Undergraduates Studies
From the Director of Undergraduate Studies Dan Zolli
Over the past year, our undergraduate program was as exciting as it was busy. As in years past, our undergraduates took full advantage of the exquisite resources that Penn State offers for meaningful, immersive experiences with artworks. With the opening of the new Palmer Museum of Art this summer, the arts landscape at Penn State looks even more vibrant, and opportunities for first-hand communion with artworks have only grown. We are already seeing the transformative role that the Palmer’s new facilities will play in our curriculum: visits to the museum’s collections now highlight most of our undergraduate courses this fall and spring. This fall, we were also treated to a spectacular model of another type of pedagogy and training that can occur through courses organized collaboratively with the Palmer. On exhibit through December 2024, the exhibition Re/Collecting the Andes: Andean Art, Science, and the Sacred at Penn State originated in a fall 2022 upper-level course led by Amara Solari and Christopher Heaney, where students were invited to serve as co-curators.
Given the number of our faculty interested in materials and making, as well as the many possibilities for exploring these topics at the Center for Virtual/Material Studies, hands-on work has become a growing part of our undergraduate curriculum. This past year, Sarah Rich taught students how to dye cotton handkerchiefs using traditional Bamana methods from Mali, and Nancy Locke traveled with students in her course on nineteenth-century photography to Howard, PA, to see demonstrations of the wet-place collodion and tintype processes, to name only two examples. In an inspired collaboration with the ceramic artist Wesley Brown, Professor Anne Cross recreated the kick-wheel that the enslaved African American potter David Drake, also known as Dave the Potter, used to make his ceramic pots in nineteenth-century South Carolina, which they then demoed to students in Professor Cross’s course on “American Art and Society.”
In February, Lindsay Cook and Cross joined forces to lead a hugely rewarding trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Students in Professor Cook’s Byzantine Art survey attended a landmark exhibition on Africa & Byzantium, while those in Professor Cross’s course on the Harlem Renaissance visited The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism. In keeping with this adventurous spirit, our undergraduates also studied abroad, some during the academic year, and others over the summer. In the latter case, Catherine Ferguson and Hails Reilly received Townley Scholarships to support their participation in summer programs in Ireland and Italy, where they studied art on-site, and in museums, and – in Hails’ case – even lived with a host family. Speaking of Hails: under her leadership, the Art History Club has greatly increased its membership, and continues to do the important work of providing exciting programming – and a social glue – for our undergraduate community outside of the classroom.
As in years past, our undergraduates were also active participants in the conference circuit. In April, two of our majors took part in the annual Intercollegiate Art History Symposium, convened this year at Bucknell University, where they presented their research on the stakes of ambiguity in Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk (Ainsel Sclar) and on the entanglements of faith and power in a medieval Iberian treasury (Shan Wu). That same month, Rónan Shaw spoke at the SUNY New Paltz Art History Symposium, where his topic was media, mediation, and memory in contemporary Chinese painting. Shan continues to share her evolving research on medieval Iberian art, most recently to alumni and guests this fall at the College of Arts and Architecture’s Donor Appreciation Celebration.
Also in April, the department hosted a job-related workshop for our undergraduate majors, where three alumnae of our graduate program – Tess Kutasz Christensen (Ph.D. 2018), Keri Mongelluzzo (Ph.D. candidate), and Hannah Matangos (Ph.D. Visual Studies, 2o23) – reflected on how their art-historical training prepared them for careers in exhibition curation, museum education, and as program facilitator for a national arts non-profit. Given that event’s enthusiastic reception, we plan to reprise the workshop with a different slate of speakers this year.
In May, our department celebrated the graduation of a host of majors, minors, and recipients of our Museum Studies certificate – fifty-seven in all! In recognition of their academic achievements, Rónan Shaw and Megan Neely were selected to serve as student marshals at graduation, representing our college and department, respectively. This fall, both Rónan and Megan began M.A. programs in art history: Rónan at the University of Florida, with a focus on historiography and global avant-gardes, and Megan at Florida State University, where she will study contemporary Italian art and the African diaspora.