special grouping of thirty-one portraits will leave Vanderbilt to travel to other venues, “carrying with it the joy and ebullience of a master portraitist and his muses,” wrote Knowles.

*Everett Raymond Kinstler (b. 1926). Christopher Plummer as Prospero, 2011, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 inches; Tom Wolfe, 1987, oil on canvas, 50 x 27 inches. Collection of the artist.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on March 20, 2018 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, Lectures, News

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