Zoe Copeman awarded two-year Kress Fellowship to research in London
Zoe to continue her ground-breaking research on the history of surgical imagery and texts related to the performance of mastectomies in Europe in the early modern period
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
In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorô and Japanese Modern Art
In Pursuit of Universalism is the first comprehensive, English-language study of early twentieth-century Japanese modern art.
Author/Lead: Alicia Volk
Dates:
Publisher: University of California Press
Publisher: University of California Press
In this groundbreaking work, which is also the inaugural recipient of the Phillips Book Prize (awarded by the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art), Alicia Volk constructs a critical theory of artistic modernism in Japan between 1900 and 1930 by analyzing the work of Yorozu Tetsugorô, whose paintings she casts as a polemic response to Japan's late-nineteenth-century encounter with European art. Volk places Yorozu at the forefront of a movement that sought to define Japanese art's role in the world by interrogating and ultimately refusing the opposition between East and West. Instead, she vividly demonstrates how Yorozu reframed modern art's dualistic underpinnings and transposed them into an inclusive and synthetic relation between the local and the universal. By looking closely at questions of cultural exchange within modern art, In Pursuit of Universalism offers a new and vital account of both Japanese and Euroamerican modernism. Volk's pioneering study builds bridges between the fields of modern and Asian art and takes its place at the forefront of the emerging global history of modern art.
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Chinese Ink Painting Now
The first book-length survey in English on recent trends in the discipline, this text reflects the recent dissemination of Chinese art and the explosion of interest in this work in the West.
Author/Lead: Jason Kuo
Dates:
Publisher: D.A.P. / Distributed Arts Publishers
Publisher: D.A.P. / Distributed Arts Publishers
China's brush-and-ink traditions remain vital in contemporary Chinese art; the genre is continually under renewal by successive generations of artists. The first book-length survey in English on recent trends in this discipline, Chinese Ink Painting Now reflects the recent dissemination of Chinese art and the explosion of interest in this work in the West. Nearly 60 artists are discussed here, including leading figures of postwar modernism such as Liu Kuo-sung; “New Literati” artists like Li Jin and other figurative painters; calligraphers such as Gu Gan; New Wave figures and conceptual artists including Xu Bing, Wenda Gu and Qiu Zhijie; and landscape artists whose work ranges from the traditional—Li Huayi, Fang Jun and Yuan Jai—to the abstract, such as Jia Youfu and Qiu Deshu. There are colorful women-warriors by New York feminist Fay Ku, monochromes by Nobel literature laureate Gao Xingjian and social commentary by the likes of Yang Jiechang, Li Jin and Wei Qingji. Chinese Ink Painting Now fills a significant gap in English-language books on contemporary Chinese art, and is an essential addition to the library of anyone following Asian art trends of the past 30 years. In addition to highly informative textual materials, the book features more than 170 images drawn from the world's leading institutional and private collections.
The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City
Uncovers the meanings of postwar art in New York as a revealing meditation on a rapidly changing society
Author/Lead: Joshua Shannon
Dates:
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publisher: Yale University Press
Professor Shannon's first book, The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City (Yale University Press, 2009) considers how art in New York understood the transformation of the economy and of everyday life around 1960. A finalist for the book prize of the Phillips Collection's Center for the Study of Modern Art, the book also won a Wyeth Foundation Publication Grant from the College Art Association.
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Rubens and the Archaeology of Myth (1610-1620): Visual and Poetic Memory
A book that explores the role of visual and poetic memory in Rubens’s interpretations of classical myths.
Author/Lead: Aneta Georgievska-Shine
Dates:
Publisher: Ashgate
Publisher: Ashgate
This book focuses on several mythological paintings created by Rubens between 1610 and 1620. Even by the standards of erudition commonly applied to his oeuvre, these works demonstrate a particularly intense engagement on his part with questions of artistic originality and ideal style. Furthermore, their learned themes point to a rarefied audience steeped in classical and renaissance theories. Through these close readings, the author illuminates the importance of the rhetorical conventions of the period for Rubens’s mode of composition, or the intersection of the poetic and the “archaeological” in his approach to themes drawn from classical mythology.
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Perspectives on Connoisseurship of Chinese Painting
A collection of essays presented at the Summer Institute of Connoisseurship of Chinese Calligraphy and Painting at the University of Maryland.
Author/Lead: Jason Kuo
Dates:
Publisher: New Academia Publishing
Publisher: New Academia Publishing
The book has grown out of material presented at the Summer Institute of Connoisseurship of Chinese Calligraphy and Painting at the University of Maryland, funded by a generous three-year grant ($150,000) from the Henry Luce Foundation. The Institute was held from 2001 to 2003. It was attended by scholars from Harvard University, Princeton University, The Ohio State University, the University of California at San Diego, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Maryland, as well as the Palace Museum in Beijing and the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The institute was established to provide intensive training in connoisseurship through firsthand experience with works of art in the Washington, DC area. The goal of the institute was to promote the study both of original works of art and of the fundamental problems in the connoisseurship of Chinese calligraphy and painting, and to enhance the quality of art-historical research and teaching. All essays in the book were either presented or discussed extensively at the institute.
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"The Myth of Neutrality"
This essay reconsiders the visual rhetoric of documentary strategies in conceptual art photgoraphy.
Author/Lead: Jordana Saggese
Dates:
Publisher: Society for Photographic Education
Publisher: Society for Photographic Education
In 1969, Joseph Kosuth proclaimed that “aesthetics…are conceptually irrelevant to art.” More than 35 years later, discussions of conceptual art still focus on the ideas rather than on the material documentation, placing these ideas within a particular social or political discourse. Artists and scholars have continued to argue that the photograph, one of the most common objects used by these artists, is almost arbitrary, with no artistic value. Nancy Foote summarizes this argument in her 1976 essay “The Anti-Photographers,” where she states that conceptual art “strips the photograph of its artistic pretensions, changing it from a mirror to a window. What it reveals becomes important, not what it is.” Due to the context of its production and exhibition, many continue to read the photography of the conceptual artists as neutral, ignoring any artistic possibilities...."
Visual Culture in Shanghai, 1850s–1930s
A study of formal and informal meanings of Haipai (“Shanghai School” or “Shanghai Style”), as seen through the paintings of the Shanghai school as well as other media of visual representation.
Author/Lead: Jason Kuo
Dates:
Publisher: New Academia Publishing
Publisher: New Academia Publishing
The book provides us a point of entry into the nexus of relationships that structured the encounter between China and the West as experienced by the treaty-port Chinese in their everyday life. Exploring such relationships gives us a better sense of the ultimate significance of Shanghai’s rise as China’s dominant metropolitan center. This book will appeal not only to art historians, but also to students of history, gender studies, women’s studies, and culture studies who are interested in modern China as well as questions of art patronage, nationalism, colonialism, visual culture, and representation of women. The book was based on material produced through a project supported by two generous grants ($125,000) from the Henry Luce Foundation.
Graphic Modernism from the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910-1930
A companion volume to a New York Public Library exhibition of eastern and southeastern European materials.
Author/Lead: Steven Mansbach
Dates:
Publisher: New York Public Library
Publisher: New York Public Library
In this visually stunning companion volume to a New York Public Library exhibition, art historian S. A. Mansbach offers an overview of the progressive eastern European graphic artists and writers who, in the first four decades of the 20th century, redefined and reshaped culture and its social meanings as they sought to comprehend and interpret the dynamics of a modern, postwar age. Illustrated in color with more than 50 examples of modernist publications, it includes works on paper by such artists as El Lissitzky, Laszla Moholy-Nagy, Karel Teige, Niklavs Strunke, Victor Brauner, and others, all drawn from the Library's extensive holdings of eastern and southeastern European materials. The volume also includes an essay on the growth and development of the Library's collections in this field, as well as a checklist of the exhibition.
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The Artist as Original Genius: Shakespeare's “Fine Frenzy” in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Art
This book examines the first generation of artists in Britain to define themselves as history painters, and their perception of the work and person of William Shakespeare
Author/Lead: William L. Pressly
Dates:
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
This book examines the first generation of artists in Britain to define themselves as history painters, attempting what then was considered to be art’s most exalted category. These ambitious artists, including John Hamilton Mortimer, Henry Fuseli, Alexander and John Runciman, James Barry, James Jefferys, George Romney, John Flaxman, and William Blake, most of whom were born in the 1740s and 60s, were presented with the challenge of how best to compete with the continental old masters when they had only an impoverished native tradition on which to build. They cultivated the concept of the artist as an original genius, a psychological strategy born out of deep-seated anxiety. At the core of this identity formation was the artists’ perception of William Shakespeare, whom they recast as the original genius incarnate. They strove to accomplish in art what they perceived he had accomplished in literature. Theseus’s lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy” (V.i.12) personified for them the Shakespeare of their imagining, and this conception of fine frenzy became the touchstone for their artistic identities, profoundly influencing both their lives and their art. This book pays special attention to their self-portraits in which they proclaim this new identity, one that emphasizes the impassioned and extravagant nature of their personal vision and their claims to original genius.
Standardization vs. Individualization in the Pylian Painted Argonaut
Examination of individualized elements in wall-painted argonauts from the Palace of Nestor at Pylos
Author/Lead: Emily Catherine Egan
Dates:
In 2015, Hariclia Brecoulaki and I published an article examining the emblematic use of the argonaut motif in wall paintings from the so-called Palace of Nestor at Pylos. This study serves as a brief follow-up to that investigation, and offers some preliminary thoughts on the opposing forces of standardization and individualization manifest in the motif's depictions. Through close investigation of the marine creature's anatomy as rendered across different band-friezes at the palace, it is demonstrated that while the design of certain body parts was "fixed," that of others was "flexible," resulting in repetitive compositions that were, in fact, subtly nuanced. Based on this evidence, some preliminary practical and intellectual explanations for this perceived "artistic freedom" enjoyed by the Pylian painters are presented, as are thoughts about composition in Mycenaean art at large.