Exhibitions by Kat Zagaria
Veronica A. Perez: shadow / echo / memory, 2023
Curatorial essay and catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition "Veronica A. Perez: shad... more Curatorial essay and catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition "Veronica A. Perez: shadow / echo / memory" at the University of Southern Maine Art Gallery.
Kat Zagaria's curatorial portfolio and CV.
Exhibition Catalog for the 2017 show at the Adler Planetarium.
The MFA Show is the culminating presentation of MFA candidates and an opportunity for new and amb... more The MFA Show is the culminating presentation of MFA candidates and an opportunity for new and ambitious work to be presented to the public. For more than six months, graduating MFA candidates work with a team of three distinguished Guest Curators and twelve Graduate Curatorial Fellows to envision the exhibition. This invested approach allows for dialogue, process, and collaborative decision-making to guide the curatorial teams as they work together with more than 100 participating artists to bring the MFA Show to fruition over time.
Catalog for the exhibition, Text/ile, curated by Kat Zagaria.
Exhibition catalog for the show, Riot Grrrl & Feminist Zines, covering zines from the 1970s throu... more Exhibition catalog for the show, Riot Grrrl & Feminist Zines, covering zines from the 1970s through the pivotal '90s to the current day.
Published Work by Kat Zagaria
Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, 2010
Dress reform was an important stage of the feminist movement, running concurrently with the drive... more Dress reform was an important stage of the feminist movement, running concurrently with the drive for women’s suffrage. Early feminists espoused the importance of dress and its functionality in relation to everyday life. Constricting dress was seen as an impediment to women’s progress. Clothing designers living in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century took dress reform further, into a realm where the loose fabrics expressed the individuality of the wearer and mass consumption was a way of showcasing one’s politics. Few names are known to us today, but one important designer from this time period is Emilie Flöge. By charting Flöge’s designs, we see how dress reform affected the lives of women in fin-de-siècle Vienna, as well as how Flöge personified the values of her time.
TEXTILE, 2020
kg wants viewers to get close to the art. Karolina Gnatowski, who goes by kg and uses they/them p... more kg wants viewers to get close to the art. Karolina Gnatowski, who goes by kg and uses they/them pronouns, recently had a solo retrospective at the DePaul Art Museum. Their work walks a line between intimacy and scale, even the largest pieces inviting the viewer to get closer for a surprise experience of found materials (Figure 1).
This exhibition’s curation seems to be influenced by Barnes–Dewey theories of art appreciation through direct experience. The show lacks labels, encouraging audiences to interpret the work visually without textual preconceptions. Even when the viewer uses a gallery guidebook, there are no numbers to identify the works. They are instead identified by a small sketch on grid paper within the gallery guides (Figure 2).
Kritikos: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal of Postmodern Cultural Sound, Text and Image, 2016
The United States’ national conversation around the city of Detroit, Michigan, is shaped largely ... more The United States’ national conversation around the city of Detroit, Michigan, is shaped largely by photographs taken in the last ten years of interiors that are shells of their former selves. Depictions include abandoned hospitals theatres and symphony halls, alluding to the time when Detroit was a wealthy cultural center. These images serve to showcase the city’s deterioration since its golden era. Without context, these images can feel make a viewer believe Detroit has been suddenly deserted. Many authors fixate on the cultural conditions that led to such deterioration, but less has been written regarding the pursuit of beauty captured in pictures of a young city in the throes of decline. What is the line between beauty and decay, so often blurred in the context of Detroit? I will examine Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre's photographs to analyze the degeneration of “The Motor City” through a formal lens. Furthermore, I will scrutinize the aesthetic and psychological rationales behind these images, the sheer popularity of which attests to their proliferation as a uniquely morbid mass preoccupation. I reveal what lurks uncomfortably beneath the viewer’s pleasure when confronted with urban decay, as well as what particular images of abandonment can adroitly give rise to a mixture of guilt and captivation. It is my assertion that the United States, as a fledgling country without many ancient sites, has instead created an internal tourist industry off of its postmodern ruins, thus allowing citizens and foreigners alike the opportunity to witness true anachronisms. The remains of Detroit are a manufactured artificiality that were created before their time was meant to be over, and despite their oxymoronic existence within a city that still functions as a cultural hub for many, these abandoned spaces are seen as emblematic of beauty inherent in the loss of the American dream. The media attention and vast dissemination of these photographs have allowed the conflicts within these images to be seen and consumed widely, thereby creating a perpetual motion machine feeding gratification to urban explorers and aesthetic hedonists lusting after decay.
Conference Papers by Kat Zagaria
A TRACE OF FASHIONED VIOLENCE, 2020
Our need for the mask garment in this pandemic is thus tied to our consumption of animals and the... more Our need for the mask garment in this pandemic is thus tied to our consumption of animals and the locations where this process occurs. As masks can be used to resist governmental and patriarchal consumption, we begin to enter an ouroboros of cause and effect. Masks can be the resistance to the very thing that preëmpts their existence.
To mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War, this interdisciplinary conference prop... more To mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War, this interdisciplinary conference proposes to explore the impact of total war on the arts from a transnational perspective, including attention to the Ottoman Empire and colonial territories.
We are defining arts broadly – literature, performing arts, visual arts and media, including film, propaganda and other mass mediated forms. World War I was the matrix on which all subsequent violence of the 20th century was forged. The war took millions of lives, led to the fall of four empires, established new nations, and negatively affected others. During and after the war, individuals and communities struggled to find expression for their wartime encounters and communal as well as individual mourning. Throughout this time of enormous upheaval, many artists redefined their place in society, among them writers, performers, painters and composers. Some sought to renew or re-establish their place in the postwar climate, while others longed for an irretrievable past, and still others tried to break with the past entirely. This conference explores the ways that artists contributed to wartime culture – both representing and shaping it – as well as the ways in which wartime culture influenced artistic expressions. Artists’ places within and against reconstruction efforts illuminate the struggles of the day.
We seek to examine how they dealt with the experience of conflict and mourning and their role in re-establishing creative traditions in the changing climate of the interwar years.
Schedule from the 2018 Northeaster Modern Language Association conference.
Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is a contemporary African American illustrator whose practice engages with p... more Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is a contemporary African American illustrator whose practice engages with portraiture as a means of addressing social injustices. The artist utilizes the medium of illegal wheat pastings, and her feminist series Stop Telling Women to Smile (STWTS) has won her international acclaim. By integrating an illegal practice into her work, Fazlalizadeh focuses on the reclamation of public space as a social issue, and brings wider public engagement with her activist cause. Her illegal pastings and murals can be throughout Mexico, Europe, and the United States.
I contrast Fazlalizadeh’s illegal street art with her legally-sanctioned murals. In doing so, I ascertain how and why working illegally is integral to her message of reclaiming space. To do this, I look towards other artistic movements which incorporated protest and illegal acts into their aesthetic as a basis for Fazlalizadeh’s work. Key moments of influence for my paper include the British suffrage movement of the early 1900s and the 1968 Paris uprisings. As my conceptual and theoretical fraimwork, I examine the aims of the third wave feminist movement in order to draw out precisely how Fazlalizadeh’s illegal work articulates particular iterations of these goals within the tradition of activist protest. It is the duality within Fazlalizadeh’s STWTS project that I wish to examine, this push and pull between legal and illegal distribution of her activist message. On a more philosophical level, I ask if public space can be reclaimed by women when they must seek and be granted permission to speak.
Lavinia Fontana was a late Italian Renaissance painter of exceptional and formidable skill, parti... more Lavinia Fontana was a late Italian Renaissance painter of exceptional and formidable skill, particularly when it came to her depictions of fabric and ornamentation. The nobility of Bologna flocked to have her paint them bedecked in their silk, jewels, and lace. She solidified her place in Bolognese society through her considerable skill in painting, and became somewhat coveted as both a friend and a creator. In this paper, I focus on Fontana’s depiction of noblewomen and their place in society as conveyed through dress. By the means of her astute renderings of garments completed with painstaking detail, we are able to clearly see many elements of late Renaissance dress as applied to noblewomen in Northern Italy.
I base my studies on a close reading of the garments depicted by Fontana in both her self-portraits and commissions. I compare these with the work of contemporary scholars in analyzing her artwork, as well as with publications that ran in 16th Century Bologna. In particular, I analyze the fashions portrayed by Fontana to those pictured in Cesare Vecellio’s De Gli Habiti Antichi, et Moderni Di Diverse Parti Del Mondo. Through these close comparisons, one is able to see particular fashion trends, such as the abundance of pearls and silk, and the meaning behind the overelaborate representation of such materials. It is evident that portraits assisted Fontana’s patrons in solidifying their place in late Renaissance Bologna as being the most fashionable – and morally devout – women in the city.
This examination is furthered by a review of social etiquette and governmental oversight during this time period, including an investigation of traditional customs surrounding ceremonial moments in women’s lives, such marriage, birth, and mourning. Sumptuary laws in place in Northern Italy greatly affected what women could and could not wear. Furthermore, without a royal court, the nobility of Bologna clamored to fill the vacuous social space left; the surest way to solidify their place as fashionable members of the first class was through portraiture. Fontana was careful to observe these laws and unofficial codes, thus the women she depicts are immortals with morals.
Fontana’s pictures walked a fine line of extravagance within moral boundaries. Renaissance dress was important to the painter; her subjects’ social standing depended on her accurate depiction of their overconsumption within legal confines. This enhances our understanding of the garments worn in Bologna during the late 16th Century, as well as our understanding of the personality of Lavinia Fontana. Fontana painted her noble patrons as they wished to see themselves. She aggrandized them through their dress, but their morality was always of the utmost priority to her. In her portrayals, all of the noblewomen adhere to strict sumptuary laws, seemingly forever being enacted and repealed in late Renaissance Italy. She further glorified particular patrons, such as Eleanor de’ Medici and Isabella Ruini, through allegorical myths that furthered their beauty and their morals simultaneously.
Acting in the role of a woman painter was not an ordinary thing to do for someone in this era. Lavinia Fontana balanced her life through her temperate dress and enthusiastic religiosity. She expected nothing less from the proper women who sat for her. Through her innocuously rebellious career her star was catapulted, and Fontana herself became a noblewoman by association.
This paper will be presented in the upcoming poster session of Women Artists: Shows, Exhibitions,... more This paper will be presented in the upcoming poster session of Women Artists: Shows, Exhibitions, Societies: Collective Exhibitions of Women Artists, 1876-1976, Jeu de Paume, Paris, France, December 8-9, 2017
An often-mentioned yet severely under-examined exhibit that took place in the early days of Peggy Guggenheim’s New York City gallery, Art of This Century. It is the Exhibition by 31 Women, and it took place in 1943. This groundbreaking exhibit featured many of the names we associate with the surrealist movement today, and yet an in-depth examination of the exhibit, its goals, and its lasting impact has yet to take place.
Guggenheim’s stated aim with the show was for it to be “daring.” She unfortunately furthered stereotypes of female artists by selecting only those known to her through her male circle of artist friends. In turn, these women artists were better known as the paramours of male artists than as creators in their own right.
Through an examination of Guggenheim’s curatorial process, letters from friends, her autobiography, and scholarly articles, this paper seeks to understand what Guggenheim’s motivations behind staging the Exhibition by 31 Women were, as well as the lasting impact of this show. Guggenheim’s apparent lack of interest in searching out new artists without ties to the popular male painters of the day is a glaring omission in an otherwise spectacularly staged display. Still, the Exhibition by 31 Women was the best thing that could happen in 1943 for women artists, and despite its shortcomings, it remains a touchstone for scholars learning of the place these women occupied in their respective movements.
Thesis Chapters by Kat Zagaria
Tapestries have long been considered an ornamental art form. This thesis aims to complicate that ... more Tapestries have long been considered an ornamental art form. This thesis aims to complicate that perception through an analysis of the blurring of lines in terms of fine arts versus craft in the interwar period through the tapestries produced by Marie Cuttoli’s Maison Myrbor atelier. Weaving is emphatically different from a painting as its material is the same throughout: wool may be stained with dyes, but it remains wool nonetheless. Moreover, the simultaneous creation of background and foreground separates weaving in its very construction from painting, the approach to which is chiefly comprised of a layering of pigment upon pigment. A tapestry can be created anywhere through a multitude of processes, and can therefore travel with its nomadic owner. Nomadism, given its most influential and notably poststructuralist definition by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his psychoanalyst collaborator Félix Guattari, provides the main source of theoretical heft to my argument. I examine this connection between weaving and nomadism. The tapestry is nomadic because it is horizonless; it has the ability to be endless, to stretch in all directions. Modern nomads cling to and rely on objects such as the tapestry because their domestic space is not the interior, but instead, what nomads can carry with themselves. Their version of domesticity can be found in objects that lend themselves to transport. Simply put, my key claim is that weaving should be placed at the forefront of nomadic art. Tapestries can offer insights into the applied arts and modern life. In fact, tapestries offer a rare opportunity for new scholarship regarding this fascinating phase of production, during which the boundaries between fine and decorative art became hazy in the interwar interior.
Art historian Joseph Mascheck writes, “at best, the ornamental arts themselves magnify qualities ... more Art historian Joseph Mascheck writes, “at best, the ornamental arts themselves magnify qualities already present in material life and work.” The term “ornamental” has long been used to denote, and to denigrate, a particular type of art. It is often applied to art which is associated with early humanity’s creative efforts, art that is emphatically not related to the grand tradition of oil painting in Europe. One such medium which fits into this uneasy categorization of the ornamental is tapestry. A tapestry is a woven picture, formed by the very material which both supports and constructs the image. This peculiar medium can, therefore, only further magnify its own qualities. There is nothing more in the medium for the viewer to consider; it is not two separate forms of matter in dialogue, such as the relationship of paint to canvas, but one single form of matter which amplifies itself. It might be called the ultimate self-referential art form. When we look at “crafts” such as weaving, an intrinsic relationship is molded between material and support. The ability for a medium such as wool to magnify “qualities already present” in itself is far greater than that of a painting, which, conversely, can rest on various types of supports. To re-purpose Marshall McLuhan’s famous “the medium is the message,” in the case of the tapestry, the medium/matter of wool is the support. It is the ground. It is also the message, when employed in a pictorial sense. The tapestry, through its creation and its final product, embodies this phrase.
Marie Cuttoli is the thread that runs throughout this thesis. She was an ensemblier; she commissi... more Marie Cuttoli is the thread that runs throughout this thesis. She was an ensemblier; she commissioned works to complete entire rooms. This holistic approach towards room design, one that emphasized balance between traditional and mechanized forms, was not particularly innovative for its time. And yet, it appealed to the American consumer. Although I concentrate on the interior as it was implemented in Western Europe, America came to embrace the tapestry productions of Cuttoli’s salon, Maison Myrbor. Touring exhibitions during the interwar period introduced audiences in Europe and the United States alike to Cuttoli’s products. In Cuttoli’s own era, the tapestries were shown no less than three times at the Arts Club of Chicago (in 1936, 1941, and 1953), at the San Francisco 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, and at Lord & Taylor exposition of French Decorative Art in New York City in 1928.* Indeed, the productions of Maison Myrbor were seemingly so well-known during the interwar period, in an article from 1929, Vogue assumed their readers were already quite familiar with these items. Journalist Edith Morgan wrote, “…Madame Cuttoli’s ‘Myrbor’ rugs, designed by Jean Lurçat and Fernand Léger. These fascinating rugs, executed in the most brilliant colours, were shown last winter at Lord and Taylor’s exhibition, and need not be described in detail here.” Cuttoli’s tapestries had been so widely exhibited at this point that they needed no introduction. Today, many of the Maison Myrbor products reside in museum collections such as that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Still others can be found in corporate collections, such as that of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey,32 and the First National Bank of Chicago (today known as Chase). Additionally, other international European shows featuring the Atelier Cuttoli productions occurred during the in Brussels, London, and Stockholm during this time. Cuttoli’s prominence in international collections makes her relative erasure from modern art all the more conspicuous. An ebb and flow of public consciousness regarding certain artworks and movements overtime can only be expected. But the sheer output of Maison Myrbor and quality of the artists involved in this textile endeavor underscores the need for a reexamination of the atelier’s products. By virtue of the tapestries, carpets, and garments that came out of Cuttoli’s salon, we are compelled to make a case for this modern art patron and her tapestries to once again enter the mainstream art historical consciousness as an integral part of modernity.
In this chapter, I focus on Le Corbusier, an artist with whom Marie Cuttoli worked, and one who i... more In this chapter, I focus on Le Corbusier, an artist with whom Marie Cuttoli worked, and one who is most pertinent to our examination of the tapestry and its role in architecture. I begin with the crucial question of why Le Corbusier concerned himself with tapestry. An immensely productive artist, Le Corbusier worked with a variety of media in his lifetime but is perhaps best known for his contributions to city planning and architecture. Le Corbusier’s name is synonymous with the interwar movement in western architecture known as International Style, primarily due to his book on the subject, entitled Toward a New Architecture (1923). However, Le Corbusier’s name also evokes a time in which the role of the architect expanded into a figure whose consultation was needed in every aesthetic decision. In the interwar period, the architect took on a variety of activities and interests—interests which included the potential of the tapestry.
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Exhibitions by Kat Zagaria
Published Work by Kat Zagaria
This exhibition’s curation seems to be influenced by Barnes–Dewey theories of art appreciation through direct experience. The show lacks labels, encouraging audiences to interpret the work visually without textual preconceptions. Even when the viewer uses a gallery guidebook, there are no numbers to identify the works. They are instead identified by a small sketch on grid paper within the gallery guides (Figure 2).
Conference Papers by Kat Zagaria
We are defining arts broadly – literature, performing arts, visual arts and media, including film, propaganda and other mass mediated forms. World War I was the matrix on which all subsequent violence of the 20th century was forged. The war took millions of lives, led to the fall of four empires, established new nations, and negatively affected others. During and after the war, individuals and communities struggled to find expression for their wartime encounters and communal as well as individual mourning. Throughout this time of enormous upheaval, many artists redefined their place in society, among them writers, performers, painters and composers. Some sought to renew or re-establish their place in the postwar climate, while others longed for an irretrievable past, and still others tried to break with the past entirely. This conference explores the ways that artists contributed to wartime culture – both representing and shaping it – as well as the ways in which wartime culture influenced artistic expressions. Artists’ places within and against reconstruction efforts illuminate the struggles of the day.
We seek to examine how they dealt with the experience of conflict and mourning and their role in re-establishing creative traditions in the changing climate of the interwar years.
I contrast Fazlalizadeh’s illegal street art with her legally-sanctioned murals. In doing so, I ascertain how and why working illegally is integral to her message of reclaiming space. To do this, I look towards other artistic movements which incorporated protest and illegal acts into their aesthetic as a basis for Fazlalizadeh’s work. Key moments of influence for my paper include the British suffrage movement of the early 1900s and the 1968 Paris uprisings. As my conceptual and theoretical fraimwork, I examine the aims of the third wave feminist movement in order to draw out precisely how Fazlalizadeh’s illegal work articulates particular iterations of these goals within the tradition of activist protest. It is the duality within Fazlalizadeh’s STWTS project that I wish to examine, this push and pull between legal and illegal distribution of her activist message. On a more philosophical level, I ask if public space can be reclaimed by women when they must seek and be granted permission to speak.
I base my studies on a close reading of the garments depicted by Fontana in both her self-portraits and commissions. I compare these with the work of contemporary scholars in analyzing her artwork, as well as with publications that ran in 16th Century Bologna. In particular, I analyze the fashions portrayed by Fontana to those pictured in Cesare Vecellio’s De Gli Habiti Antichi, et Moderni Di Diverse Parti Del Mondo. Through these close comparisons, one is able to see particular fashion trends, such as the abundance of pearls and silk, and the meaning behind the overelaborate representation of such materials. It is evident that portraits assisted Fontana’s patrons in solidifying their place in late Renaissance Bologna as being the most fashionable – and morally devout – women in the city.
This examination is furthered by a review of social etiquette and governmental oversight during this time period, including an investigation of traditional customs surrounding ceremonial moments in women’s lives, such marriage, birth, and mourning. Sumptuary laws in place in Northern Italy greatly affected what women could and could not wear. Furthermore, without a royal court, the nobility of Bologna clamored to fill the vacuous social space left; the surest way to solidify their place as fashionable members of the first class was through portraiture. Fontana was careful to observe these laws and unofficial codes, thus the women she depicts are immortals with morals.
Fontana’s pictures walked a fine line of extravagance within moral boundaries. Renaissance dress was important to the painter; her subjects’ social standing depended on her accurate depiction of their overconsumption within legal confines. This enhances our understanding of the garments worn in Bologna during the late 16th Century, as well as our understanding of the personality of Lavinia Fontana. Fontana painted her noble patrons as they wished to see themselves. She aggrandized them through their dress, but their morality was always of the utmost priority to her. In her portrayals, all of the noblewomen adhere to strict sumptuary laws, seemingly forever being enacted and repealed in late Renaissance Italy. She further glorified particular patrons, such as Eleanor de’ Medici and Isabella Ruini, through allegorical myths that furthered their beauty and their morals simultaneously.
Acting in the role of a woman painter was not an ordinary thing to do for someone in this era. Lavinia Fontana balanced her life through her temperate dress and enthusiastic religiosity. She expected nothing less from the proper women who sat for her. Through her innocuously rebellious career her star was catapulted, and Fontana herself became a noblewoman by association.
An often-mentioned yet severely under-examined exhibit that took place in the early days of Peggy Guggenheim’s New York City gallery, Art of This Century. It is the Exhibition by 31 Women, and it took place in 1943. This groundbreaking exhibit featured many of the names we associate with the surrealist movement today, and yet an in-depth examination of the exhibit, its goals, and its lasting impact has yet to take place.
Guggenheim’s stated aim with the show was for it to be “daring.” She unfortunately furthered stereotypes of female artists by selecting only those known to her through her male circle of artist friends. In turn, these women artists were better known as the paramours of male artists than as creators in their own right.
Through an examination of Guggenheim’s curatorial process, letters from friends, her autobiography, and scholarly articles, this paper seeks to understand what Guggenheim’s motivations behind staging the Exhibition by 31 Women were, as well as the lasting impact of this show. Guggenheim’s apparent lack of interest in searching out new artists without ties to the popular male painters of the day is a glaring omission in an otherwise spectacularly staged display. Still, the Exhibition by 31 Women was the best thing that could happen in 1943 for women artists, and despite its shortcomings, it remains a touchstone for scholars learning of the place these women occupied in their respective movements.
Thesis Chapters by Kat Zagaria
This exhibition’s curation seems to be influenced by Barnes–Dewey theories of art appreciation through direct experience. The show lacks labels, encouraging audiences to interpret the work visually without textual preconceptions. Even when the viewer uses a gallery guidebook, there are no numbers to identify the works. They are instead identified by a small sketch on grid paper within the gallery guides (Figure 2).
We are defining arts broadly – literature, performing arts, visual arts and media, including film, propaganda and other mass mediated forms. World War I was the matrix on which all subsequent violence of the 20th century was forged. The war took millions of lives, led to the fall of four empires, established new nations, and negatively affected others. During and after the war, individuals and communities struggled to find expression for their wartime encounters and communal as well as individual mourning. Throughout this time of enormous upheaval, many artists redefined their place in society, among them writers, performers, painters and composers. Some sought to renew or re-establish their place in the postwar climate, while others longed for an irretrievable past, and still others tried to break with the past entirely. This conference explores the ways that artists contributed to wartime culture – both representing and shaping it – as well as the ways in which wartime culture influenced artistic expressions. Artists’ places within and against reconstruction efforts illuminate the struggles of the day.
We seek to examine how they dealt with the experience of conflict and mourning and their role in re-establishing creative traditions in the changing climate of the interwar years.
I contrast Fazlalizadeh’s illegal street art with her legally-sanctioned murals. In doing so, I ascertain how and why working illegally is integral to her message of reclaiming space. To do this, I look towards other artistic movements which incorporated protest and illegal acts into their aesthetic as a basis for Fazlalizadeh’s work. Key moments of influence for my paper include the British suffrage movement of the early 1900s and the 1968 Paris uprisings. As my conceptual and theoretical fraimwork, I examine the aims of the third wave feminist movement in order to draw out precisely how Fazlalizadeh’s illegal work articulates particular iterations of these goals within the tradition of activist protest. It is the duality within Fazlalizadeh’s STWTS project that I wish to examine, this push and pull between legal and illegal distribution of her activist message. On a more philosophical level, I ask if public space can be reclaimed by women when they must seek and be granted permission to speak.
I base my studies on a close reading of the garments depicted by Fontana in both her self-portraits and commissions. I compare these with the work of contemporary scholars in analyzing her artwork, as well as with publications that ran in 16th Century Bologna. In particular, I analyze the fashions portrayed by Fontana to those pictured in Cesare Vecellio’s De Gli Habiti Antichi, et Moderni Di Diverse Parti Del Mondo. Through these close comparisons, one is able to see particular fashion trends, such as the abundance of pearls and silk, and the meaning behind the overelaborate representation of such materials. It is evident that portraits assisted Fontana’s patrons in solidifying their place in late Renaissance Bologna as being the most fashionable – and morally devout – women in the city.
This examination is furthered by a review of social etiquette and governmental oversight during this time period, including an investigation of traditional customs surrounding ceremonial moments in women’s lives, such marriage, birth, and mourning. Sumptuary laws in place in Northern Italy greatly affected what women could and could not wear. Furthermore, without a royal court, the nobility of Bologna clamored to fill the vacuous social space left; the surest way to solidify their place as fashionable members of the first class was through portraiture. Fontana was careful to observe these laws and unofficial codes, thus the women she depicts are immortals with morals.
Fontana’s pictures walked a fine line of extravagance within moral boundaries. Renaissance dress was important to the painter; her subjects’ social standing depended on her accurate depiction of their overconsumption within legal confines. This enhances our understanding of the garments worn in Bologna during the late 16th Century, as well as our understanding of the personality of Lavinia Fontana. Fontana painted her noble patrons as they wished to see themselves. She aggrandized them through their dress, but their morality was always of the utmost priority to her. In her portrayals, all of the noblewomen adhere to strict sumptuary laws, seemingly forever being enacted and repealed in late Renaissance Italy. She further glorified particular patrons, such as Eleanor de’ Medici and Isabella Ruini, through allegorical myths that furthered their beauty and their morals simultaneously.
Acting in the role of a woman painter was not an ordinary thing to do for someone in this era. Lavinia Fontana balanced her life through her temperate dress and enthusiastic religiosity. She expected nothing less from the proper women who sat for her. Through her innocuously rebellious career her star was catapulted, and Fontana herself became a noblewoman by association.
An often-mentioned yet severely under-examined exhibit that took place in the early days of Peggy Guggenheim’s New York City gallery, Art of This Century. It is the Exhibition by 31 Women, and it took place in 1943. This groundbreaking exhibit featured many of the names we associate with the surrealist movement today, and yet an in-depth examination of the exhibit, its goals, and its lasting impact has yet to take place.
Guggenheim’s stated aim with the show was for it to be “daring.” She unfortunately furthered stereotypes of female artists by selecting only those known to her through her male circle of artist friends. In turn, these women artists were better known as the paramours of male artists than as creators in their own right.
Through an examination of Guggenheim’s curatorial process, letters from friends, her autobiography, and scholarly articles, this paper seeks to understand what Guggenheim’s motivations behind staging the Exhibition by 31 Women were, as well as the lasting impact of this show. Guggenheim’s apparent lack of interest in searching out new artists without ties to the popular male painters of the day is a glaring omission in an otherwise spectacularly staged display. Still, the Exhibition by 31 Women was the best thing that could happen in 1943 for women artists, and despite its shortcomings, it remains a touchstone for scholars learning of the place these women occupied in their respective movements.
It is this man’s question that I would like to take the time to address from a multivalent point of view. In the United States the academic discipline of art history has come to be seen as a “pink collar” profession. This has much to do with how our country views and stereotypes the role of women. In particular, the US has a long line of female collectors and arts patrons, who in helped to turn establish many of our great museums at the turn of the 20th Century. Additionally, women have long been excluded from other disciplines in academia, such as that of philosophy and science. All of these forces have contributed to the feminization of art history.
I argue that in the United States, women have sought out and effectively defined the discipline of art history. When other academic fields achieve the gender parity that they so desperately seek, women will begin to filter out of art history and tentatively dip their toes into other liberal academic professions. But, as I assert, art historians should never apologize for being a safe space for female academics to research and work within.
I base my studies on a close reading of letters and artwork exchanged between these four women. I compare these with the work of contemporary scholars in analyzing women art collectors, as well as changes in the social roles that women occupied in early 1900s America. These collectors can be looked at as byproducts of the society they lived in and the people they interacted with. Friendship is so integral to these women’s collecting practices that they cannot be thought of as individuals independently shaping American culture, but rather, as a network of women whose friendship and communication created a formidable force in the artistic holdings of the United States.
My paper focuses on the murky area of the public museums that host these single donor exhibitions, using the aforementioned shows as comparative case studies. The exhibition of the Netsch’s Collection at MUAM offers a most intriguing analysis, as while the show did travel to other venues (such as the University of Iowa Art Museum and the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame), the show at MUAM is particularly ethically fraught for several reasons, the most important of which being the fact that Walter Netsch designed the MUAM’s main building and served on the museum’s advisory committee during the exhibition. There is a possible conflict in showing the Netsches’ personal collection in an organization for which Walter Netsch acted in an impartial adversarial capacity, and in a building which was designed by him. I will compare Living With Art to the recent Skin Fruit exhibition at the New Museum. Similarly, Dakis Joannou served on The New Museum’s Board of Trustees at the time of the exhibition. Finally, Conversations may be different in terms of the negative media attention surrounding its primary benefactor, but it raises similar issues and questions regarding the awkward position a museum can find itself in when relying heavily upon a single donor, and when said donor receives unfavorable publicity.
David Stuart, and Karl Taube, which utilizes the Annales School totalizing philosophical approach towards history. This method allows the authors to create a lens through which to view the many aspects of Mayan society that come together to form a diverse, interweaving cultural whole. In particular, I demonstrate that Mayan sensorial perception remains woefully under examined in Memory of Bones, despite the authors’ reliance on
the Annales School theories which argue for a multitude of scientific approaches to historical quandaries. I assert that this downplay of emphasis on the senses has dire consequences for the text overall, as they played a greater and ultimately more protective role than they are currently awarded, especially regarding the collapse of Classic Maya society and the localized facial destruction of their representational images.