Prof. Abby McEwen awarded Inaugural Do Good Campus Fund Grant
The $25,000 grant will focus on providing students opportunities to "understand the process of commissioning and installing public art."
Research and Innovation
Research in art history and archaeology is an interdisciplinary enterprise.
Engaging diverse theoretical frameworks and research methods, our faculty produce innovative scholarship in the form of books and articles, digital projects, museum exhibitions, public lectures and more. Our faculty lead national networks and conferences (including the Archaeological Institute of America and the College Art Association), providing innovative research frameworks and making significant contributions to UMD's research enterprise.
Consolidated ARTH Statement of Commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
(Prepared by the DEI Task Force and Approved by GAHA May 2022)
We, the members of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, affirm that Black lives matter and condemn the ongoing violence of systemic racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and other acts of injustice and harm impacting BIPOC and other marginalized people. We recognize and are willing to confront the roles of Art History and Archaeology in elevating and perpetuating Eurocentrism and its attendant systems of oppression including colonization, exploitation of labor, exploitation of the nonhuman world, sexism, classism, and white supremacy inside and outside academia. We recognize that this list is not all-inclusive and is ever evolving, and to it more will be added. Continuing the work begun by graduate students, faculty, and staff in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by police, we commit to building and maintaining a more inclusive, equitable, anti-racist and pluralistic department. As part of this commitment, we recognize the need to confront and redress bias and harm and to challenge monocultural norms and expectations.
In this process, we are inspired by and join the campus-wide efforts to reckon with the University of Maryland’s long record of discrimination, racial injustice, and actions that undermine the very principles of intellectual and moral integrity for which we stand.
We are committed to lifting up and expanding the diversity of our department community and to improving inclusivity and equity in our departmental practices, policies, and culture. In the study and practice of art history and archaeology, diversity and differences are assets. Our department affirms that diversity is expressed in myriad forms, including race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, class, immigration status, body type, language, culture, national origin, religion, age, ability, and political perspective. We are made stronger by inviting in and providing for the diverse voices, approaches and contributions that form the foundation of our twinned disciplines, and which enable our community, as a whole, to thrive. While our disciplines have collaborated in structures of oppression, we wish to affirm the role that we in the humanities and in art history and archaeology can play in helping to envision and make possible a world that is both sustainable and just.
We envision our department as a space of care, safety, and respect for all of our members. All of our voices are valuable and our actions matter. We commit to upholding this vision in our work together.
Research and Service
The Achilles and Penthesilea Group from the Tetrastyle Court of the Hadrianic Baths at Aphrodisias
This article analyzes statue fragments found at Aphrodisias to reconstruct one of the most important Greco-Roman statue types.
Author/Lead: Maryl B. GensheimerNon-ARHU Contributor(s):
Katherine Welch
Dates:
Publisher: Istanbuler Mitteilungen
Publisher: Istanbuler Mitteilungen
One of the highest-quality replicas of the Achilles and Penthesilea group was excavated at Aphrodisias in 1966-67. Recent research has identified additional fragments belonging to the group. Study of these fragments clarifies our knowledge of this important Roman replica and its Hellenistic original. The Aphrodisias replica was discovered in its late antique context, in the Tetrastyle Court of the Hadrianic Baths. The Achilles and Penthesilea was juxtaposed with a replica of the so-called Pasquino Group and a nude male torso wearing a chlamys. All three statues faced east, toward the main square of the city, the North Agora. Our study elucidates the thematic intent behind this sculptural ensemble and the poignancy of the contrast between Penthesilea and her pendant, the young warrior in the Pasquino group. The material from Aphrodisias, together with its known find context, allows for new reconstructions of a major Greco-Roman statue group and elucidates this statue's repair and display throughout the fifth century C.E.
"Between Washington and Ancient Rome: The Pellegri Program on Roman Antiquity and its Legacy in America." National Italian American Foundation Pellegri Grant
The Pelligri Program supports teaching and research focused on Rome and its legacy.
Author/Lead: Maryl B. Gensheimer
Dates:
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Focusing on the relationship between ancient Rome and modern America, the Pellegri Grant supports innovative teaching and research on the part of its grant winners. I have used part of this grant to support graduate instruction on archaeological excavation on the Bay of Naples and to facilitate my own research and publication.
Greek and Roman Images of Art and Architecture
This chapter addresses Greek and Roman representations of art and architecture that appear as metapictures within larger images.
Author/Lead: Maryl B. Gensheimer
Dates:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Ancient Greek and Roman art provides a window through which one can gain an appreciation for ancient self-consciousness of, and engagement with, images. In particular, this chapter addresses Greek and Roman representations of art and architecture that appear as metapictures within larger images. I refer not only to images of the same kind as their support (vases on vases, for instance) but also to metapictures more generally - that is to say, images of vases, sculpture, or architecture represented in other media. This chapter demonstrates that metapictures can be understood as significant documents for our understanding of the underlying intentions of their artists and even the contemporary reception of images and practices of image making in antiquity.
Albert Carrier-Belleuse: the Master of Rodin
The catalog documents the marriage of art and industry created by this versatile sculptor whose art became synonymous with the Second Empire in France and defined the decorative arts of the Third Republic
Author/Lead: June Hargrove
Dates:
The work of this prolific master ranged from sensuous Salon marbles to luxury objects in gold and modest utensils in zinc. He played a major role in integrating the decorative arts with fine art. The young Rodin collaborated with him intermittently over two decades.
Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art
The first monographic study of one of the post popular artists of the late twentieth century.
Author/Lead: Jordana Saggese
Dates:
Publisher: University of California Press
Publisher: University of California Press
Before his death at the age of twenty-seven, Jean-Michel Basquiat completed nearly 2,000 works. These unique compositions—collages of text and gestural painting across a variety of media—quickly made Basquiat one of the most important and widely known artists of the 1980s. Reading Basquiat provides a new approach to understanding the range and impact of this artist’s practice, as well as its complex relationship to several key artistic and ideological debates of the late twentieth century, including the instability of identity, the role of appropriation, and the boundaries of expressionism. Jordana Moore Saggese argues that Basquiat, once known as “the black Picasso,” probes not only the boundaries of blackness but also the boundaries of American art. Weaving together the artist’s interests in painting, writing, and music, this groundbreaking book expands the parameters of aesthetic discourse to consider the parallels Basquiat found among these disciplines in his exploration of the production of meaning. Most important, Reading Basquiat traces the ways in which Basquiat constructed large parts of his identity—as a black man, as a musician, as a painter, and as a writer—via the manipulation of texts in his own library.
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Rubens, Velázquez, and the King of Spain
A study of the painted decorations for the hunting lodge of King Philip IV of Spain by two of the greatest old masters – Rubens and Velazquez
Author/Lead: Aneta Georgievska-Shine
Dates:
Publisher: Ashgate
Publisher: Ashgate
This study provides a new analysis of the pictorial ensemble of the Torre de la Parada, the hunting lodge of King Philip IV of Spain. Created in the late 1630s by a group of artists led by Peter Paul Rubens, this cycle was completed by Diego Velázquez. Despite the lack of a written program, surviving works provide eloquent testimony of several themes revolving around Neostoic ideals of self-restraint and prudent governance. Rubens set the moral tone through his serio-comic Ovidian narratives, complemented by Velázquez’s portraits of ancient philosophers, and royals and fools of the court. This study is the first to consider in depth their joint artistic contributions and shared ambition.
Angels and the Order of Heaven in Medieval and Renaissance Italy
This book examines the theological, philosophical, and artistic identity of angels in medieval and Renaissance times, addressing such themes as the Nine Orders, music-making angels, and conceptions of the afterlife.
Author/Lead: Meredith J. Gill
Dates:
Publisher: Cambridge
Publisher: Cambridge
From earliest times, angels have been instruments of salvation and retribution, agents of revelation, and harbingers of hope. In effect, they are situated at the intersections of diverse belief structures and philosophical systems. In this book, I focus mainly on medieval and Renaissance Italy, and I consider the Christian and Jewish traditions from which Early Modern conceptions and representations derived. I trace the iconography of angels in text and visual form, beginning with Dante and his precursors through such lights as Pico della Mirandola; and from Fra Angelico to Raphael and beyond. I argue that angels are touchstones and markers of each era’s intellectual self-understanding, theological doctrines, and artistic imagination.
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Riga's Capital Modernism
This book demonstrates that from the Fin-de-siècle to the beginning of World War I the region From the Baltic to Balkans constituted a coherent and interactive art-historical meso-region characterized by specific national art traditions and innovations.
Author/Lead: Steven Mansbach
Dates:
Publisher: Leipziger Universitaetsverlag
Publisher: Leipziger Universitaetsverlag
Steven Mansbach stresses in the tradition of his own discipline the overwhelming importance of urban centers in his predominantly rural "Eastern Europe". It is cities which shape artistic regions, and this the more so in a part of Europe where there are fewer cities than in other parts. This is one of the reasons why Mansbach in his 2013 Oskar Halecki Lecture analyzes (and visualizes) the "capital modernism" of the only "Baltic metropolis" - Latvia's capital Riga.In looking at Riga's central role not only for Latvia but for all three Baltic countries and the wider Baltic Sea Region, Mansbach aptly applies Klaus Zernack's post-Haleckian meso-regional concept of "Nordosteuropa" which constructs a 'Mediterranean of the North' reaching from the Neva to the Kattegat - a region of enhanced economic, military, cultural, political, and ethnic cooperation and conflict from the Nordic Wars of the early modern period to the interwar years of the 20th century. As Mansbach demonstrates with the example of the city on the Daugava's modernism, after Hanseatic commercialism, Russian imperialism and Latvian nationalism also Soviet communism left its visible impact resulting in "a novel eclecticism" by "a quixotic intermingling of Riga's inventive modernism and constraining Soviet politics." Northeastern Europe lives on, and the Soviet legacy, unwelcome as it may be today, is a constituent part of it - as can be seen in Riga.
The Inner Landscape: The Paintings of Gao Xingjian
An exhibition of works by Nobel Prize in Literature winner Gao Xingjian Art Gallery at the University of Maryland.
Author/Lead: Jason Kuo
Dates:
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Born in 1940, in Jiangxi province in eastern China, Gao Xingjian is the first Chinese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Gao's interest in theater, writing, and all-things-creative was instilled at an early age by his mother, an amateur actress. He began painting at age ten after his uncle gave him a notebook for his birthday. Mr. Gao describes it as: “just white pages, no grid and no lines,” and that it was in this book where he first began writing and drawing simultaneously. Throughout the course of Gao Xingjian's prolific career, he has had nearly thirty international exhibitions of his ink paintings and, also, illustrates all of the covers of his books.
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The Inner Landscape: The Paintings of Gao Xingjian
A study of the paintings by Gao Xingjian who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000 and was the first Chinese writer to receive the prize
Author/Lead: Jason Kuo
Dates:
Publisher: New Academia Publishing
Publisher: New Academia Publishing
The monograph is a study of the paintings by Gao Xingjian who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000 and was the first Chinese writer to receive the prize. He is a naturalized French citizen and lives in Paris. His style of ink painting belongs to the great Chinese literati tradition of xieyi (literally “writing the idea”); this style allows him to create subtle, intuitive settings and characters that move in the limits between figurative and abstract art, in a way that has been done by many of the great masters in Chinese art history. His paintings explore the expressive possibilities of ink and washes; the nuanced light and dark shadings, subtle washes, textures, and volumes in his paintings are both dramatic and refreshing.
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