CCL/Mellon Foundation Seminar

Kylie Ching is a Ph.D. candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She specializes in contemporary American art with a focus on Asian American art and visual culture. Her dissertation examines how Asian diasporic visual artists critically reexamine and respond to American wars in the Asia-Paci c by engaging with private family photographs and wartime journalistic photography. She argues that her case studies, as products of gendered knowledge and memory keeping, center notions of family to o er alternative mappings of war and belonging. Kylie holds a M.A. in Art History and a B.A. in Art History and English from UC Irvine. Previously, she has held curatorial and registrar internships at the San Diego Museum of Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, and UCI’s Institute and Museum of California Art.

Lesdi Carolina Goussen Robleto is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She works on modern and contemporary art in Latin America and the Caribbean, with a focus on experimental, mixed-media, and performance practices in Central America. Her dissertation, (Un)mending Bodies: Patricia Belli and Feminist Artistic Praxis in Central America, 1986-2000s, looks at the work of the contemporary Nicaraguan artist, Patricia Belli, against the backdrop of postwar Nicaragua. Tending to fiber and craft-based materialities in the artist oeuvre, the dissertation considers how Belli’s work gives texture to counter-poetics of resistance that unravel national aesthetics and socio-political discourses. The project places Belli’s work in conversation with other Central American women artists that re-work everyday materials to find expression at the nexus of social and political transition.

In 2019, Lesdi helped organize About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked as a Gallery Assistant at Anthony Meier Fine Arts in San Francisco and previously interned in the Education Department at the de Young Museum.

Lesdi is a 2021 Ford Fellow and a recipient of the AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship. She holds a BA in Art History from New York University and an MA from the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Bianca Hand is a PhD candidate in the Department of the History of Art focusing on ancient Mesopotamian art. Her research focuses on investigating questions of alterity, materiality, style, and interaction at the royal palace at Khorsabad during the reign of the Neo-Assyrian king Sargon II (721-705 BCE). She received her bachelor’s degree in archaeology with minors in art history and French from the College of Wooster. There, she received a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates Award to excavate and conduct research for her senior capstone thesis. Her field work has also led her to Turkey, where she worked with the Tayinat Archaeological Project and the Hatay Archaeological Museum on the Basalt Reconstruction Project to reconstruct a monumental statue of an unidentified queen.

Grant Klarich Johnson is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Southern California. Interested in international artistic trajectories and aesthetic exchanges, his research considers twentieth and twenty-first century art, craft, textiles, and fashion. His dissertation, Sheila Hicks: Weaving to the World, presents the first monographic study of the prolific weaver and contemporary artist. This work has been supported by a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he contributed to a reinstallation of the permanent collection, and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellowship at The Whitney Museum of American Art, where he has traced new itineraries through the permanent collection in remote programs such as “Queer Belonging,” “Portable Landscapes,” and “Domestic Aesthetics,” designed in response to Covid-19. In 2018, he produced a symposium inspired by the work of Senga Nengudi with the USC Fisher Museum of Art and the California African American Museum. In 2016, he curated “20/20 Accelerando,” a new film installation and performance by Lita Albuquerque for the Fisher. His writing has appeared in Artforum, Frieze, and The Brooklyn Rail among other publications, and catalogues including With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972-1985 and Emily Gernild, Black Lemons. He holds a BA from Kenyon College, where he majored in studio art and English, and worked for The Kenyon Review.

Cynthia Kok is a PhD candidate in the history of art at Yale University. Her research focuses on the material culture of trade and empire and her dissertation examines tactile and sensory engagement with mother-of-pearl in an early modern Dutch world. Cynthia received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley and her MA from Bard Graduate Center and she has worked at the Yale Center for British Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Smithsonian American Art Museum. She is the 2021-2023 Kress History of Art Institutional Fellow at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS).

Sarah is a PhD candidate in art history and architecture at Harvard University. Her work focuses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art and environmental history, with a particular interest the relationship between bodies, landscapes, and colonialism. She has a special interest in Early Modern European conceptions of nature, environment, and territory, especially the ways in which visual encounters inform these ideas. Her dissertation combines her interests by examining visual and material histories and legacies of wetland ecologies in the Netherlands and the Americas. Sarah holds a B.A. in science, technology, and culture studies from the Georgia Institute of Technology, an M.A. in decorative arts and design history from Parsons The New School for Design, and an M.A. in art history and archaeology from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. She has worked at various museums including the Metropolitan Museum of art, The Frick Collection, and the Harvard Art Museums. She recently co- organized the international conference ‘Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures,’ and contributed an essay to the edited volume ‘Dutch Golden Age(s): The Shaping of a Cultural Community’ (Brepols, 2020).

Annissa is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto in the department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations and specializes in Egyptology, Nubian archaeology, and Museum Studies. Her doctoral thesis investigates the ceramic production and trade industry during Meroitic Nubia and its potential far-reaching networks linking the Nile Valley to Iron Age Western African cultures. She examines these networks by identifying artistic similarities on pottery which she combines with piecing together the objects’ biography in order to better understand Nubian collections in North American museums. She earned her Master of Museum Studies from the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and incorporates museum theory and practice into her academic and professional work. She has held internships at the Peel Art Gallery, Museum, and Archives and at the Royal Ontario Museum in the department of Arts and Culture: Global Africa and in the department of Ancient Egypt and Nubia. In 2021, Annissa will join the Bard Graduate Center/Brooklyn Museum as the Postdoctoral Fellow in the Arts of Africa.

Hoda Nedaeifar is a PhD candidate in Art History at Indiana University Bloomington, specializing in Iranian Modern and Contemporary art. In her dissertation, she explores the development of documentary photography during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, and the impact of those documentary practices on the ne art photography in the postwar Iran (1988-2013). Through examining the operation of institutions in charge of image production and their printed materials including photobooks in the 1980s in Iran, she traces visual representations of war memory across the work of the next generation of Iranian ne art photographers as they responded to the subject matter of the Iran-Iraq war and its legacy. Hoda holds a BA in English Literature from University of Tehran, an MA from Art University in Tehran, and an MA in Art History from Indiana University. She has experience of working in a range of museum settings in both Iran and the US. In Summer 2019, she worked as a curatorial intern at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art and Design in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Kymberly S. Newberry is a PhD. candidate in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her ongoing dissertation research focuses on the contemporary artistic practices of the African continent, exploring its curatorial methods and pedagogies, placing them in conversation with museological approaches of the West. Her intervention considers the dilemmas of contextualizing/translating the material culture from the African continent once removed from its synaesthetic totality and placed in American art museums. Most recently Kymberly provided curatorial assistance for Arts of Africa, a new installation at Smith College Museum of Art under the direction of Dr. Christa Clarke. Kymberly holds a B.A. in International Relations from Mount Holyoke College and a M.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in African American Studies.

Ashley Patton is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation, “Tangible Women: Marble Sculptures of Female Saints and Mystics in Post-Tridentine Rome,” explores how marble sculptures of holy women in sacred spaces reflect the complex status of female sanctity in early modern Rome, and investigates how these artworks constructed and defined gender roles in the aftermath of the Council of Trent. She is also interested in the global impact of early modern Catholicism, including the trans-Atlantic relationships between Italy and the Americas in the seventeenth century.

Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked at the J. Paul Getty Museum as a Graduate Intern and the Getty Research Institute as a Research Assistant. She has also contributed to multiple museum exhibitions, including “Turkish Rugs on Tudor Walls: 16th Century Trade between England and the Islamic World” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and “Albrecht Dürer: Master of the Black Line” at the Huntington Library. She holds a BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MA from the University of California, Riverside.

Ali Printz is a historical painter, curator, and scholar who is pursuing a cross-disciplinary PhD in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. Her scholarly interests lie in the field of ecocriticism, the intersection between folk art and fine art, the influence of craft in defining Appalachian regionalism. She received her BFA in Painting and a BA in Art History from West Virginia University in 2009. Printz graduated with an MA in Contemporary Art from Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York City in 2012. She has worked in various iterations of the art world in both for profit and non-profit sectors as a curator, art handler, fabricator, and scholar before relocating to Philadelphia for her PhD.

Her most recent scholarly and artistic projects include the collaborative immersive installation, Appalachian Extraction, in 2020 with technology-based artist Ernie Roby-Tomic, participation in the 2020 CAA Conference in Chicago, the publication “The Modernist Appalachian Aesthetic: The Art of Patty Willis” in the June 2020 issue of Panorama: Journal of the Association of American Art, and receiving a William H. Truettner Fellowship at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, which will begin in fall 2021.

Indrani Saha is a PhD candidate in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture program at MIT. She studies modern art of the United States with a particular interest in histories of abstraction as they intersect with theories of mind, histories of spirituality, and reception theory. Her dissertation spotlights non-Western routes to the spiritual, and the agents who pursued them in more organizational roles within the American art scene. She was a 2019-2020 Junior Fellow at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies (BBQ+), and a 2020-2021 Teaching Development Fellow at MIT’s Teaching + Learning Lab. In 2021-2022, Saha will hold the Social Science Research Council’s Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal Fellowship. She received her BA in Cognitive Aesthetics from Duke University where she was a Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellow. While at Duke, she worked extensively with the Nasher Museum as a curatorial intern and student curator.

Tyler Shine is Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in twentieth-century art with interests in the African diaspora, time-based media, and modern design. His dissertation, “There Is No End to Out: Ecological Art in the Black Diaspora, 1941-2001,” combines Art History, Black Studies, and Environmental Studies to examine how Black artists engaged environmental questions in the second half of the twentieth century. Tyler was the Constance E. Clayton Fellow in the Prints, Drawings and Photographs Department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 2016 to 2018. Previously, he worked at the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History, The Phillips Collection, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. He holds a BA in Art History from the University of Pittsburgh and a MA in Art History from the University of Maryland, College Park and the University of Pennsylvania.

Delphine Sims is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley where she studies the history of photography in the Americas. Her research focuses on the ways in which race, gender, geography, and urbanity inform and redefine landscape photography. Most recently she was the Mellon Curatorial Intern at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) during which time she helped organize the 2019 exhibitions Unlimited: Recent Gifts from the William Goodman and Victoria Belco Collection and About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging. In 2018, she was a curatorial intern at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the photography department. Previously, Delphine was a curatorial assistant at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. She has worked on numerous museum exhibitions and contributed writings to several catalogues including Looking In, Looking Out: Latin American Photography (SBMA); Laurie Brown: Earth Edges (California Museum of Photography), New Time: Art and Feminisms in the Twenty-first Century (BAMPFA); and the forthcoming More Dreamers of the American Dream (Riverside Art Museum). In Fall 2021, Delphine will be the Andrew W. Mellon Art History Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Lauryn Smith is a PhD candidate in the Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Museum of Art Joint Art History Program, where she specializes in early modern Netherlandish painting and European decorative arts. Her dissertation examines the cabinets of Amalia van Solms-Braunfels (1602–1675), Princess of Orange, to illuminate instances of innovation and exchange in her collecting practices and patronage. Her research has been supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Decorative Arts Trust, and the Historians of Netherlandish Art. She has held curatorial placements and internships at a wide variety of cultural institutions and museums, including Christie’s, LAND Studio, the Cuming Museum, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

In 2017, Lauryn co-founded a now international, transdisciplinary technical art history collaboration that integrates traditional art historical methodologies with cutting-edge technological tools. For the 2021–2022 academic year, she will serve as the inaugural Frick Collection and Frick Art Reference Library Digital Art History Fellow. As the Frick DAH Fellow, Lauryn will embark on a new project that utilizes social network analysis to investigate the collecting practices of non-elite women in the seventeenth- century Dutch Republic and interrogate the perceived gendered societal norms of the early modern period.

Xin Wang is an art historian and curator based in New York. Past curatorial projects include “Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013); “Lu Yang: Arcade”, New York (2014); “THE BANK SHOW: Vive le Capital”, BANK, Shanghai (2015); “THE BANK SHOW: Hito Steyerl”, BANK, Shanghai (2015); “chin(A)frica: an interface”, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (2017); and “Life and Dreams: Photography and Media Art in China since the 1990s”, The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm (2018). Her writing has appeared in the E-Flux journal, Artforum, Kaleidoscope, Mousse, Flash Art, Art in America, Wallpaper, Leap, etc. She has lectured at institutions such as the Para/Site, Yale University, School of Visual Arts, Queens Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, Städelschule, and as the keynote speaker for the “Asia/Technics” conference at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2019). She has served on the jury of the Shed’s inaugural Open Call’s visual art panel, and nominated for Anonymous Was a Women and the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies’ Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism. Currently pursuing a PhD in modern and contemporary art—focusing on Soviet hauntology in Postmodernism—at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, Wang also works as the Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, producing a series of zoom lectures during the lockdowns: “Asian/American Perspectives,” “Technology and Fantasy,” “Eros,” as well as in-depth series on artists Salman Toor and Julie Mehretu. Upcoming projects include an exhibition that explores Asian Futurisms, a book chapter on AI and Culture, and Visiting Critic at the Yale School of Art in fall 2021.

Diana Yang is a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow at the Bard Graduate Center (BGC) in New York. Specialized in East Asian decorative arts and material culture, she is particularly interested in early modern ceramics and their pivotal roles in transnational maritime trade as well as in Japanese tea culture. Her ongoing dissertation project builds on her expertise in Asian ceramics and explores artistic and technological exchanges between Asian potters and Dutch merchants through the case study of Zhangzhou ceramics at the turn of the seventeenth century. Featuring cross-cultural conversations in the rst wave of globalization, her work aims to facilitate dialogues and build empathy across di erent communities. Prior to joining the BGC, Diana got an M.A. in museum studies/museum anthropology from Columbia University in the City of New York and has since conducted museum research in Japan, China, the Netherlands, and England, in addition to the United States.