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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

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The Petra Great Temple’s Water Strategy

This article discusses the water systems of the Great Temple in Petra, Jordan.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Christian Cloke
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Martha Sharp Joukowsky
Dates: -
This article discusses the water systems of the Great Temple in Petra, Jordan.

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Keith Morrison

This volume surveys the distinctive style and painting of Jamaican-born artist Keith Morrison (b. 1942).

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Renée Ater
Dates:
Publisher: Pomegranate Press
The fifth volume in “The David C. Driskell Series of African American Art,” Keith Morrison showcases and explores the painting of the Jamaican-born artist from the early 1960s through 2004. Tracing the development of Morrison’s multifaceted career, Ater outlines the styles and complexity of his work. She considers the ways in which Morrison exploits color, humor, ethnicity, and the sacred and profane to render work ranging from abstract compositions to figurative narratives centered on the African diasporic experience.

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Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo

This book traces the availability and reception of Augustine (354-430 CE), arguably the most influential Latin author of the Early Christian era, from the fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Meredith J. Gill
Dates:
Publisher: Cambridge
Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo
In this book, I discuss Augustine’s influence on thinkers and humanists, such as Petrarch (1304-1374), as well as his representation in works of art. Augustine fascinated writers and artists in the period; they perceived him to be a conduit of classical and Christian truths and an example of the life of the intellect reconciled to a life of faith. The religious order who claims him as their founder sponsored several major fresco cycles portraying the saint’s life while, in single portraits, artists alluded to Augustine’s aesthetic theory as it was manifest in his concept of divine illumination. The Sistine Chapel represents the fulfillment of his theological and philosophical legacy, one that extended through the completion of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.

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Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement, 1945-1970

Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement examines the artistic dialogue between Japan and America that blossomed in the wake of World War II.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Alicia Volk
Dates:
Publisher: University of Washington Press and Milwaukee Art Museum
The Japanese Creative Print (sôsaku hanga) movement, which had originated in the early twentieth century in opposition to traditional ukiyo-e prints, came to worldwide prominence between 1945 and 1970. Forging ties with artists, scholars, museums, and collectors overseas, Japanese printmakers brought their artistic innovations into fruitful interaction with a global art scene. Americans had long considered imported objects labeled “Made in Japan” as shoddy and inferior in quality, but they warmly welcomed Creative Print artists and prized their work for its consummate craftsmanship, inclination toward abstraction, and sometimes exotic subject matter. Benefiting from government-sponsored exchange programs, Japanese printmakers performed an important role as cultural ambassadors and helped smooth tensions between the peoples of two nations that had recently been enemies at war but that were now allies in peace. The prints documented in Made in Japan range widely in treatment and medium, embracing woodcut, stencil, lithography, etching, mezzotint, aquatint, and screenprint. Essays outline the history of the Creative Print movement and its American patronage from the Occupation through the 1960s, and consider its relationship to the earlier tradition of ukiyo-e prints. With nearly one hundred color illustrations, the book is the first to narrate the Creative Print movement in all its diversity and constitutes a major reappraisal of one of the twentieth century’s most important moments of cultural and artistic exchange.

Japan and Paris: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and the Modern Era

Japan and Paris demonstrates the deep cross-cultural nature of art in Japan from about 1880 to 1930.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Alicia Volk
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Christine Guth, Emiko Yamanashi
Dates:
Publisher: University of Washington Press and Honolulu Academy of Arts
Illustrated with masterpieces from Japanese collections by Matisse, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Corot, Cézanne, and Monet, Japan and Paris explores the history of collecting Western art in Japan and its influence on Japanese modern art. In particular, it addresses the development of Western-style modernist impulses as Japan's early interest in the Barbizon School extended to include modes of expression such as Impressionism, Postimpressionism, Symbolism, Cubism, and Fauvism. In addition to showcasing works by some of the best-known French and European painters, works by Japanese artists who were instrumental in the introduction of Western modes of expression to Japan are included, such as Kojima Zenzaburo, Kume Keiichiro, Maeta Kanji, Mitsutani Kunishiro, and Fujita Tsuguharu.

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“Yorozu Tetsugorô and Taishô-period Creative Prints: When the Japanese Print Became Avant-garde"

In this study I examine the emergence of printmaking as a field of modernist practice in early twentieth century Japan.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Alicia Volk
Dates:
Publisher: Japanese Art Society of America
An analysis of early twentieth-century Japanese “creative prints” (sôsaku hanga) as a new vehicle for modernist expression by the hands of oil painters.

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“Introduction,” to From the Flowers – Endless Trial: Young Na Ahn

This introduction to an exhibition for modern Korean artist Young Na Ahn places the work in the context of traditional and modernist movements.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Greg Metcalf
Dates:
Publisher: INSA Art Center, Seoul
This introduction to an exhibition for modern Korean artist Young Na Ahn places the work in the context of traditional and modernist movements.

“Katsura Yuki and the Japanese Avant-garde"

This essay addresses increased opportunities for, and persistent resistance to, female artists in mid-20th-century Japan.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Alicia Volk
Dates:
Publisher: Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
In a close analysis of Katsura Yuki's transwar work and practice, I argue that her representational strategies allowed her to engage with gender difference while liberating her from its traps.

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Konok

Catalogue accompanying the retrospective exhibition by Tamás Konok.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Steven Mansbach
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Peter Baum, László Beke, Tamás Konok
Dates:
Publisher: Balassi (Budapest)
Catalogue accompanying the retrospective exhibition by Tamás Konok. Ludwig Múzeum - Kortárs Művészeti Múzeum, Budapest.

The French Revolution as Blasphemy: Johan Zoffany's Paintings of the Massacre at Paris, August 10, 1792

Art historians will find Pressly's on two paintingsby Johann Zoffany to be of immense value, as will cultural historians interested in religion, gender, and race.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: William L. Pressly
Dates:
Publisher: University of California Press
The French Revolution as Blasphemy: Johan Zoffany's Paintings of the Massacre at Paris, August 10, 1792
William Pressly presents for the first time a close analysis of two important, neglected paintings, arguing that they are among the most extraordinary works of art devoted to the French Revolution. Johan Zoffany's Plundering the King's Cellar at Paris, August 10, 1792, and Celebrating over the Bodies of the Swiss Soldiers, both painted in about 1794, represent events that helped turn the English against the Revolution. Pressly places both paintings in their historical context—a time of heightened anti-French hysteria—and relates them to pictorial conventions: contemporary history painting, the depiction of urban mobs in satiric and festival imagery, and Hogarth's humorous presentation of modern moral subjects, all of which Zoffany adopted and reinvented for his own purposes. Pressly relates the paintings to Zoffany's status as a German-born Catholic living in Protestant England and to Zoffany's vision of revolutionary justice and the role played by the sansculottes, women, and blacks. He also examines the religious dimension in Zoffany's paintings, showing how they broke new ground by conveying Christian themes in a radically new format. Art historians will find Pressly's book of immense value, as will cultural historians interested in religion, gender, and race.

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