Art history graduate students contributed to a University of Delaware exhibition, Grounded Innovation: Pueblo Arts of Clay, hosted by UD Library, Museums and Press at the Old College Gallery in spring 2022. The exhibition featured clay vessels and curios from the private Jude and Eric Roberson collection and the growing University Museums collections of historical and contemporary Indigenous art. It explored how contemporary Pueblo artists innovate to strengthen bonds with their ancestors and homelands.
Art history student Victoria Sunnergren served as the guest curator. She graduated from UD in May 2023 with a Ph.D. in art history, criticism, and conservation. The collaboration involved Sunnergren, Museums staff, and a curatorial collective of M.A. and Ph.D. students: Rachel Allen, Emily Beeber, María Carrillo-Marquina, Catherine Cyr, Emily Francisco, Anisha Gupta, Julia Hamer-Light, Rose Sheehan, Dakota Stevens, and Sarah Sudres. Jessica Horton, Ph.D., an associate professor of art history, served as the faculty advisor.
The students studied the aesthetic, cultural, ecological, and economic histories of Native American art as part of the Mellon Curatorial Studies seminar, Curating Contemporary Native Art. The course, taught by Horton in fall 2021, provided practical, theoretical, and ethical training in curatorial practice anchored in the field of Native North American art history, with an intensive focus on Pueblo clay arts.
To plan the exhibition, the students engaged in virtual and in-person conversations with Pueblo artists, curators, educators, art collectors, and UD development and museums staff. Working both independently and collaboratively, the students researched the artworks and developed labels and wall text for the exhibition subthemes.
The exhibition remains open to the public online, with photography and written descriptions by the students about the artists and the historical significance of the pieces. It includes a video interview and demonstration with artist Bobby Silas.
Annual lecture recognizes Native American women artists
The Department of Art History also recognized the work of Native American artists with its annual Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Track Ph.D. Lecture on October 28, 2021. UD welcomed award-winning co-curators, Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Ph.D., associate curator of Native American art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA), and Teri Greeves, artist, independent curator, and member of the Kiowa Nation. In their lecture, “To Honor and Respect: Recognizing Native Women in Hearts of Our People,” Yohe and Greeves discussed the vision, development, and creation of their award-winning exhibition, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists.
Presented in close cooperation with an advisory board of top Native women artists and scholars, this first major exhibition of artwork by Indigenous women honored the achievements of more than 115 artists from the United States and Canada, spanning 1,000 years. MIA organized the exhibition, which traveled to the Frist Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Philbrook Museum of Art in 2019 and 2020.
Yohe and Greeves discussed how their triumphs—from pottery, textiles, and painting to photographic portraits—showed astonishing innovation and technical mastery. The co-curators also provided UD’s community of art historians and curators-in-training with a candid account of the intensive process of working with a large and diverse advisory board.
About the Department of Art History
The Department of Art History at the University of Delaware is dedicated to education and research in the history of the visual arts. It has an established national and international reputation as the home of leading specialists in the field. It is also a hub for accessing important art centers in the Mid-Atlantic region. With special strengths in American and European art and architecture, the department offers an expansive coverage of the arts and culture of historical periods internationally, from Greco-Roman antiquity to the present. Broader geo-cultural fields are covered as well, such as Chinese, Latin American, and African art.
The Department of Art History is committed to undergraduate education for majors and non-majors and to training graduate students who will be competitive at the higher reaches of their discipline as educators, museum curators, and scholars. Its undergraduate program includes the general major, nine double majors, two minors, honors degrees, and an option for majors to earn an M.A. degree through the 4+1 program. For graduate students, the department offers M.A. and Ph.D. degrees.
Article by Jessica Horton, Ph.D., and University of Delaware staff
Image courtesy of UD Library, Museums and Press.
June 1, 2022
