The Florida State University Art History directors and staff welcome you to the 2023–24 academic year! Whether you are a new or returning student or faculty member, a current or prospective member of our community of scholars, we have exciting news and plans to share with you, new faculty members and students to introduce, and many opportunities to meet with your FSU Art History community.

We are delighted to introduce two new faculty members in Art History: Dr. Mora Beauchamp-Byrd, Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Museum & Cultural Heritage Studies, and Dr. Brendan Weaver, Visiting Assistant Professor, visual and material cultures of Latin America. We also welcome thirteen new MA students to our graduate programs this year, and three new doctoral students. The graduate and undergraduate student organizations are planning the year’s events and holding elections for open posts; we will post updates on our committees page in the coming weeks.

 

The Symposium Committee is pleased to announce the keynote speaker for our 40th annual Art History Graduate Symposium in the spring: Dr. Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University. The committee is busy now planning events and preparing the call for papers for this milestone Symposium, which will be held on March 1–2, 2024, and preparing to publish papers from the previous Symposium in Athanor in October. Elections are in progress for two positions on the 2023–24 Symposium Committee, to join Brooke Belcher, Hudson Kauffman, Tanya Pattison, Madison Gilmore-Duffey (Athanor Co-editor), and Emma Huston (Athanor Editor).

On September 7, we hosted the second annual BA Fair for students majoring or interested in Art History. This event, initiated by Director of Undergraduate Studies Tenley Bick, featured representatives of the College of Fine Arts recruitment office, University Libraries (Leah Sherman), the Honors Program, Career Center (Anissa Ford), and the Museum of Fine Arts (Annie Booth), as well as department faculty, staff, graduate students, and student organization officers. Students in all levels of study and various majors enjoyed the opportunity to socialize with professors and staff outside the classroom and offices.

We’ll have many opportunities for gathering this semester, starting with the Museum of Fine Arts exhibition opening at 6pm on Thursday evening, September 14, of Intertwined: Labor and Technology in Contemporary Textile Arts, curated by Art History alumni Keidra Daniels Navaroli and Annie Booth. The Undergraduate Art History Association (UAHA) will host Coffee Hour in the Rose Library (WJB 2020) on Tuesday, September 19, from 8 to 11 am. UAHA will also host a guided tour of the Museum of Fine Arts on October 5. The graduate Art History Association (AHA) hosts monthly Friday social gatherings and is planning a variety of other community events. Follow UAHA (@uahafsu)  and the department (@arthistoryfsu) on Instagram for the latest news and events!

Letter from the Chair:

Dear students:

In his Metaphysics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC) remarked: “It is through wonder that men [and women] now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters.”

For Aristotle, the wonder that leads to philosophy, and more generally, to knowledge, was evidence that we ask questions––we wonder––in order to satisfy not our bodily needs and instincts, but a spiritual (or intellectual) urge within us. This wonder we commonly define as curiosity, and it is the drive that pushes us not only to find reasons for the unknown, but also to challenge ourselves: our fear to think critically and to lose our certainties. If you are in our department, we expect you to be animated by insatiable curiosity. We want you to push us all, the faculty, not only to provide you with the tools for answering your questions, but also to fill you with renewed curiosity. Without your thirst for knowledge, our teaching would be of little value.

This year, we have introduced a new format for our two surveys. Through the theme of “encounters” in art history, from prehistory to the contemporary world, we aim to arouse your curiosity, and to make you wonder at the endless ways in which works of art and artifacts convey historical meaning, synthesize differing and sometimes antagonistic cultures, and propose change.

We are also introducing changes in our graduate program this year. For the first time in many years, we are again offering our MA students in art history the possibility of compiling a thesis as a capstone project. In this way, we now allow students curious about the feats and challenges of research to explore this possible pathway to their future.

This year, two new faculty members have joined our ranks: Dr. Mora Beauchamp-Byrd and Dr. Brendan Weaver. Having straddled a career between museums and universities, Dr. Beauchamp-Byrd, an expert in the history of the arts of the African diaspora in North America and England, will be directing our prestigious Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies program. An anthropologist and an archaeologist, Dr. Weaver has a unique knowledge of the visual culture and everyday life of the numerous enslaved Africans working in Jesuit haciendas in Peru. Thanks to these two new colleagues, we will be able to expand our Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies program.

Stay tuned, share your curiosity with us, and we will make sure that “by gradual progression” you will be able in a near future to fuel your own wonder through an independent and critically-grounded wondering.

Sincerely yours,

Lorenzo Pericolo

We are excited to welcome Dr. Mora Beauchamp-Byrd to Florida State University this fall as Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies. An art historian, arts administrator, and curator, she specializes in the art and visual culture of the African Diaspora; Art of the Americas, with a focus on Modern & Contemporary African American art and Caribbean art; British art, including appropriations of the 18th-century graphic narratives of William Hogarth, and The Black Arts Movement in Britain during the 1980s and 90s; Global modern & contemporary art; Museum & Curatorial studies; and representations of race, class and gender in American comics, with an emphasis on animation and African American newspaper comics during the Golden Age of Comics (1938-1955).

I am truly excited about joining my new colleagues here in the Department of Art History at FSU! I am also thrilled about opportunities for developing collaborative projects with our amazing students in Art History and in MCHS, with the FSU Museum of Fine Arts, The Ringling Museum, College of Fine Art faculty members from departments such as Art, Art Education, The School of Dance, The School of Theatre, and departments and programs across campus as we chart new possibilities for Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies. This is such a supportive environment for my research as well, and I am enthusiastically preparing courses that focus on global histories and theories of curatorial practice; on histories of American comics (including animation, newspaper comic strips, and graphic novels); and recent critical approaches to the study of modern and contemporary African American art.

In recent years, Dr. Beauchamp-Byrd has taught courses such as Art of the United States; Art of the African Diaspora; Art Since 1960; The Black Atlantic; Black Popular Culture (Race and Gender in American Comics); Contemporary Art; History of American Comics; History of Graphic Design; Intro to Africana Studies; Intro. to Global Art; Intro to Museum and Curatorial Studies; Mining the Museum; Modern Art; Modern and Contemporary African American Art; Museum Practicum I, II and III; and 20th Century Art.

Dr. Beauchamp-Byrd has organized numerous exhibitions including Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966-1996 (presented at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Caribbean Cultural Center, and The Studio Museum in Harlem); When I Am Not Here/Estoy Alla: Photographs by Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons; Struggle and Serenity: The Visionary Art of Elizabeth Catlett; Transcending Silence: The Life and Poetic Legacy of Audre Lorde; Petrona Morrison and Veronica Ryan: Sculptural Works; The Worldview of Katherine Dunham; Picturing Creole New Orleans: The Photographs of Arthur P. Bedou ; and Little Nemo’s Progress: Animation and Contemporary Art.

Currently, she is completing a manuscript focused on the early to mid-twentieth-century portraiture of the New Orleans-born photographer Arthur P. Bedou (1882-1966).

Since 2020, Dr. Beauchamp-Byrd has been a member of the Board of Directors of the College Art Association (CAA), where she served on the Executive Committee as Vice President for Publications from 2021-2023. Since 2021, she has also served as an Exhibition Reviews Co-Editor at Panorama, Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art.