MONICA BAUER presented her paintings in a solo exhibition titled “Pictura” at Amos Eno Gallery in the  Dumbo area of Brooklyn, February 4-28, 2009.

SAM BRYAN continues his work with motion picture archives.  Over the past year he has had on-going  negotiations and shipments of films to the Showa-Kan National Museum (Tokyo), the Library of Congress  (Washington,DC) Aquila Polonica (Los Angeles) and ITV (London). He has attended and participated in  the national meetings of Film Archivists (Rochester, NY and Savanah,GA), Orphans Film Symposium (NYC)  and Cinema Studies (Philadelphia).  He continues on the board of the New York Film Council, planning  monthly meetings (such as recent Cuban films at the new Maysles Cinema in Harlem and NYC documentaries  at the 42nd Street Public Library).  He was also promoted recently at Pratt from Associate Professor  to Professor.

Last May, SANDRA CHENG was awarded the University of Delaware’s Wilbur Owen Sypherd Prize in the  Humanities for Outstanding Dissertation of the Year.  She presented a paper entitled, “Collective  Play: Drawing Games in the Carracci Academy” at the 2008 Renaissance Society of America conference in  Chicago.  Currently, she is preparing an essay, “Parodies of Life: Baccio del Bianco’s comic drawings  of dwarfs in Seicento Florence,” for publication in Parody and Festivity (working title), edited by  David R. Smith.

MARY D. EDWARDS co-chaired an art history session at the 97th annual meeting of the College Art  Association in Los Angeles in February with Elizabeth Bailey, Professor of Art History at Wesleyan  College. The title of the session was “Gravity and Levity in Art.” There were five papers about art  that deals with the physical phenomenon of gravity, whether succumbing to this force or defying it.  The papers included one on ascent and descent in Nardo di Cione’s 14th-century Florentine frescoes  inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. Another concerned the portrayal of the socio-political  gravitational theories in the cubist art of the Czech painter, Bohumil Kubišta. Finally, one pertained  to Salvador Dali’s use of the anti-gravity theories of Marcel Pagés in his surrealist painting,  Railway Station at Perpignan.  In March, she spoke at Wesleyan College on the pre-historic Native  American Mound Builders of the Eastern Woodlands; the Virgin Mary as interpreted by Altichiero in his  14th-century frescoes in Padua; Primitivism in 20th century Art; and the connections between Native  American and Non-western art.

DIANA GISOLFI’s review of the exhibition, L’Ultimo Tiziano (Vienna and Venice, 2008), was published in  caareviews.org in July. Her review of two recent books on Titian was published in the same venue in  August. Renaissance Quarterly invited (and printed in December) her review of Jaffe’s book on Battista  Zelotti’s fresco cycle at Cataio. In collaboration with Sarah McHam of Rutgers, Gisolfi is organizing  and contributing to a session on the Marciana Library for the Renaissance Society of America  conference to be held in Venice in April of 2010. In Spring 2009 Gisolfi spoke in the conference on  Chemistry and Art organized by Eleonora del Federico.  Additionally, Gisolfi participated with  Venetian Renaissance colleagues and conservators on March 8 in the Scholar’s Day associated with the  Boston Museum of Fine Arts exhibition: Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese.

FRIMA FOX HOFRICHTER, while on sabbatical 2008-09, has been a consultant to the North Carolina Museum  of Art for their Dutch and Flemish catalogues.  She is also the Consultative Curator for the Judith  Leyster at 400exhibition which will open at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC June 21st thru  November 28, 2009.  Hofrichter is a member of CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts and the Dutch Book  Review Editor for the HNA (Historians of Netherlandish Art) where she wrote several reviews for them  this year.  She is also one of the authors for the 8th edition of Janson’s Basic History of Art,  published in October.

JANET KARDON curated “Conversations in Clay”, an exhibition of installations by nine prominent ceramic  artists for the Katonah Museum.

RICHARD LESLIE has published these reviews for Art Nexus, an international journal for contemporary  Latin art: “Iran do Espiritu Santo” at Sean Kelly (NYC, Vol.7, no. 71, December 2008-February, 2009,  138-139); “Eugenio Dittborn” at Alexander and Bonin (NYC, Vol.7, no. 70 September-December, 2008,  145-146); and “Saint Clair Cemin” at Sikkema Jenkins (NYC, Vol.7, no. 70, September-December, 2008,  148-149).  He completed for their March 2009 publication one review (“Pedro Meyer’s Heresies Project”  at the Queens Museum, NYC) and one feature article, “Alexandre Arrechea: The Emerging Dialogue of  Social Identity” for the 10th Havana Biennale.  His article “Dialogues in Difference: Donald Kuspit  and Lawrence Alloway” will appear in the 2009 festschrift for Donald Kuspit titled Donald Kuspit and  the New Art Criticism: Mercury’s Hermetic Message, published by the University of Liverpool Press, UK.  His touring script for the “Projects” section of Art Basel, Miami for the international art critics  press was completed under contract in December 2008, Art Basel, Miami.  He gratefully returns to  completing his next book by summer 2009, “Lawrence Alloway and the Emergence of Topical Criticism.”   Additionally, Leslie will be part of the panel “Multidisciplinary Art: Symbol or Fad?”, part of a  larger conference on art and science, ArcheTime, on June 6, 2009 at the Tank Space for Performing and  Visual Arts, NYC.

MICHELE LICALSI is completing a commissioned portrait of Dr. Henry C. Moses, Headmaster of Trinity  School in New York. Founded in 1709, Trinity is the oldest continuously operating educational  institution in the city, where Dr. Moses served the school for seventeen years and died unexpectedly  in 2008. The portrait will be unveiled in a ceremony in May as part of the school’s tercentennial.

MARSHA MORTON presented a lecture, “Nature and Soul: Austrian Responses to Ernst Haeckel’s  Evolutionary Monism,” in June 2008 at a symposium held at the Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt, Germany)  in connection with the exhibition Darwin: Art and the Search for Origins.  Her talk has been published  as an essay in the catalogue for that exhibition, curated by Pamela Kort, which opened February 5,  2009.  She has also published “From Monera to Man: Haeckel, Darwinismus, and Nineteenth-Century German  Art,” in The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture, ed. Barbara Larson and Fae  Brauer (University Press of New England, 2009).  She delivered a paper, “Max Klinger and the  Psychology of Hypnosis, Nerves and the Unconscious Self,” in Helsinki, Finland last August in the  session “Art and Psychology” at the conference of the International Society for the Study of European  Ideas.

Last April, ADEKUNBI ONI’s paper, “Afro-Brazilian Architecture in Lagos, 1850 – 1950” was included in  the session, “Transnational Exchange in African Architectures and Urbanisms” at the 2009 Society of  Architectural Historians Annual Meeting in Pasadena, CA.

JOYCE POLISTENA published The Religious Paintings of Eugène Delacroix 1798-1863: The Initiator of the  Style of Modern Religious Art (Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). Pratt Libraries sponsored a book signing  event to celebrate the publication, which was hosted by Patricia Cutright, Director of Libraries, and  Jean Hines at Pratt Manhattan. Polistena published The Unknown Delacroix in the national weekly  Americamagazine (2009). She delivered a lecture titled, Liberal Catholicism between the Romantic and  the Modern: Eugène Delacroix and His Time at the historic Catholic Worker (f.1933).

In December 2008, KATARINA V. POSCH was invited by the University of Art and Design in Kyoto, Japan as  a keynote speaker for a conference under the title Designing the Transience (Monono-Ahare): A New  Relationship between Art and Life, in commemoration of the 1000th anniversiary of the first written  novel “The Tale of Genji” by the court lady Murasaki Shikibu.  She gave a 90 minute lecture titled  “Mono no Aware in Today’s Japanese Design: A Material Culture in Comparison with Europe and America,”  comparing cultural attitudes toward materialism on three continents.  A few days later, Posch  delivered another lecture, invited by the National University of Education in Tokyo. The lecture was  intended to students in the department of Education in 3-Dimensional Design, titled “Cultural  Preconditions of Chair Design in Europe.”  In New York, she is serving currently as a committee and  jury member for a competition under the theme of “Creative Migration – Austrian Artists in New York.”  This open space project is organized by the Austrian Cultural Forum in NY, to select and exhibit  artists’ works from all fields. Further, she continues to serve as a member on the Exhibition  Development committee for the Museum of Arts and Design, which opened its new building on Columbus  Circle last September.

KYUNGHEE PYUN published the article, “Foundation Legends in the Illuminated Missal of Saint-Denis:  Interplay of Liturgy, Hagiography, and Chronicle” in Viator, journal published under the auspices of  the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of California, Los Angeles (vol. 39,  number 2, 2008, pp. 143-192).  It is derived from her research funded by the David E. Finely  Fellowship of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art,  Washington DC during 2001-2003.  She has also collaborated with Anna Russakoff, professor at the  American University of Paris to edit a book on a medieval French artist, Jean Pucelle.  Their book  entitled Jean Pucelle, A Medieval Artist: Innovation and Collaboration in Manuscript Painting has been  under contract with Brepols, a renowned academic publisher in Belgium and will be circulated in 2011.

VANESSA ROCCO is Assistant Curator at the International Center of Photography, and Curatorial Advisor  for the exhibition The Universal Archive: The Condition of the Document and Modern Photographic Utopia  which was on view at the MACBA Barcelona from October 2008 – January 2009. The exhibition now travels  to Museo Berardo de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal from March – May 2009.  Her essay on architectonic  photography in Italian Fascist exhibitions appeared in the related publication Public Photographic  Spaces: Exhibitions of Propaganda, from “Pressa” to “The Family of Man,” 1928-1955 (Barcelona: Museu  d’Art Contemporani) which was released in March 2009.

In 2008 KATERINA ROMANENKO received a Professional Development grant from PSC-CUNY Fund, and spent one  month in Russia working in archives and libraries of St. Petersburg. She presented  her papers at the  Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference, held at the New York University,  at the Parson/Cooper-Hewitt  Symposium (Cooper-Hewitt Museum, NYC), and at the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East  European Languages (AATSEEL) Conference in San Francisco. Her paper “Photomontage for the Masses:  Visual Language of the Soviet Periodical Press, 1929-1939” was accepted for the publication in the  Design Issues in 2009.

JACK TOOLIN participated in two exhibitions this year: “Perfect View,” a project that explores the  topographical sublime through the use of Geographic Information Systems and social networking was  exhibited at the San Jose Museum of Art as part of the “Road Trip” exhibition that ran from September  19th, 2008 to January 25th, 2009.  “Manhattan Cache: Exchanging Neighborhood Knowledge,” a  characterization of Manhattan neighborhoods from the residents’ perspective, was initiated during the  Conflux 2008 festival of locative media, and will be continuing through 2009.  Co-written with  Christiane Paul, Toolin published two works: “Information Arts: Adventures in the Creative Use of  Information as Medium,” in the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences and “Impulses: The  Technological and Conceptual Lineage of New Media Art,” which will be included in the forthcoming book  “Tools: Analogues and Intersections: Video and Media Art Histories.”