Ward Bissell's manuscript Artemisia Gentileschi and the Authority of Art: Critical Reading and Catalogue Raisonné, finished with the support of a Michigan Humanities Award, has been accepted for publication by Pennsylvania State University Press. Additionally, he was the recipient of an Excellence in Research Award, given by the College of Literature, Science and the Arts to faculty who have made outstanding contributions in research and scholarship. This resulted in a study trip to Spain; he has now returned to work on his Catalogue of the Italian Baroque Paintings in the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Celeste Brusati spent a stimulating and productive year on leave in Berlin, with fellowship support from the American Council of Learned Societies and a Michigan Humanities Award to work on her current book project, a study of the imagery and ideologies of the pictorial arts which emerged in 17th-century Netherlandish texts and pictures about painting. She focused her research on still life and trompe l'oeil painting, which is abundantly represented in German collections. While living at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin, Professor Brusati participated, with historians of art and historians of science from several American and European universities, in a lively seminar which critically examined the concept of style and its deployment in both disciplines. She was invited to lecture on the value and uses of Netherlandish and German trompe l'oeil still life painting at the Art History Institute of the Freie Universitaet in Berlin, and, at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, she presented "Authorizing the Counterfeit: Questions of Trompe L'oeil in Dutch Still Life." She was a featured speaker at the symposium A Debate on the Interpretation of 16th- and 17th-Century Netherlandish Art: Some Developments From America, held in March 1997 at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Her article, "Natural Artifice and Material Values in Dutch Still Life," was just published in the new anthology Looking at Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered, (Wayne Franits, editor, Cambridge University Press, 1997). Earlier this year, her review of the exhibition held at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., "Vermeer and the Art of Optical Disillusion", appeared in The Low Countries: Art and Society in Flanders and the Netherlands, A Yearbook, 1996-97.
Stephen Campbell completed work on his book on Cosmè Tura and fifteenth-century Italian court culture, to be published next January. In addition work was concluded on another project concerning debates about the Italian epic in the sixteenth century and their influence on pictorial narrative. "Sic in amore furens: Painting as Poetic Theory in the Early Renaissance" appeared in I Tatti Studies VI, and "Pictura and Scriptura: Cosmè Tura and Style as Courtly Performance" appeared in Art History (June 1996). In May 1997, he taught, with Marvin Eisenberg, the department's May seminar in Florence in Renaissance Fresco Painting.
Elaine Gazda was curator of Images of Empire: Flavian Fragments in Rome and Ann Arbor Rejoined, and co-authored the accompanying catalogue. She organized an international conference, Representing the Roman Past: Archaeologists, Museums, Logistics, Legalities, to celebrate the opening of the exhibition. Having just completed an eleven-year term as Director of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, she returns to her joint faculty-curatorial post in September 1997.
Beth Genné's book The Making of a Choreographer: Ninette de Valois and Bar aux Folies-Bergère was published in October 1996. British critic Clement Crisp, reviewing the book in the London Dancing Times, wrote, "The result in a work of scholarship is rare: the ballet under discussion lives. There is no greater pleasure for the reader." This year Professor Genné interviewed Twyla Tharp for public radio and gave a paper on "Women and Dance History in the Academy" for U. of M.'s Institute for Research on Women and Gender.
Maria Gough joined the faculty in 1996. Professor Gough received her Ph.D. at Harvard, with a dissertation entitled "The Artist as Producer: Karl Loganson, Nicolai Tarabukin and Russian Constructivism, 1918 - 1926".
Diane Kirkpatrick spent a busy year divided between the tasks of teaching, being a member of the College Executive Committee, and serving as Interim Director of the Institute for the Humanities in its year themed "Images and the Imaginary." She helped to expand the Institute's exhibition program, continued work on software development and use in courses, and began a project in which undergraduate students are preparing a self-study of the values that make this university unique through research and interviews with alumni/ae, students, staff and selected others.
Sharon Patton was appointed Director of the Center for African and Afroamerican Studies for a three-year term. She is engaged in writing an art history text on African-American art of the 18th-20th centuries for Oxford University Press. In September 1996, Professor Patton gave "A Divine Presence in the Art of Romare Bearden" for the Symposium on the Life and Work of Romare Bearden at the University of Pennsylvania, and, in October, a three-part lecture on "African Hairstyles and Headdresses" for the Detroit Institute of Arts. In January 1997 she presented "20th-Century African-American Art" at the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities in Eatonville, Florida, and, in February, "Changing the Subject" for the Ideals of Appearance symposium at the U. of M. Institute for the Humanities.
Martin Powers published two studies: "Humanity and 'Universals' in Sung Dynasty Painting" in Arts of the Sung and Yuan (Maxwell K. Hearn and Judith G. Smith, editors, New York, 1996) and "Reexamining the 'West': Shifting Perspectives in the Narrative of Modern Art" in Ershi shiji zhongguo hua: chuangtong de yanxu yu yanbian (Cao Yiqiang and Fan Jingzhong, editors, Zhejiang, 1997). The Chinese version of this essay is slated for publication in Xin meishu (The New Art History). Professor Powers was invited to deliver four lectures this year. In March he delivered "Chongxin kaolü 'xifang' yu geren zhuyi" [Reexamining the "West"], for the symposium Chinese Painting and the Twentieth Century. Held in Beijing, this was an international symposium devoted to discussion of the future of Chinese painting in the coming century. It was sponsored by the National Academy of Art and the Pan Tianshou Foundation. A longer version of that lecture was offered in Taipei under the auspices of the National Palace Museum in April. Both lectures were in Mandarin. Later in April he delivered "Picturing Family and Childhood in Song Dynasty Painting" at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City. In May he spoke on "Fractal Structure and the Rhetoric of Rocks in China" for the symposium and exhibition Worlds Within Worlds: The Richard Rosenblum Collection of Chinese Scholars' Rocks, the Fogg Museum, Harvard. Professor Powers is director of the CRSTAL Project (Concept Research System for Theory in Art and Literature), an interactive database for early texts in Chinese art and literary theory. This spring the project completed the first stage of its work. The CRSTAL database now allows users to peruse the earliest formal writings on Chinese art and literary theory. In addition to enabling searches and concordances, the CRSTAL system provides a variety of useful tools to help historians compile clusters of Chinese terms even if one begins with English-language categories like "original" and "freedom." For this reason the database should be a valuable aid to those interested in cross-cultural research. Professor Powers' book Ornament and Identity: a Case Study of Classical China is nearing completion.
Nii Quarcoopome was curator of African Form and Imagery at the Detroit Institute of Arts. He also gave lectures at the D.I.A. and at two of the Detroit area's most important galleries specializing in non-Western art. In November, he chaired a panel on "Ethics in Field Research" organized by the Arts Council of the African Studies Association at the annual ASA conference held in San Francisco. He was also a panelist at the symposium celebrating the tenth anniversary of the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution. Meanwhile, he completed an article-length essay for the Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies program. Professor Quarcoopome has submitted his book manuscript Speaking Art, Viewing Power: The Prosaic and Sublime in Ewe Visual Culture for press review.
Jonathan Reynolds has been on leave this year with a postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Foundation. During his year away, he has completed his book manuscript on the Japanese modernist architecture of Maekawa Kunio, written an article on the Tokyo Imperial Household Museum Competition of 1931, and begun work on his new book project "Constructing 'Tradition': Modern Japanese Architecture and the Formation of a Viable Past." He spent April and May in Japan, researching this project.
Margaret Root gave the J. Walter Graham lecture at the University of Toronto, on "Persia and the Parthenon New Agendas." She also presented a paper to the Classical Archaeology seminar of the University of Toronto on the Persepolis Fortification tablet seal impressions as an interdisciplinary resource. She presented an invited paper at a symposium on Recent Research on the Persian Empire in Lyon, France: "Sealing as Intercultural Discourse on the Persepolis Fortification Tablets." Additional engagements included an address to the national convention of the Iranian-American Medical Association. The first fascicule of The Persepolis Fortification Tablet Seal Impressions: A Catalogue (co-authored with 1988 U. of M. archaeology Ph.D. Mark Garrison) was accepted for publication by the University of Chicago Press and is waiting its turn in the production line. Work proceeds unabated on the remaining two fascicules.
Elizabeth Sears served on the search committee for the dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and continued as a member of the board of directors of I.C.M.A. She was a consultant for the Detroit Institute of Arts' exhibition "Images in Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age," and contributed an essay, "Ivory and Ivory Workers in Medieval Paris," to the catalogue of the exhibition. She also co-chaired a session, with the D.I.A.'s Peter Barnet, on "Gothic Ivories: Art in the Private Sphere" at the Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo. Professor Sears was the recipient of a Julia Lockwood Award, given to tenured faculty in recognition of recent scholarship and of outstanding contributions to the college as educators. As has been her pattern in recent years, she spent much of her summer in Oxford, England, where she brought her edition of Edgar Wind's writings on the Sistine Ceiling to its penultimate stage. Professor Sears will spend the coming academic year as a fellow of the U. of M. Institute for the Humanities.
Elizabeth Sharf developed a first-year seminar, "Zen Icons? Zen Art?," which was taught in the Winter 1997 term. The course was designed to introduce students to recent scholarship on Zen Buddhism and its impact on our study of East Asian Buddhist art. She is currently working on a conference volume (co-edited with Robert Sharf) entitled Living Images: The Japanese Buddhist Icon in its Monastic Context.
Pat Simons spoke on "Revealing and Veiling: Acts of (Un)dress in Italian Renaissance Visual Culture" at the conference Dress and Visual Culture in Italy 1300-1600, which was held in London in June 1996, and convened jointly by the Courtauld Institute of Art, the University of London, and the Medieval Dress and Textile Society. Following this, she delivered "Two Rucellai Altarpieces With St. Jerome in the National Gallery: Patterns of Patronage in Quattrocento Florence," for the conference Art, Memory and Family in Early Renaissance Florence, held at both the National Gallery of Art, London, and at the Courtauld Institute.
Thelma Thomas contrived to enjoy a busy but altogether refreshing sabbatical year, completing work on her book on Late Egyptian funerary sculpture, among other projects. The most notable of these were two exhibitions in which she was involved: one on forgeries of ancient art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, the other on Middle Byzantine art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She was a contributing author of the catalogue for the latter exhibition, and delivered a paper at C.A.A. at the session entitled: "Exposing Byzantium on the Occasion of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Exhibition."
Rebecca Zurier's exhibition Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York moved, in Summer 1996, from its sponsor institution, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art, to the New York Historical Society. Although the show has now concluded, a sample of it may be seen at: http://www.nmaa.si.edu/metlives/ashcan.html. Professor Zurier presented a paper on some of the controversies that arose in preparing the show at a panel on "Museums and Multiculturalism" at the American Studies Association conference in Kansas City last fall. In February 1997, the book Metropolitan Lives, co-written with Robert Snyder and Virginia Mecklenburg, was given the College Art Association's Alfred Barr Award for a "distinguished publication from a North American museum"probably the highest honor accorded to an exhibition catalogue. Professor Zurier found it especially appropriate and exciting to receive the award, with her collaborators, in New York, the subject of their show.