Art History

Mya Bailey '22

Mya, who graduated SUNY New Paltz with a degree in Art History and a minor in History, writes, "I am now in the last semester of my Masters program in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture at the Bard Graduate Center (BGC). I presented my thesis research, titled "A Sense of Enslavement: Multisensory Experiences in Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and Poplar Forest," at Johns Hopkins' 2024 Graduate Conference for Anthropology as well as The Jenrette Foundation's 2025 Convening, "The State of American Decorative Arts,” as their keynote.

"During my time at BGC, I have had the opportunity to work as a Higher Education Tour Guide for the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) for the 2024 retrospective "Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other." Following my graduation in May 2025, I will continue to engage in the study of American decorative arts and Black material and visual culture."

Steve Baltsas '23

Two years after earning his BA in Art History and English, Steven is to complete his MA in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture this May. In summer 2024, he was awarded research funding for his master’s thesis, which traces the diffusion of Romantic nationalism via exchanges of Renaissance Revival furniture between Paris, New York, and New Orleans between 1845–1861. Steven traveled to Mississippi, Louisiana, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maine, and the Hudson Valley examining Renaissance style furnishings and interiors. He will give a paper on German upholsterer-decorator Henry N. Siebrecht’s 1850s furnishing plans for plantation houses at the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association 2025 Conference in New Orleans.

Duncan Beebe '06

Duncan Beebe, who graduated with a BA in Art History, successfully transitioned from managing art galleries to writing software. He works for Google now to protect people from scams and abuse.

Ellen Brief '74

Ellen Brief, who graduated with a BA in Art History, showed 21 of her recent collages in the Katonah Village Library in NY in the month of September. She incorporates her mono-prints, handmade paper and watercolors to create unique artwork. Ellen states, “I marvel at the multitude of choices offered by simply changing the placement of a piece of paper or an object before glueing it into place. It is satisfying to recycle my discarded original prints, watercolor paintings and my handmade paper to create something new.”

Ciera Browne '24

Ciera graduated in May with a double major in Art History and Adolescent Education with a Concentration in Social Studies. She has been quite busy since then. Currently she is participating in a fellowship with the Dia Art Foundation. The Pedagogies of Site Fellowship is geared towards cultural producers between the ages of 18-25, and concentrates on providing fellows the opportunity to explore the concept of 'site' and its relationship to each participant's individual practice. Through the fellowship Ciera has had the opportunity to engage in meaningful discussion alongside other fellows, explore the various departments within the organization, and engage directly with the diverse collection of Dia. Currently, with the fellowship, Ciera is beginning to plan an educational program alongside Dia's Learning & Engagement staff and her Artist Mentor.

In addition to her work with Dia Art Foundation Ciera finds herself working within the Beacon City School District as a Teaching Assistant. One of her proudest accomplishments in this position is the recent completion of a community mural with students in a Grades 3-5 Art Club she leads.

Charlotte Calmer '22

Charlotte, who graduated from New Paltz with a BA in Art History and a double minor in History and International Relations, recently earned her Master’s in Library Science from Queens College. During her time in graduate school, Charlotte was the Archives Intern for the Brooklyn Museum and hired full-time as the Libraries & Archives assistant shortly thereafter. After a year and a half at BkM, Charlotte started a new position as the Reading Room Assistant for the Sherman Fairchild Reading Room at the Morgan Library & Museum. In this role, Charlotte focuses on the handling, preservation, and access of rare manuscripts, printed books, and archives. Charlotte is very excited to grow professionally at the Morgan and continue to promote information access within cultural repositories.

Brooke Cammann '23

Brooke graduated with a BA in Art History and a BS in Chemistry in 2023. This past summer, she received The Etruscan Foundation Conservation Fellowship and continued her work in the Poggio Civitate Archaeological Project conservation lab in Murlo, Italy. Research that Brooke completed during her first year as a student excavator in Murlo was also published this past year in Etruscan and Italic Studies. Currently, she is pursuing a Masters degree in Archaeological Materials Science through an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master program, and is completing her first semester in Évora, Portugal, before moving to Thessaloniki, Greece in the spring, and Rome, Italy next fall.

Robert Randolf Coleman ‘70

Dr. Robert Randolf Coleman, who earned his BA in Art History at New Paltz, retired as Professor Emeritus from The University of Notre Dame in 2016, and has not actively engaged in scholarly publications, although he still maintains his online catalog of drawings in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan https://ambrosiana.it/en/.

Since 2019, he has been active in curatorial collection research of Italian ptgs dating from the fifteenth- to eighteenth-centuries for Notre Dame's newly opened Rachlin Murphy Museum of Art. The works range from the Bolognese Francesco Francia, the Lombard/Milanese Bernardino Luini, the Roman Carlo Maratti, to the Venetian G. B. Piazzetta.  He writes that the work has been very rewarding with some terrific discoveries, plus he does not have to deal with foot/end notes (since parenthetical notes work just fine), and pesky editors and publishers! Dr. Coleman remembers New Paltz Art History faculty, Dr. Peter Bohan, and department founder, Hugo Munsterberg. He also fondly remembers his mentor, longtime Professor of Art History, Dr. Helen Harkonen, who taught Renaissance and Baroque art.

Christopher Daly '12

In 2024 Chris (Art History with a minor in Italian Studies) completed his fellowship at the Center of Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington, D.C., and joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the 2024-26 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the Robert Lehman Collection, where he is primarily focused on cataloguing the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian paintings. In addition, he published an article, "Thinking Through a Tondo by the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany" in volume 77 of The Journal of the Walters Art Museum (accessible online), and co-authored an article with Rafał Quirini-Popławski, "The Adoration of the Child by the Ghirlandaio workshop rediscovered in Zhytomyr," which appeared in volume 14 (March 2024) of the Colnaghi Studies Journal. He also contributed five entries to the catalogue of the exhibition, Bellissimo! Italienische Malerei von der Gotik bis zur Renaissance held at the Augustinermuseum in Freiburg, Germany.

Mary Catherine Dugan '19

Mary Catherine, who graduated with a BA in Art History, is excited to report that she has started her Masters in Occupational Therapy at Columbia University in fall 2024! She is on a two-year track to receive her national license, and then she plans to complete her clinical Doctorate in Occupational Therapy. Her interests are pediatrics, neuro, and maternal health on fetal development. Recently she shadowed a lymphedema specialist and learned a great deal about Occupational Therapists in the hospital setting. She has recently taken on a new role in the mentorship program at Columbia, as well as holding the Social Activities role in her cohort.

Mary Catherine shares that she has used her Art History degree to help children therapeutically through crafting, art, and sharing fun facts about what she learned in her time at New Paltz. She invites anyone who has any questions about Occupational Therapy or just wants to reach out and learn more about what she does, to email her at marycatherinedugan@gmail.com.

Jennifer Frémont '97

Jennifer earned her BA in Art History from SUNY New Paltz under the academic guidance of Dr. Jamie Uhlenbrock, completing her studies in December 1996. During her time at New Paltz, she completed an internship at the FDR Home and Presidential Library in Hyde Park. There, she confirmed her interest in Archives and using digital tools, cataloging archival materials, including sheet music, photographs, personal papers, and wartime issues of Life magazine as part of our Federal cultural agencies early migration efforts towards digital preservation.

In Springtime 1997 in San Francisco, Jennifer joined the newsroom of the nascent C|Net News.com under Jai Singh, where she gained first-hand, front row experience in the emerging digital media and technology landscape. Her work in the early commercial World Wide Web was foundational to embarking on her career as an Archives Technologist, and helped shape her ability to integrate traditional archival practices with evolving technologies.

Jennifer enjoys working with artworks on paper as archival artifacts in many of the collections she stewards; they are a favorite media type that informs and guides her archival practice. She focused on creative and practical archiving solutions for private clients with My Personal Archives, which led to the development of Tiny Archives—her Archives Tech Startup that she bootstraps with able, talented teams of computer science engineer Interns. Tiny Archives is building FACTool, a software platform designed to more accessibly process archival collections, including each of our own personal archives, namely to create and edit finding aids, as part of Jennifer’s mission to create a global, inclusive archival repository for everyday people of the documented historical record of humanity.

Jennifer currently serves as Archivist and Administrative Director of OPUS Archives at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California.

Jennifer treasures and credits the academic and professional foundation she gained at SUNY New Paltz and looks forward to engaging with its alumni and academic community in the years to come.

Jorell Herrera '23

Jorell, who graduated with a BA in History, and a minor in Art History, completed the program as a Lifchez/Stronach Nine-Month Curatorial Intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Egyptian Department. In October he started a new position as an Ambassador for the Visitor Experience Department at The Met. His role consists of selling tickets, issuing memberships, and assisting with wayfinding throughout the museum.

León Azahar Jagels Fernández '20

León Azahar Jagels Fernández, who graduated with a BA in Art History, entered a Master's program in the Department of Classics at SUNY at Buffalo in fall 2021. His studies were mainly focused around Bronze Age Greek archaeology, with a special interest in textile production and other adjacent household economies. León is very happy to report that he graduated with his Master's degree in spring 2024!

León then packed his bags and moved to Spain, something he had intended to do for quite a long time. He is now situated in the city of Granada. León's plan here is to start out in a PhD program in archaeology. Lately León's research has been focused on local history in Spain; he is particularly interested in the medieval history of his country, as well as the Civil War and subsequent dictatorship period in Spain.

For the past couple of years, León has been working on an archaeological investigation in Aragon, in a ruined town called Belchite. Beginning as a volunteer on the project, he quickly became the second in command at the dig as the site's technician. In 2024, León and his team published their site report in a journal. He and his team have found remains from nearly all known periods of inhabitation in this region of Spain in just one town. This coming summer season, they will be working to clearly identify and expose the structure of what is very likely a medieval synagogue. Currently, in Spain there are only five identified and visible medieval synagogues, so the structure that they are investigating in Belchite may very well become the sixth in the entire country.

If you have any interest or questions about Belchite, León urges you to send him an email, as he is very happy to discuss his work. His project is also currently looking for more volunteers, so if this sounds like a project you would like to be a part of, let him know—León would be very happy to have some New Paltz students working by his side!

Hannah Karkari '19

In spring of 2023 Hannah graduated from American Univeristy with a Master's Degree in Art Hisotry, speciallizing in issues of gender and sexuality in the art of 19th and early 20th century Japan. Her master's capstone is titled, "Boundaries of Feminity: Crossdressed Women in Modern Japanese Visual Culture," and explores the way images of crossed-dressed women moved in and out of the cultural mainstream of Japan at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Following completion of her degree she has been working as a museum teacher in Washington D.C. and recently started a position as an adjunct professor at American Univeristy teaching the Buddhist Arts of Asia. She is currently preparing to apply to PhD programs.

Ben Kuhn '24

Before Ben graduated in May '24 with a BA in Creative Writing and minors in Art History and Philosophy, they were the student curator for the "Art X Books" exhibit for the 2024-2025 academic year. The exhibit, a collaboration between the Sojourner Truth Library and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, is currently on display on the library's first floor. Ben writes: "I had the chance to learn how to access the Dorsky Museum's extensive catalogue of art covering a variety of regions and gain valuable experience in how to create a meaningful, yet clearly defined exhibit that challenges the viewer. Even if it's not a postgraduate experience, it was one of the most exciting and meaningful moments I had as an undergraduate! I hope to share more undetakings in the art world as my postgraduate career begins and develops!

Ian Mankes '18

Having recently graduated from CUNY School of Professional Studies with a Master's degree in Museum Studies, Ian Mankes, BA Art History, is eager to embark on a career in the museum world. The program, uniquely led by professionals from the New York Historical Society, including Dr. Valerie Paley, provided invaluable real-world experience. A highlight was the culminating group project, where students created a fictional museum. Ian spearheaded the Public Programs department for the fictional Museum of Television Shows in Atlanta, gaining valuable insights into the planning and execution of engaging museum experiences. Ian's passion for museums is evident, as showcased by the attached photo of him enjoying a moment of reflection by the Seine after visiting the Louvre.

Julie Maresco '12

Julie Maresco, BA in Art History, on November 24, 2024 accepted a promotional position as a Historic Preservation Program Analyst in the Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation. Her new position is in the National Register and Survey Unit of the State Historic Preservation Office. In her role she directs and monitors historic resource surveys; prepares evaluations of eligibility for individual historic properties and historic districts; reviews and comments on state and federal undertakings through compliance reviews; reviews Part 1 applications for the State Historic Homeownership tax credit program; and edits and reviews individual historic properties and historic districts for nomination to the State and National Registers of Historic Places.

Julie writes that she draws on much of her SUNY New Paltz Art History background when identifying artistic and architectural styles in the buildings that she evaluates. This includes researching and writing about significant visual components of built historic resources, addressing their artistic elements, and providing detailed descriptions of them in written and oral form. She presents the nominations that she reviews to the State Review Board four times a year and some of the public speaking practice she received at SUNY New Paltz helps with that too.

After New Paltz, in 2017, Julie earned an MA in Public History. Both of Julie's degrees have given her a wonderful background to be succesful in her new role. She found, though, that there were many similarities between art history and the field of public history, with its focus on material culture and historic preservation. 

Julie also continues to serve as a Correspondent Docent for the DAR Museum in Washington D.C. She presents PowerPoint programs based on the museum's collection, past exhibitions, and period rooms. Last year, she presented ten programs to library groups, historical societies (including New Paltz's), DAR Chapter meetings, and at events. These programs' focus on art and history really marry the two subjects well—complementing both of her degrees. Julie writes, "I truly enjoy sharing these presentations with the community and getting them to think about women's history, Colonial history, fine and folk art, and the decorative arts as more serious subjects that connect to broader social themes and issues."

Dawn Ruhren '23

Dawn, BA Early Childhood Education, with an Art History Concentration, and a minor in Studio Art, is an experienced educator and museum professional who has made significant contributions to the field of museum education. Over the past year, she spoke at the New York City Museum Education Roundtable Conference at Columbia University and released her first publication, Kids and Families’ Guide to the Brooklyn Museum: Ages 7–11.

In December, Dawn transitioned from her role in family programs at the Brooklyn Museum to become a Learning Specialist at The Museum of Modern Art, where she is part of the Learning and Engagement team. In this role, she writes curricula for K-12 school audiences, conducts school tours, collects feedback, and leads professional development for teachers. Dawn is also currently expanding her expertise by learning how to conduct touch tours for low-vision students.

Daniela Stigh '94

Daniela Stigh, who graduated with a BA in Art History, was recently appointed the Director of Communications and Marketing at the Morgan Library and Museum. She began her career at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and then spent 12 years at The Museum of Modern Art. She also held roles at Rubenstein, World Monuments Fund, and the Jewish Museum. Daniela is thrilled to be at the Morgan, fulfilling a life-long dream of working at such an iconic museum with an amazing collection of medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts!

India Thomas '24

India Thomas (BA Art History) writes, "I am very excited to share that I am now a Library Assistant for Columbia University's Fine Arts and Architecture Library! I am also one-quarter of the way through a Master's in Library Science at SUNY Albany. I've been using my position to help navigate the ins and outs of academic librarianship. This includes taking on special projects like finding online versions of physical resources, learning about cataloging, and other little tasks here and there. Working with students studying similar topics as I was during my time in New Paltz has been incredibly fulfilling."

Amy Avolio

Amy graduated summa cum laude in December with a BA in Art History and a minor in Anthropology. During her final semester at SUNY New Paltz, she became the Curatorial & Collections Intern at Historic Huguenot Street. There, Amy worked on a textile rehousing project that involved the documentation, handling, photography, research, and collections care of 18th-20th century American textiles. Currently, Amy is preparing to attend an archaeological field school in Greece this summer while also researching graduate programs in the archaeological field.

Jazmyne Daily-Simpson

Jazmyne is a senior in the Graphic Design BFA program with a minor in art history. This past summer, she spent a week at UCLA for the Andrew W. Mellon Opportunity for Diversity in Conservation summer workshop. During the week, she spent time in the UCLA/Getty graduate conservation labs where she learned about basic conservation techniques and met multiple conservators working in the field. Jazmyne writes:

“Being a part of the 2024 summer workshop at UCLA was an amazing experience and I am grateful that I was able to be a part of it. The workshop shifted my ideas of what I thought conservation was and showed me that there is lots of important work that conservators are involved in outside the lab. The week in UCLA gave me clearer idea of the things I want to pursue post-graduation and knowing that the Mellon program will help me feel supported at every step is a big reason that I feel more capable of reaching my goals to become a conservator.”

This upcoming summer following graduation, Jazmyne will be a Mellon Intern at the Smithsonian African American Museum of History and Culture in Washington D.C. as part of the paper conservation department. She would like to thank everyone at the Mellon Program for this wonderful opportunity.

Anna DiPiazza

Anna DiPiazza, a senior majoring in Art History with a minor in History, began volunteering at the Samuel Dorsky Museum in Summer 2024 with Collections Manager, Wayne Lempka, and fellow volunteer, Susan Shaw. As part of this team, Anna helped to catalog gifts to the Museum, and enter the information into the museum's database. She also helped Director Anna Conlan with administrative tasks. Volunteering at the Dorsky, Anna met a collector who afforded her "the chance to work off-campus in a private collection where I learned how to properly physically catalog art, and handle delicate artifacts." This fall, Anna continued at the Dorsky, this time as a paid intern, where she has had further hands-on experience with the collection and is gaining valuable insight about the administration of the museum.

Anna is looking forward to Spring 2025 when she will continue at the Dorsky as an Administration and Collections Intern while simultaneously serving as Archives Intern at Historic Huguenot Street in New Paltz. Professor Kerry Carso will be her advisor. She will also continue her work-study job with Susan DeMaio Smutny in the Visual Resources Library of the Department of Art History.

Aditri Khadilkar

Aditri Khadilkar majors in Theatre Arts with a minor in Art History and expects to graduate in 2026. In the Fall 2024 semester, Aditri participated in the SUNY Global Engagement Program that gives students the opportunity to intern in the field of their choice and engage in international affairs through weekly seminars and research, all while in New York City.

Aditri writes of her internship at the arts organization, New Dramatists, "New Dramatists is a non-profit that has been in existence for 75 years. It supports playwrights through a seven-year residency, free of charge, to make lasting contributions to the theatre. I worked alongside the New Dramatists team and provided support to the programs offered for their resident playwrights. Sitting in different workrooms gave me insight into the world of new work development and how each writer’s process varies. Each company discussed not just important themes from the text, but what excited us as an audience member and what we wanted to learn more about. This would help the writer further develop the world they’re creating.

This internship was a great introduction to the industry as I was able to meet so many talented artists and collaborate with them which was truly a gift. The GEP seminars allowed me to learn about a field that was entirely new to me and explore the connection between international affairs and creating art. This intersection allowed me to explore new avenues creatively as I began developing my first play based on the Greek tragedy, Medea, and topics from our seminar. It further emphasized my intentions as an artist to champion causes important to me through theatre-making and advocacy. I hope more students take the opportunity to participate in the GEP program and engage in their interests!"

Gillian Miller

Gillian is a Biology Major with a minor in Art History, but she has really become involved with all things Art History during her first year and as a rising sophomore in Fall 2024. We'll let Gillian tell you all about it!

"Over the summer I had the opportunity to go on Professor Heuer's incredible Italy Before Rome Tour. I got to meet some amazing people and learn so much about Italy’s extensive history. Our travels took us around Sicily and to Naples, Florence, Orvieto, and Rome where we got to visit museums and famous sites. Some of my favorite sites were the temples and getting to see all of them in different states of ruin, and the ruins of ancient settlements. While we mostly focused on ancient history, we got to learn about Renaissance art. I was excited that I was able to use some of what I learned about Renaissance art in Art of the Western World II when I took it last semester. Of course, the food was a highlight. Between the gelato and baked goods, and the pasta and traditional Italian dishes, I had a lot of good meals. The trip was such an incredible experience, and I'm so grateful I was able to go.

"Last semester I started my position as an E-board member of the Art History Association. I first joined AHA last spring when it consisted of mostly E-board members. It has been amazing to see the club grow as more people consistently joined last semester. For our meetings we try to combine education with fun. For example, last semester we did meetings about art crime, funerary arts, and even art history themed Jeopardy. We got a lot of new members and even got to use some of the budget to go on a field trip to Storm King. It was a lot of fun being able to go see works of art instead of just talking about it through presentations. We hope to be able to do more field trips in the future. Along with our usual club meetings, this semester we are preparing for the Art History Symposium in April. People from all over the world have submitted abstracts and we are excited to see the hard work and topics they did for this event."

Alessandra Papaleo

In her final semesters as an Art History major, with a minor in Communications, Alessandra's ambition was to build on her work with mentor Professor Beth E. Wilson from her SURE project on Dadaists Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann. Alessandra registered for an independent study with Prof. Wilson and diligently pursued new research avenues that included a return visit to the archives at The Museum of Modern Art. Alessandra hopes to develop her project into a paper for publication that examines how the Berlin Dada group reflected on the imperialistic and colonialistic intentions of European nations and the destructive nature of technology during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

For fun, this summer Alessandra traveled abroad for the first time with Professor Heuer's group tour, "Italy Before Rome: Archaeology, Visual Culture, and Political Power." As scribe for the Newsletter and a fellow participant on this tour, I can vouch that Alessandra had a fantastic time experiencing art on site, fearlessly trying many new foods, and making new friends!

Jocelyn Thornton

Jocelyn, an Art History major and Visual Arts minor is about to graduate in December. She writes, "During my time at New Paltz I was very involved within many different aspects of art history. Through the department I worked in the Visual Resources Library with the VR Librarian, Susan DeMaio Smutny, learning how to organize and store legacy 35mm slides, cleaning and scanning images from the slides, and processing the scans in Photoshop, so they can be accessed through an online database. I also assisted with departmental social media projects in the VRL. I was also very involved in the Art History Association for the entire duration of my time at New Paltz. In AHA I held many E-Board positions gaining experience with a variety of organization functions. Finally, I was employed at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art from 2022-2024, which was an amazing experience that helped me develop many skills that I will continue to use in my future endeavors.

Kerry Dean Carso

Professor Kerry Dean Carso’s review of Mary Kuhn’s book, The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America, was published in the Journal of the Early Republic in Spring 2024 (volume 44, no. 1).

At the Studios of Key West in Key West, Florida, Carso spoke at a symposium, “‘All of Us Are Full of Stories’: Crafting Identity Across the Arts,” on March 29, 2024. Her paper was entitled “Narrative Gardens: Storytelling Through Architecture.”

Professor Carso gave four lectures on the Hudson River School at Mohonk Mountain House, as part of the Mohonk Lecture Series.  In summer 2024, she visited the Winterthur Library in Delaware to continue her research on the nineteenth-century American artist Washington Allston; she is editing Allston’s novel Monaldi: A Tale, forthcoming from the University of Wales Press in 2026.

Keely Heuer

Professor Keely Heuer began the year with a new role as the co-chair of the Archaeological Institute of America’s Etruscan Interest Group and with sore fingers after installing the “Rome Beyond Rome Exhibition” in the Sojourner Truth Library lobby cases, which was curated and designed by the students in her Fall 2023 Art of Ancient Rome course. During the spring, she kept busy with preparations for the Department of Art History’s national reaccreditation, and she was thrilled to hear the site team’s rave reviews after their time on campus in March. She was equally pleased by the continued success of the SUNY New Paltz Undergraduate Art History Symposium in April, which this year featured talks by 155 student-scholars from around the world and a keynote address by Corine Wegener, director of the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative. She enjoyed being involved in a variety of campus-wide programming, including giving a talk at the Honors Program’s 25th Anniversary Celebration, organizing the annual Traverso Lecture given by NYU’s Dr. Clemente Marconi, and hosting the activity, “Dressing Like a God(dess)” for Alumni Reunion Weekend, which included a presentation on ancient Greek and Roman clothing and a fashion show of replica garments modeled by current Department of Art History students.

Much to her delight, Professor Heuer got to spend plenty of time overseas, including taking seventeen SUNY New Paltz students and alumni on a tour of ancient Italy in June and making two trips to Greece, including spending a month learning traditional Greek weaving techniques to prepare for teaching a new Honors seminar on textiles and identity in the ancient Mediterranean world. While in sitting in front of the Parthenon in January, she began writing her first historical novel, set in Athens during the Persian Wars of the 5th century BCE. This past summer, Professor Heuer mentored History major and Ancient Studies minor Zachary Greenwood in his Summer Undergraduate Research Experience project, “Forgotten Feuds: Visually Documenting Greek-Italic Conflicts in Pre-Roman Italy.” In August, she participated in the American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ Department Chairs Institute in Washington, D.C. In the fall, she was selected to be a member of the President’s Listening Learning Community for the 2024-2025 academic year and received a grant from the Creating a Stronger New Paltz Together Fund to host a Roman banquet in May 2025 for 200 participants.

Throughout the year, she was invited to give guest lectures for students at Vassar College, Emory University, and the University of Georgia. She was also chosen to be the North Carolina Museum of Art’s Friends of Greek Art annual lecturer. Continuing as faculty liaison for the Art History Association, Professor Heuer enjoyed collaborating with our talented student leaders to coordinate a speaker series this past spring focused on Native American visual culture and their lectures for the current academic year on the intersection between Art History and Disability Studies. This fall, she worked with our Visual Resources Librarian, Susan Smutny, and a Graphic Design major, Elizabeth Blasco, to create a recruitment postcard advertising the Department of Art History, which was sent to over 600 high schools across New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts that offer AP Art History.

For 2025, she looks forward to seeing several long-term scholarly projects in print as well as further adventures in Greece, Türkiye, and Egypt!

Jaclynne Kerner

Dr. Jaclynne Kerner taught Early Medieval Art and Sacred Spaces, Divine Images in the Fall and is currently teaching Later Medieval Art: Gothic and her recently developed “non-Western” survey, Images and Ideas in World Art. Dr. Kerner’s classes cover multiple global traditions, and she is pleased that the department is taking steps to decenter, broaden, and strengthen the New Paltz art history curriculum in the future. As the chair of last year’s search for a specialist in Asian art, she is delighted to have Dr. Elizabeth Lee as a new colleague.

Dr. Kerner continues to work on a two-volume study of the material culture of the Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, the appendant body to Freemasonry whose fez-wearing members are commonly known as Shriners. Her research sheds light on the fraternity’s extensive but understudied material legacy, which is rife with appropriations from Islamic and ancient Egyptian history. In 2024, she expanded a 2023 conference paper, “Alterity and Antiquarianism in the Illustrated Sheet Music of the Shriners,” into a book chapter to be published in February 2025 in Illustrated Sheet Music in the U.S., 1830–1930 (part of Bloomsbury’s Research in Illustration series), edited by Theresa Leininger-Miller and Kenneth Hartvigsen. Dr. Kerner’s contribution to the pioneering anthology considers illustrated Shriner sheet music as exponents of the fraternity’s pervasively Orientalized worldview during American fraternalism’s “Golden Age” (c. 1870–1930).

In March, Dr. Kerner will travel to Los Angeles to present a paper at The 13th International Conference on Freemasonry. The theme of the conference, which is sponsored by the Grand Lodge of California, is Freemasonry in Popular Culture: 1700 to Yesterday. Dr. Kerner’s paper will explore the sensory and material dimensions of the Shriners’ 50th Imperial Council Session (convention). San Francisco’s Islam Temple (presently, Asiya Shriners), the host body of the multi-day festivities of June 1922, spared no expense in planning the fraternity’s “Golden Jubilee” convention. The event followed in the wake of an inflection point in Shriner history. Over the preceding five decades, the Shrine had earned a seemingly unshakable reputation as a boozy, Middle Eastern-themed social and travel club for fun-loving men—Freemasonry’s freewheeling “playground.” With Prohibition’s enactment in 1920, the Shrine’s focus shifted, at least publicly, from the purely (and often intoxicatingly) recreational to the philanthropic. The first in the eventual network of Shriners’ charitable children’s hospitals—the brainchildren of the 1920 and 1921 conventions—opened in September 1922. The fifth such institution’s cornerstone was laid in San Francisco during the “Golden Jubilee” convention. Bringing together a corpus of archival photographs, souvenirs, and ephemera from the 1922 convention and subsequent “pilgrimages” to Hawai’i and Alaska, Dr. Kerner’s paper will consider the complex relationships between images, artifacts, fraternal identity, and the Shrine’s role in the Orientalization of American popular culture. Such images and objects—badges, ribbons, paperweights, flashlights, programs, postcards, sheet music, menu cards, etc.—evince the inherent materiality of Shrinedom, the consumerism of the “Roaring Twenties,” the impact or negligence of Prohibition, souvenir-collecting fads, advancements in travel technologies, and the election of a Shriner (Warren G. Harding) to the United States’ highest political office. They also concretize the fezzed fraternalists’ countless appropriations from Arab-Islamic culture. Press photos and newspaper coverage will help contextualize the Shrine’s engenderment of a highly commodified fraternal atmosphere and its increasingly altruistic turn in the 20th century’s third decade.

Dr. Kerner encourages current Art History students to explore scholarship opportunities by visiting Scholarships | SUNY New Paltz and invites alumni to consider contributing to the Alison Wilhelmy '09 Memorial Art History Scholarship. Established by Professor Ed Lundergan and Carol Lundergan in 2020 in memory of Alison Wilhelmy ’09, this annual scholarship supports non-tuition expenses related to traveling overseas for academic purposes for SUNY New Paltz Art History students studying abroad. To contribute to the fund, visit www.newpaltz.edu/give/ways.html.

Elizabeth Lee

Dr. Elizabeth Lee joined the Department of Art History in Fall 2024 as assistant professor of Asian Art. She is a specialist of the Buddhist Arts of East Asia, with a regional and temporal interest in the visual and material culture of the Korean Koryŏ (918–1392 CE) and Chinese Tang (618-907 CE) and Song (960-1279 CE) dynasties. Her research methodologies include Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis which supports her art historical interpretations of the environment’s agency in the creation and placement of Buddhist artwork and architecture within mountainous landscapes. She will teach classes on topics related to East Asia and Asian traditions more broadly.

During the fall semester Professor Lee taught two classes, Images and Ideas in Asian Art and The Arts of Early China. Her Images and Ideas in Asian Art course is thematically structured to highlight the many cross-cultural connections that religions, technologies, and trade made possible during the pre-modern and early-modern periods. The Arts of Early China course focused on the ritual and religious contexts of Chinese funerary objects and goods traded and produced for the Silk Road and Indian Ocean trade routes. In October, Professor Lee led multiple tours through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Chinese Art galleries, bridging the gap between the material as studied in the classroom and the phenomenological experience of seeing these objects up close. In both courses, Professor Lee incorporated translated contemporaneous primary source materials as well as modern interpretations and recreations to offer students models of the various ways in which art historians and artists have engaged with ancient materials from Asia.

As a member of the Asian Studies program faculty at SUNY New Paltz, Professor Lee’s classes are cross-listed with that program and fulfill requirements for the Asian Studies major and minor. In Spring 2025, Professor Lee will teach a brand-new course, Arts of Korea, which explores the visual and material culture of Korea. Beginning with prehistoric rock art and ending with the modernisms of both the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea), the class will focus on important ideas, trends, and visual expressions that have shaped each period of the peninsula's history.

Beyond teaching, Professor Lee’s article “Environment as Palimpsest: Layers of Buddhist Imagery on Kyŏngju Namsan during the Unified Silla (668–935 CE) Period” was published in the peer-reviewed journal Religions in September 2024. The article examines the Buddhist transformation of Namsan (South Mountain) in Kyŏngju between the seventh and tenth centuries through the creation of stone sculptures and architectural structures. Originally tied to indigenous nature deities, Namsan was re-envisioned as a Buddhist landscape, integrating Buddhist imagery within existing indigenous sacred sites. Drawing on David Harvey’s concept of urban palimpsests, this paper presents Namsan as a layered site, replete with military, religious, and political functions. Professor Lee’s research reveals how the strategic installation of Buddhist symbols helped assert both spiritual authority and political control over the mountain, intertwining Buddhism with the power of the Silla elite.

Beth E. Wilson

Beth E. Wilson (Lecturer) presented her paper, "Solarization: The Primacy of Photography over Thought" at the Surrealisms 2024 conference of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS) in Paris, France, on October 30, 2024. The paper focused on Man Ray's The Primacy of Matter over Thought, in particular a print of the image in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Reva Wolf

Publications

Translating Warhol, published by Bloomsbury Academic, which Professor Wolf conceived and edited, is the first study of the translation of Andy Warhol's writing and ideas, and reveals how translation has censored, exposed, or otherwise affected the presentation of Warhol’s political and social attitudes and, in turn, the value we place on his art and person. Historical and theoretical aspects of translation are taken up, and individual chapters discuss French, German, Italian, and Swedish translations, as well as Warhol's views of his mother's native Rusyn language, the Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar's performative translations of Warhol, and Warhol as translated for documentary television. Wolf’s essay in the book, “Being, Nothingness, and the Quest to Understand: An Introduction to Warhol in Translation,“ provides an overview of the history of translations of Warhol’s writings and discusses some key challenges and theories of translation. Translating Warhol has been described as “a pioneering book: fascinating and far-reaching.”

Professor Wolf's essay, "The Victim as Martyr: The Black Legend and Eighteenth-Century Representations of Inquisition Punishments, from Picart to Coustos to Goya," appeared in The Black Legend of Spain and its Atlantic Empire in the Eighteenth Century: Constructing National Identities, edited by Catherine Jaffe and Karen Stolley (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2024). This transnational and transdisciplinary volume examines how and why the idea that Spain was more intolerant than other European countries was manifested and debated in the eighteenth century.

Another essay by Professor Wolf, “The History of the Artist Interview: Conventions, Conditions, Contexts, Collaboration,” came out in the book Theorising the Artist Interview, edited by Lucia Farinati and Jennifer Thatcher (Routledge, released in 2024 with a 2025 copyright date). Wolf’s essay, a reflection on the complex historiography of the artist interview, opens this anthology, which has been described as “vital reading for anyone who conducts or uses quotes from interviews with artists.”

Presentations

On the occasion of the publication of Translating Warhol, and in conjunction with the exhibition "Mis/Communication: Language and Power in Contemporary Art," the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art hosted a panel discussion in November, “Miscommunication, Translating Artists’ Words, and Interpretation,” which considered how tone, word choice, censorship, power dynamics, and more have come into play when translating Andy Warhol’s words. Professor Wolf moderated the panel, joined by fellow SUNY New Paltz faculty Michelle Woods (English), author of Kafka Translated and co-editor of the Bloomsbury Academic book series "Literatures, Cultures, Translation," and Mercedes Rooney (Languages, Literatures & Cultures), translator of the essay “Warhol in French.” American Sign Language interpretation was provided, and the Q&A from the audience was launched by questions prepared in advance by four students—Keara Neilsen and Elizabeth Ruth Charlton Hunt from Art History, Isabella Mettler from Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Owen Smith from English—followed by a book signing and refreshments. The event, covered in The Oracle student newspaper, was generously supported by the Office of the Provost's “Creating a Stronger New Paltz Together” initiative.

Wolf spoke about her essay for The Black Legend in Spain in a "project session" at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) annual meeting in Toronto in April. She also chaired a panel at the ASECS meeting on the interconnections of culture and the globalization of banking in the eighteenth century.

In May, Wolf participated in the twenty-second Annual Bloomington Eighteenth-Century Studies Workshop at Indiana University. The theme of the 2024 workshop, funded by Indiana University, was the “Magical Eighteenth Century,” and her contribution was a study of portraits of William St. Clair of Roslin as a Freemason and the legends of Roslin Chapel. The workshop abstracts and discussant comments are published in The Workshop.

Teaching-related activities

Professor Wolf spoke in March at the Dorsky Museum about Francisco de Goya’s famous print, The Sleep [or, Dream] of Reason Produces Monsters, to students in the course Intercultural Connections in the Romance Languages, taught by Mercedes Rooney.

In June, Professor Wolf participated in a group trip by invitation to Ann Arbor and Detroit for a tour with the artist Machine Dazzle of his University of Michigan Museum of Art installation, Ouroboros, and a viewing of the related performance he created in collaboration with graduate students, Ouroboros Act III: Runway Show. In Detroit, the group visited art cooperatives and installations that are key examples of how abandoned spaces have been renovated or otherwise repurposed by artists. Wolf looks forward to bringing insights from this trip to her courses in contemporary art.

For Professor Wolf’s fall course, Art History: Theories and Approaches, she invited Daniel Belasco, Executive Director of the Al Held Foundation, to speak about his groundbreaking book, Women Artists in Midcentury America: A History (Reaktion Books, 2024). Dr. Belasco’s talk, "All-Women Exhibitions: An Emerging Method of Art Historical Research," offered insight into his innovative uses of archival research methods. The talk, featured in The Oracle, was organized to fit into the section on feminism in Professor Wolf’s course and was open to the public, with thanks to the valued support of Campus Auxiliary Services (CAS) and the Department of Art History.

Work in Progress

Professor Wolf’s work in progress includes an article about portraits of the Scottish Freemason William St. Clair of Roslin and an essay about three early collectors of Goya’s Caprichos prints. She will chair a round table session at the College Art Association’s annual conference in February 2025 in New York City on Benjamin Wigfall and his legacy (in which colleagues from the Dorsky Museum will participate). She will speak on visual representations of uprisings in Spain for a panel at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual meeting in March, online. Another paper in preparation is for a panel that she co-organized with a colleague in France, Clarisse Godard Desmarest, on the built environment in Scotland, for the annual Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society conference taking place in summer 2025 in Stirling.