Three undergraduate Art History & Archaeology majors and minors have been awarded the 2021 Ottoson Summer Travel Awards.
We are grateful to Mary Ottoson for continuing to generously support summer travel awards that are open to both our majors and minors. Our students are invited to propose a research or study project anywhere in the world. Should the pandemic make travel difficult in the coming summer, the students will be able to use the awards next year as travel conditions become safe.
The following three majors and minors have won the competition for the 2021 Ottoson Summer Travel Awards:
Hannah Ward - Art History & Archaeology Major, Class of 2021, current Greenberg Fellow (for the exhibition “Women’s Work”)
Hannah will be spending 2 months in Florence interning at the Medici Archive Project. Hannah will be researching a 17th century unpublished manuscript by Cristofano Bronzini who wrote Artemisia Gentileschi’s first biography. Bronzini’s Della Dignità et della Nobiltà delle Donne contains unpublished biographical information on many understudied Florentine women artists who have been excluded from the canon of art history. Hannah will be attending graduate school next year at Syracuse University’s Master's Program in Renaissance Art History. She hopes to be able to conduct similar research on artists such as the painter Plautilla Nelli and the sculptor Properzia de’Rossi while in graduate school and help broaden the constrictive canon of art by drawing attention to women artists whose artistic achievements have been historically ignored. On a more practical level, Hannah will also use her time in Florence to improve her Italian language and archival research skills, helping her prepare for grad school.
Megan Orlanski - Art History & Archaeology, and Latin American Studies Major, Class of 2022
Megan will be traveling to London to undertake research on the Argentinian contemporary artist Claudia Fontes (who lives in London and has a solo show there opening in May). Megan’s goal is to study the Cecilia Brunson Projects Gallery (where Fontes is showing). By attending her solo show and having extended exposure to her work, as well as the other works exhibited at the Cecilia Brunson Projects gallery, she hopes to gain a better understanding of the ways in which Latin American contemporary art is exhibited, discussed, and interpreted globally. More specifically, how Fontes’ culturally, geographically, and temporally specific work can transcend boundaries, foster dialogue, and connections that challenge the notion of a clear-cut scope of her work’s reach. It is through this trip that Megan also plans to further define and formulate her senior thesis topic, whether it be on Claudia Fontes’ work, or inspired by her approach to cultural memory within and surrounding Latin America, and Argentina specifically.
Jina Hyun - Art History & Archaeology Minor, Class of 2021
Jina proposes travel to Berlin this summer to “explore the link between experimental film traditions” and the development of early Internet art, as seen through the case study of artist Olia Lialina. Berlin is currently a leading international center for new media arts. Jina has been in touch with Lialina, who resides in Berlin, and Jina will be able to conduct her study in person with Lialina in her office space in Merz Akademie and private studio space in Stuttgart, Germany. Jina will have private access to Lialina’s personal collection of notebooks and sketchbooks that detail the thought process (both visually, and in HTML code) on how her early net art work was realized. She will also have private access to Lialina’s home server containing non-public and unpublished work, the GeoCity archive, and the GeoCity’s installation piece "Give me time/This page is no more "(160 35mm slides & 2 slide projectors, 2015-). This project will start research Jina hopes to continue in a master's program in the future in the field of comparative media studies. She seeks to investigate the transitional period between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. There is tremendous potential for scholarship in this understudied period, and Jina’s project, which consults a material archive (rather than just the extant works online), will make a real contribution to the growing field of new media art history.
