Student News
The Author with remains of the Byzantine chapel of St. Hilarion's castle behind him, overlooking the harbor of Kyrenia.
Charles A. Stewart
Indiana University
Department of Art History
Medieval Art & Archaeology
PhD Candidate
A ragtag group of famished yet zealous Crusaders successfully stormed the gates of Jerusalem on July 15th 1099, at once overthrowing Fatimid control over the Holy Land and ushering in an era of cultural exchange. Such interaction between the Latin West and Byzantine and Islamic East is manifested in 12th century architectural design, particularly that of castles and churches. No longer the squat and heavy structures of the preceding century, churches would be built with a graceful and elongated superstructure. Light floods these sacred spaces due to innovations in domed-vaulting techniques and larger windows. Since basilicas with a series of domes were erected in Cyprus before they were erected in France decades later, their design indicates a significant change in medieval self-consciousness and architectural theory. Thanks to the Friends of Art Organization and the Indiana University Department of Art History, I have been able to study the 8th to 10th century domed-churches of Cyprus. My findings from this fieldwork will be incorporated in my doctoral research, in an effort to further expand our knowledge of the architectural designs predating the Crusades.
Thanks to the Friends of Art Organization and the Indiana University Department of Art History, I have been able to study the 12th century domed-churches of Cyprus. My findings from this fieldwork will be incorporated in my doctoral research, in an effort to further expand our knowledge of the architectural designs resulting from the Crusades.
Elizabeth Perrill with three officiates of the Nomkubelwane Cultural Festival, South Africa.
Elizabeth Perrill
Indiana University
Department of Art History
African Art
PhD candidate
Potters in the Marketplace: South African Ceramics, 1910s to the Present.
As you read, I may be standing next to a home-built kiln in an urban township, interviewing a rural ceramic artist, or elbow-deep in archival documents from 1916. I am doing what I love with the help of past and present support. The Friends of Art, The Indiana University Department of Art History, The Roy Sieber Memorial Fund, The Indiana University International Enhancement Grant, and presently, the 2005-2006 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Grant are all key contributors to my continuing research in South Africa.
During the 2005-2006 year, I will be examining how South African ceramic artists promote their work in the global art market and the expansion of this ceramic art market since the early-twentieth century. My work will focus on three artists’ groups and highlight the heterogeneous nature of the Zulu-speaking ceramic community. I will work with a commercially successful urban workshop, two rural potting families, and members of the younger, college-bound, urban generation of ceramic artists.
As artists and art historians realize, change and perceptual shifts are the result of long hours of work. Through archival research, aesthetic analysis, and the collection of life-histories I know that my own perceptions of ceramic arts in South Africa will expand and transform many times during the year ahead.
Mrs. Koyei and Kitty Johnson
Kitty Johnson
Indiana University
Department of Art History
Africanist
PhD candidate
Street Talk: Kenyan Matatu Art
A Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship for summer and for the academic year funded study of the Maa language and history courses in Kenya. An Indiana University Office of International Programs (OIP) Pre-Dissertation Travel Grant helped me lay groundwork for dissertation research on Maasai beadwork.
In addition to Maasai beadwork, I studied matatu art for my MA thesis. Matatus are 14-seater Nissan vans and 25-seater mini-buses, or manyangas, used for public transport. Hassan Rasta created a “revolution” in the early 1990s with hit matatus named “The Horse” and “Total Madness” (pc Rasta 8.2004). Artists still design stunning vehicles and Rasta influences both up-coming and established artists. This photograph shows Kitty Johnson and Juju, the matatu’s driver, posing with Rasta’s current hit, “Revz.” Matatus and their art form an important part of Nairobi’s matatu sub-culture. Artists, local musicians and matatu crew members, such as Juju, gain renown with fans that ride only the “deadly” vehicles. These must have the most masterful designs, the best and loudest music and the most daring drivers.
Malick’s studio in Bamako
Candace M. Keller
J. Stewart and Dagmar K. Riley Graduate Fellowship Award
Indiana University
Department of Art History
African
PhD candidate
My dissertation examines the history and character of photography in Bamako, Mali from the 1940s to the 1980s, a dynamic period of heightened social, political and cultural change, spanning eras of colonialism, national independence, socialism and democracy. From both historical and contemporary vantage points, I consider Malian photographers working in studio portraiture, reportage photography, entertainment photography, and film, whose creative and revolutionary ideas, style and work continues to hold relevance and influence for photographers and consumers in Mali, Africa and the world today. My research examines how and why individuals create and commission photographs, negotiate meaning and invest significance in these artworks, and considers the roles particular photographers and their traditions of photography have played in the lives of individual patrons and in the flow of Bamako’s dynamic social history.
During the 2003-2004 academic year, I conducted my dissertation research in Mali and in France with the support of a Fulbright-Hays fellowship. While in Mali, I was able to work closely with some fifty photographers, both young and old, including Mr. Malick Sidibe, arguably the most highly acclaimed and influential Malian photographer to date. In fact, he was awarded the prestigious Hasselblad in 2003, the first African photographer to receive the honor.
Since my return to the States, I have been working on post-research projects related to my dissertation such as taped interview transcriptions, translations, writing, and printing photographs in the darkroom from negatives that I collected during my stay in Mali. Fortunately, many of the photographers with whom I worked graciously printed images to be included in my dissertation. However, for those who are no longer with us, and whose family members lack the means to print photographs, I have had the great fortune of their trust and support in loaning me certain negatives from their collections to be printed by me and included in my dissertation. These negatives will be returned to them this November when I will visit Mali once again to attend the sixth biennial photography festival in Bamako entitled Rencontres.
With the support of the J. Stewart and Dagmar K. Riley fellowship that was recently awarded to me by the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University, I will be able to continue to work diligently on my dissertation during the 2005-2006 academic year. In addition to focusing my efforts on writing and completing my dissertation, during this period I will be afforded the opportunity to travel to New York City to work with the Gagosian and Sean Davis galleries—the only institutions in the nation who own the rights to print and distribute the works of Malian photographers Malick Sidibe and Seydou Keita.
Laura E. Smith
Indiana University
Department of Art History
American Art
PhD candidate
Laura E. Smith is a doctoral student in American art history with special interests in Native American art, art of the American West and photography. Her dissertation will be on the photographs of Horace Poolaw, A Kiowa artist from Oklahoma who took images of individuals in his community in the 1920s and 1930s.
She has published two articles in the year 2005. One in the spring 2005 issue of American Indian Art Magazine entitled “Picturing Zuni in the New Deal Era: the Clara Brignac Gonzales Collection of Zuni Day School Drawings and Paintings, 1925-1945.” This article focuses on a previously unexamined collection of artwork created by Zuni students during a period that combined Indian education with political reform. These drawings reflect the rapidly fluctuating conceptions of a Zuni reality and the role of art in Indiana schools around the New Deal era. She argues that the significance of these works is found in their ability to engage multiple contexts for interpretation and to challenge notions that the relationship between knowledge, identity, and imagery is fixed.
Her second, Photography, Criticism, and Native American Women’s Identity in three Works by Jolene Rickard, has been published in Third Text 18(1), January 2005. It focuses on three photographic works by Native American artist and scholar Jolene Rickard. These works, created between 1988 and 1998, have been published and read by both Native and non-Native critics, most of whom have considered her photography as an affirmation of Native women’s identity without responding to theories that have deconstructed the truthfulness of photography and the mutability of the self. Therefore, she argues that these well-meaning writers have perpetuated essentialist and static notions of Native American women. Her paper constructs a new reading of Rickard’s work that finds political and self-liberation for Native women in her pictures through their refusal to locate a whole sense of self or a completely apparent presence.
Jennifer Heusel and Matt Backer
In the spring of 2004, Jennifer Heusel and Matt Backer both presented papers on the painter Eldzier Cortor at the Herman C. Hudson Symposium on African American and African Diaspora Culture. Over the course of the following two years, with the help and inspiration of Assistant Professor John Bowles and Curator of Works on Paper Nanette Brewer, Heusel and Backer collaborated to curate "Black Spirit": Works on Paper by Eldzier Cortor. The show included representative work from the broad spectrum of Cortor's career, including heroic portraits of WPA-era Chicagoans and recent prints of the African American female figure. Cortor has always been best known for his work with the black female nude; the show historicized the artist's symbol of African American experience (the "Black Spirit") by demonstrating the Gullah and Caribbean sources that inspired his artistic treatment. On view in the Indiana University Art Museum's Special Exhibitions Gallery from March 7 until May 7, 2006, "Black Spirit" would not have been possible without the support of the Friends of Art and the Department of Art History. Heusel traveled to Chicago to research the neighborhood of Cortor's youth and early career, and Backer visited Kenkeleba Gallery in New York, the artist's primary representative, and Howard University in Washington, D.C., in order to select prints and drawings for the show. To accompany the show, the co-curators produced a scholarly brochure, a landmark in the scant scholarship devoted to this important African American artist. Heusel has been able to draw on her research as she completes her Masters Essay, also on the subject of Eldzier Cortor.
Thor Mednick
Thor Mednick
Indiana University
Department of Art History
PhD candidate
Pre-dissertation grants from the Russell A. Havens Endowment support graduate students in the department who are conducting research preparatory to their submission of dissertation proposals. In the summer of 2004, this grant was awarded to Thor J. Mednick, who traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark to research museum collections and gather sources. His dissertation will investigate the relationship between nationalism and artistic production in late nineteenth-century Denmark. Focusing especially on the Symbolists (a group that emerged in the early 1890s), Mednick will demonstrate that the growing interest in finding a uniquely Danish language of representation (in the visual and literary arts) had a profound impact on the artworks produced around the turn of the century.
