American Identities on Land and At Sea

Dr. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser is the Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (appointed in 2010) where she completed work on the new American Paintings and Sculpture galleries which opened in January 2012.  She is currently working on the major exhibition: Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, which opens at The Met in January 2018 and the National Gallery, London, in June 2018. Betsy served as the Co-curator for the following exhibitions at the Met:  Rediscovering Thomas Hart Benton’s “America Today” Murals, 2014; Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River, 2015; and John Singer Sargent’s Portraits of the Arts: Artists, Writers, Actors, and Musicians, 2015.  She served as the Chief Curator, and Krieble Curator of American Painting and Sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art from 1997 to 2010.  Her special exhibitions (all of which traveled) and accompanying catalogues for the Wadsworth Atheneum include: American Moderns on Paper (Yale University Press, 2010-11); Neue Welt: Erfindung der Amerikanischen Malerie (New World: Discovering an American Art, 2007), an international project with the Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg, Germany; Samuel Colt: Arms, Art, and Invention (Yale University Press, 2006); Marsden Hartley (Yale University Press, 2003); Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe & American Modernism (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 1999); New Worlds from Old: 19th-Century Australian & American Landscapes (National Gallery of Art, Canberra, Australia, 1998); Joseph Cornell: Box Constructions and Collages (1997); Thomas Cole: Landscape Into History (1994); and Ralph Earl: The Face of the Young Republic (Yale University Press, 1991). Her catalogue for the Ralph Earl exhibition won the 1992 Frances Tavern Museum Book Award.

Kornhauser has a Ph.D. from Boston University with a specialty in American paintings and an M.A. from Cooperstown Graduation Programs, SUNY, Cooperstown, NY, in American Folk Art and Culture.  She began her curatorial career in 1976 at the Smith College Art Museum, and in 1980 at the Long Island (now Brooklyn) Historical Society in Brooklyn, NY. She co-organized the exhibition and catalogue: Brooklyn Before the Bridge, for the Brooklyn Museum in 1982. In 1983 she joined the Wadsworth Atheneum as Associate Curator of American Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings.  In 1988 she was promoted to Curator of the American Paintings and Sculpture and was named Chairperson of the Curatorial Department.  In 1997 Kornhauser was appointed Chief Curator and Krieble Curator of American Painting and Sculpture. She was named Deputy Director in 1999, and served as the museum’s Acting Director in 2000.  During her tenure at the Wadsworth Atheneum, she greatly enhanced the collections with major purchases and gifts of American art.

Kornhauser is a graduate of the Getty Leadership Institute, Los Angeles, class of 2006. She has been the recipient of numerous grants, awards and Fellowships from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and The American Academy in Rome, among others. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in American art at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, and courses for New York area universities at The Metropolitan Museum.

Emily Casey is a doctoral candidate in the department of art history at the University of Delaware, and is currently a fellow in the American Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her dissertation, “Waterscapes: Representing the Sea in the American Imagination, 1760-1815,” explores how eighteenth-century British Americans visualized their place in a global world through representations of the sea in art, literature, and material culture. Emily has received numerous grants and fellowships to support her research from the University of Delaware, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts, the Peabody-Essex Museum, and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London in the UK. Emily received her A.B. from Smith College. In addition to her research, she has worked at the Smith College Museum of Art, Winterthur Museum, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Sophie Lynford is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art at Yale University. She specializes in British and American art with a focus on the visual and material exchange between Britain and America in the nineteenth century. She received her M.A. and M.Phil from Yale and her B.A. in the History of Art and Architecture from Brown University, where her work investigated the relationship between the critic Clement Greenberg and the sculptor David Smith. She has contributed to catalogs and exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society and the Yale Center for British Art, most recently to Spreading Canvas: Eighteenth-Century British Marine Painting, which was on view in New Haven this past fall.

Sophie’s dissertation, "Painting Dissent: The Pre-Raphaelite Experiment in America," argues that the work of the American Pre-Raphaelites incorporated a much wider range of styles and ideologies than has been previously understood. Employing an Atlanticist approach, she evaluates the American Pre-Raphaelites’ reception and subsequent absorption of British models of landscape theory and practice. In September 2017, Sophie will be the Douglass Foundation Fellow in American Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Whitney Thompson conducted her undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree with University Honors in the History of Art and Film and Video Studies. After working in New York City museums for five years, she entered the PhD program in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY, to study nineteenth-century U.S. art and architecture under Professor Katherine Manthorne. She is simultaneously earning a certificate in The Graduate Center's American Studies program. This spring, she will defend her dissertation, "Foreign-born Artists Making “American” Pictures: The Immigrant Experience and the Art of the United States, 1819-1893," which examines the assimilation experiences of nineteenth-century, foreign-born American artists in relationship to the larger patterns of immigrant behavior. To develop her dissertation, Thompson has conducted research in Germany under CASVA’s Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fellowship for Historians of American Art to Travel Abroad and at the U.S. Capitol Building as a Capitol Historical Society fellow. Thompson has also been awarded The Graduate Center’s Martin E. Segal Dissertation Fellowship, the Catherine Hoover Voorsanger Fellowship, a Graduate Teaching Fellowship, and the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Internship in The Metropolitan Museum's American Wing. Thompson currently teaches the History of American Art as an adjunct professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY, and Hunter College, CUNY. Her conference paper stems from her dissertation, which includes chapters on the landscape imagery of painter Thomas Cole and Currier and Ives lithographer Frances Palmer.

Elizabeth Hutchinson is Associate Professor of North American art history at Barnard College/Columbia University in New York City where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on U.S. and indigenous North American art and visual culture and supervises BA and MA students in American Studies. She is the author of The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890-1915, which addresses the production and promotion of Native American art at institutions supported by government and social reform agencies who presented it as both modernist and anti-modern.  The book uses objects, photographs and contemporary publications to plumb both the Anglo-American and the Native American experience of this "craze."  As Hutchinson asserts, because of the way it was valued by mainstream viewers, Native art was one of the only aspects of "traditional" Native culture that was tolerated by a federal government committed to solving the "Indian problem" through assimilation.

Hutchinson is currently working on a book about Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of the Pacific Coast of North America that examines pictures made for the United States government from a perspective that links the critical commitments of indigenous studies and ecocriticism.  A piece of this project has recently appeared in Picturing, volume one of the Terra Foundation Essays series.  She has also produced a number of shorter studies of late nineteenth-century  landscape painting and photography that have appeared in the journals October, and American Art as well as in several exhibition catalogs.

In addition, Hutchinson is the author of several studies of portraits of Native diplomats made in the Early Republic that have sought to give legibility to the critical work done by indigenous artists to assert tribal identity and sovereignty within the historical frameworks of intercultural exchange.  This work can be found in Winterthur Portfolio, British Journal of American Studies and the volume Global Trade and the Visual Arts in Federal New England, edited by Patricia Johnston and Caroline Frank.  

Professor Hutchinson has enjoyed working closely with museums.  She has contributed to exhibitions at the BYU Art Museum, the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Terra Foundation.  In 2016, she curated an exhibition "Messages Across Time and Space: Inupiat Drawings from the 1890s at Columbia University," that was on view at the gallery at the Center for the Study for Ethnicity and Race.  Hutchinson's research has been supported by several institutions including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Clark Art Institute, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and the American Council for Learned Societies.

Michelle Foa is an Associate Professor of European art from the 18th through the early 20th centuries in the Newcomb Art Department of Tulane University, with a particular focus on 19th-century French art, visual and material culture, and criticism.  Her first book, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, was published in 2015 by Yale University Press.  Professor Foa situates Seurat’s body of work as a sustained meditation on different forms of visual engagement with the outside world and the diverse states of mind that these visual experiences can elicit.  She places particular emphasis on Seurat’s investigation into the relationship between vision and knowledge, interpreting his work in close relation to 19th-century scientific discourses on the operation of the senses and their role in how we come to understand the world.  In addition to her work on Seurat, Professor Foa has published numerous essays on 19th- and 20th-century painting, photography, art criticism, and literature, and she has lectured domestically and internationally on her research.

Professor Foa’s current book project focuses on the diverse body of work of Edgar Degas, which she interprets as a reflection of the artist’s profound and long-standing interest in materiality.  Her other research and teaching interests include Europe’s global encounters in the 18th and 19th centuries, the materials of art, the relationship between art and science, and art historiography and criticism. 

Professor Foa completed her doctorate at Princeton University in 2008, the same year that she began teaching at Tulane.  She has also taught at Mount Holyoke College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton.

She is currently the William L. Duren ’26 Professor at Tulane and a Monroe Research Fellow at Tulane’s New Orleans Center for the Gulf South.

Ross Barrett is an assistant professor of American art at Boston University. He is the author of Rendering Violence: Riots, Strikes, and Upheaval in Nineteenth-Century American Art (2014) and the co-editor, with Daniel Worden, of Oil Culture (2014). He is currently at work on a second monograph, Speculative Landscapes: American Art and Real Estate in the Long Nineteenth Century, that examines five American artists—Thomas Cole, John Quidor, Eastman Johnson, Martin Johnson Heade, and Winslow Homer—who painted and speculated on land in the years between 1820 and 1910.

Stephanie L. Herdrich is Assistant Research Curator of American Painting and Sculpture at The Metropolitan Museum. Her work focuses on late nineteenth-century American paintings and drawings. She was co-curator of the Met's presentation of Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends (2015) and Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River (2015). In addition to contributing to the exhibitions and publications Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (2004) and Thomas Hart Benton's America Today Mural Rediscovered (2014), she has published several essays on the work of John Singer Sargent, and is co-author of American Drawings and Watercolors in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: John Singer Sargent (2000). She attended Washington University in St. Louis and received a PhD and Curatorial Studies certificate from The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She is currently planning an exhibition focusing on Winslow Homer in the Caribbean.

Chanda Laine Carey is the Andrew W. Mellon Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at the New York University Center for the Humanities.  She specializes in Contemporary art in global context, and presents her research internationally.  Her work focuses on the transcultural aesthetics of Contemporary art, with an emphasis on artists whose practices reflect the influence of cosmopolitan worldviews and experiences.  Her research agenda reaches across borders and cultures, disciplines and media, pursuing a more diverse and inclusive scholarly approach to the criticism and history of Contemporary art.  These studies frequently explore the global geographies of artists’ interest in philosophy, science, and religion.  Her dissertation and ongoing research on Marina Abramovic addresses the development of Abramovic’s transcultural performance aesthetic as a reflection of her spiritual life and global travels, the role of public participation in her work, recent collaborations with neuroscience, and the accelerating globalization of her image in the media.  

Dr. Carey has published widely on American artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Jack Whitten, and Lita Albuquerque, as well as international artists Marina Abramovic (Serbia), Xu Bing (China), and Vik Muniz (Brazil).  Her criticism has appeared in NKA: Journal of African Contemporary Art, YISHU: Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art, and artillery magazine.  The art of the African diaspora features strongly in her research, with multiple studies of Contemporary African American artists in curatorial and academic contexts.  She has contributed research to the exhibition Dimensions of Black at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and presented her research on Jean-Michel Basquiat for the Association of Critical Race Art History.

She holds a PhD in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the University of California at San Diego, and an MA in Theory and Criticism from Art Center College of Design. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the European Science Foundation, the Max and Iris Stern International Symposia, and the Société Européene pour l’Astronomie dans la Culture have supported her research.

Andrea Grover is the Executive Director of Guild Hall as of September 1, 2016. She was formerly the Century Arts Foundation Curator of Special Projects at the Parrish Art Museum, where she initiated new models for temporary and off-site exhibitions via the Museum’s Platform and Parrish Road Show series. From 1998–2008, she was the Founding Director of Houston’s Aurora Picture Show, a non-profit cinema specializing in media art and the presentation of multi-disciplinary performances and screenings. In addition to ten years of film and video programming at Aurora, she has curated film programs for both the Dia Art Foundation and The Menil Collection. 

In 2010, she was awarded a Warhol Curatorial Fellowship, jointly hosted by the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, to research artists working at the intersection of science and technology. The outcome of that Fellowship is the 2011 publication, New Art/Science Affinities, co-authored with Claire Evans, Régine Debatty, Pablo Garcia, and the design collaborative Thumb, that profiles over 60 contemporary artists working in maker culture, hacking, artistic research, citizen science, and computational art. The corresponding exhibition, Intimate Science, opened at Miller Gallery in January 2012, and toured to Southern Exposure, San Francisco, Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT, Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA, Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum, University of Louisiana, Lafayette, LA, and Sheila C. Johnson Design Center (SJDC), Parsons The New School for Design, New York, NY. Intimate Science followed her earlier exploration of artists working across disciplines in 29 Chains to the Moon, an exhibition curated for Miller Gallery in 2009. Her earliest exhibitions exploring collective creativity were Phantom Captain, presented at apexart, New York, in 2006, and Never Been to Tehran, co-curated with artist Job Rubin, and presented at Parkingallery, Tehran, Iran, in 2008. She studied Visual Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA 1995), Syracuse University (BFA 1992), and Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design (1991). She was a Core Fellow in residence at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from 1995-1997, and was a 2013 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow. In 2014, Grover received the prestigious Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award for the exhibition, Radical Seafaring at the Parrish Art Museum in 2016.

Photo Credit: Michael Halsband

Mary Mattingly is a visual artist.  In 2015, she completed a two-part sculpture “Pull” for the International Havana Biennial with the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Mary Mattingly’s work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, the Seoul Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and the Palais de Tokyo. With the U.S. Department of State and Bronx Museum of the Arts she participated in the smARTpower project, traveling to Manila. In 2009 Mattingly founded the Waterpod Project, a barge-based public space and self-sufficient habitat that hosted over 200,000 visitors in New York. In 2014, an artist residency on the water called WetLand launched in Philadelphia. It is being utilized by the University of Pennsylvania’s Environmental Humanities program. She recently transformed a military trailer into a social space and launched Swale, a floating food forest in New York. Mattingly is engaged in questions about how art can influence policy and strengthen the commons.