Doctoral candidate Cindy Evans has accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Art & Design at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah. Cindy joins the faculty this fall as an assistant professor.

Cindy specializes in modern and global contemporary art. Her interests include postwar art in Germany and the Balkans, with a focus on social art history and cultural geopolitics. She is completing her dissertation, “Political Playgrounds: The Effekt Gruppe’s Interactive Art in Postwar West Germany and Yugoslavia,” under the direction of Dr. Tenley Bick, who writes,

Cindy’s dissertation makes a major historical and methodological intervention in the discourse on art of the Sixties and broader Cold War era. She is the first to conduct sustained scholarly research on the Effekt Group, a Munich-based artist collective connected to the trans-European “New Tendencies” circuit established in Zagreb in the early 1960s. Supported by her extensive fieldwork in Germany and Croatia, including her collection of landmark oral histories with surviving artists and documentation of artworks otherwise at risk of being lost, Cindy’s captivating history on Effekt finds and examines their artistic strategies (immersive exhibition formats, experiments with ephemeral materials, and network aesthetics) as an imagined “third way” solution for the divisive era of the 1960s. She is therefore emerging as the leading authority on this work and its connections to Yugoslav avant-gardes and “non-aligned” politics of the period. Distinguished by her bilingual command of German, work with living artists, and sophisticated understanding of under-studied international modernisms and Cold War politics, she is the first to bridge the growing scholarship on non-aligned Eastern European modernism with existing studies on art of postwar Germany, both East and West. In addition to her extensive teaching experience, Cindy brings an exciting research program and publication slate to the position at Southern Utah University.

Of her time at FSU, Evans writes:

FSU has been my home for the past several years providing me with friends who have become family, and a community who motivates me to be the best historian I can be. My education at FSU has strengthened my foundation in art history and expanded my vision of how it can impact our understanding of our global community.

I am particularly grateful for the mentorship of Dr. Tenley Bick and all the other professors and staff I have been able to work with while at FSU. Their diligence and insights have taught me to be persistent in my research and committed to my teaching. Their guidance has been instrumental in the development of my confidence as a researcher and with their encouragement, I have achieved goals I would not have thought possible.

 

Museum internships and gallery experiences during her graduate studies have paid off for alumna Ivy Bealyer (MA ’22), who took a position this year as Education Specialist at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg. 

As a master’s student in the Museum & Cultural Heritage Studies (MCHS) program, Ivy centered her research around the impact of temporary exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. In her second year Ivy participated in the Ringling Course, a yearlong intensive internship at The John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art, in which graduate students are exposed to every aspect of museum work. 

At The Ringling, Ivy was mentored by Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art Ola Wlusek. Ivy assisted Ola with artist and collection-based research for the exhibition Reclaiming Home: Contemporary Seminole Art, which opened in March, 2023. Ivy participated in interviews with artists Jessica Osceola and Tony Tiger, and edited portions of the manuscript for the exhibition catalog.

Working on the exhibition was an ideal convergence of Ivy’s studies and professional experience: “At FSU one of my favorite courses was Dr. Dowell’s Contemporary Native American Art seminar. It was a wonderful coincidence that Ola Wlusek was working on an exhibition with Contemporary Native American artists. I felt like I had some much context and everything came full circle.”

Throughout her undergraduate and graduate studies, Ivy also interned remotely for five years with Miami-based art agency ArtRepublic Global, managing the agency’s online marketplace, drafting exhibition plans, assisting with program production, and traveling to art conferences in New York and exhibition openings in Miami. 

At the MFA St. Petersburg, Ivy works at the intersection of executive administration and the education department. Her primary role is administration, based in the Director’s Office, supporting a re-accreditation effort which puts her in touch with all areas of the Museum. Ivy writes,

 

“A major theme in the MCHS program at FSU was the importance of integration and collaboration between departments in museums. This was also essential in the Ringling internship; we were able to participate in all aspects of museum operation and get an overview of how each department contributes to the whole institution. I’m excited to have a role that implements exactly these principles.”

Soon after she joined the museum, Ivy was able to travel to Chicago with a few members of the MFA team for EXPO CHICAGO. The international exposition of contemporary and modern art was held April 13-16, 2023. The Museum of Fine Arts was one of three institutions to receive the annual Northern Purchase Prize, awarding them the acquisition of a work of art of their choice from an emerging artist shown in the fair’s EXPOSURE Section. There the MFA announced the acquisition of Ahua Can by Claudia Peña Salinas. 

The museum staff were also there to celebrate the second rendition of Gio Swaby’s solo exhibition Gio Swaby: Fresh Up, organized by the MFA St. Petersburg in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition, curated by Melinda Watt and Katherine Pill, was on view from May to October, 2022, in St. Petersburg before it was moved to Chicago.

 

“I’m so excited to be back in museums,” Ivy writes. “I received a broad range of experiences at FSU. Research and development are key components of public programming and I’ve taken those tools and thrown them back into museum education. Most of all I’m eager to learn the ins and outs of museum administration. It’s in the Director’s office that you actually understand the breadth of museum work, and honestly I’ve only touched the surface.”