Faculty and Staff News 2025 Newsletter

María Beatriz H. Carrión is an art historian of the United States and Latin America who studies photography, racial representation, colonialism, and ecocritical issues. Her dissertation, which will be the basis for her first book project, examined the intersection of Indigenous participation in lens-based media and the formation of modern visuality at the turn of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to projected images and the history of spectacle/entertainment in the Americas. Carrión obtained her Ph.D. at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York in June of 2025 and, before joining Penn State in the fall, served as assistant curator of photographs at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. At the Carter, she curated various exhibitions, including one about Richard Avedon’s In the American West, and spearheaded the acquisition of work by contemporary artists such as Bin Danh, Cara Romero, and Chuck Ramirez.   Her interest in the work of Chuck Ramirez, a Texan conceptual artist who specialized in still lifes, is the subject of a new research project. This endeavor examines Ramirez’s artwork Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead, in English) in relation to the pictorial tropes such as the vanitas and the memento mori, the memorialization of the AIDS epidemic in South Texas, and photographic theories about the camera and death. In October, she delivered a guest talk on this topic at the Meadows Museum of Southern Methodist University as part of their Luis Martín Lectures in the Humanities. She also shared this ongoing project with the Penn State community at a Department of Art History Tea.  At Penn State, Carrión is teaching classes on art of the United States and photo history. She is very excited about developing new courses and supporting both undergraduate and graduate students. She is also happy to experience a place with four seasons again and looks forward to getting to see all of Pennsylvania. 

Maggie Borowitz has been trying to balance making progress on her book manuscript, Magali Lara: Feminist Artistic Tactics and the Mexican 1980s, with a number of smaller writing endeavors. Over the last year she contributed the essay “Navigating Channels of Feminism” to the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo’s exhibition catalogue Magali Lara. Cinco décadas en espiral that accompanied their major retrospective of Magali Lara’s work, as well as an essay to the volume Magali Lara. Una jeografía propia (W—galería) forthcoming later this year and Monochrome Multitudes (University of Chicago Press), forthcoming in 2026. She recently submitted two essays for volumes that are in preparation. One essay focuses on Frida Kahlo’s practice in the 1930s and one explores women’s mail art networks in the 1980s. This past spring Maggie also received a Research Development Grant from the Organization for Feminist Research on Gender and Communication to support the production of an exhibition catalogue for the show she co-curated last February, put a bow on it (Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Chicago). She’s looking forward to being in conversation with Magali Lara as part of the Lit & Luz Festival in Chicago and to teaching new classes in the spring semester.

In February, with a grant from the Popjoy Fund, James Harper took his graduate seminar to the Netherlands for eight days. The theme of the course was the visual culture of the Dutch empire in the seventeenth century. From their base in Amsterdam, the group visited museums, private collections, and even the (generally off-limits) family residence of the Dutch royals.     Later that same month Harper presented a paper at the College Art Association conference in New York in a session on Artists and their Objects. His research drew on the Roman archives (police reports from a 1633 burglary at the studio of sculptor Francesco Caporale) to generate reflections about seventeenth-century artists’ attitudes towards possessions.  Then in March, Harper chaired two sessions and presented in a third one at the Renaissance Society of America conference in Boston. His paper, “Texo-numia: The Boston Term Pilasters and the Depiction of Medals in Renaissance & Baroque Tapestry,” defined a pervasive but under-theorized category, illustrating its characteristics with a prominent local example.    In the summer Harper saw the long-awaited publication of an article, co-written with the anthropologist Philip Scher, about Julius Lips. Lips was a professor and museum director in 1930s Germany. He was hounded by the Nazis, who felt threatened by his research on the images that non-European artists did of Europeans during the period of colonialism. Lips escaped to the United States, then a haven of intellectual freedom, and published his book in 1937 with the title The Savage Hits Back. Most recently, Harper was in Philadelphia in late September to give a sold-out public lecture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His topic was the museum’s celebrated Rubens-Cortona Life of Constantine tapestries, which had their quadricentennial this year.  

Having contributed an essay, catalogue entries, and biographical sketches of Manet family members to Manet: A Model Family, the exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum curated by Diana Seave Greenwald, Nancy Locke published “Manet’s Mother” on the museum’s “Inside the Collection” blog on October 1, 2024: https://www.gardnermuseum.org/blog/manets-mother    Professor Locke’s first book, Manet and the Family Romance, played an important role in the conception of the exhibition, which was built around the Gardner Museum’s striking portrait of Manet’s mother, Eugénie-Désirée Fournier.    Locke’s second monograph, Cézanne’s Shadows: Poussin, Chardin, Rubens sets out to reconstruct an artistic dialogue that Paul Cézanne carried on with past masters. The book was published in April 2025 by Penn State University Press, with advance copies displayed at the College Art Association’s Book and Trade Fair in February.  

  2025 has been a fantastic year for Dr. Heather McCune Bruhn: she received an Opportunity Grant from Penn State to explore new ways to engage students using hands-on art experiences in large in-person and online courses. She attended several conferences and workshops, including the College Art Association in February, the National Art Education Association in March, and a day-long weaving workshop in April, and spent several days in residence at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in May. She also finished work on her Sustainability Seed Grant research into materials analysis for medieval manuscripts at Penn State and attended a workshop on budget-friendly manuscript analysis in the United Kingdom in July. Research from both grants has made an impact on her teaching, both in the spring and now in the fall: she has been experimenting with activities using 3D-printed models of ancient art in her Ancient to Medieval survey course, and with discussion boards involving low-budget paint making with natural ingredients, relief printing with household items, and other techniques for her Renaissance to Modern online students.  Recently she accompanied several of the Ancient to Medieval students on a trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Dr. McCune Bruhn is currently writing an article on how to calculate payment rates for goldsmiths using medieval records and has a second research article awaiting publication.   

Chang Tan completed her residency as the William C. Seitz Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington, D.C., in May 2025. In March, she gave a public talk, “Staging the Diaspora: Vernacular Image-making in May’s Studio, San Francisco, 1923-1945,” at the National Gallery of Art. The content of the talk will also be published as an article in The Art Bulletin in March 2026. While in D.C., she advanced the research and writing for her second book project, Network Moderns: Vernacular Photography and Image-making in Global Chinas, using materials from institutions such as the Library of Congress and the Archives of American Art. Supported by a faculty research grant from the Department of Art History, she made another research trip to California in May, visiting the special collections at the Stanford Library and private collectors of the Bay area.      Having returned to teaching at Penn State in the fall, Dr. Tan enjoyed the opportunity of taking her classes to the Cleveland Museum of Art in October—a trip that was made possible by the generous support from the Drew Stewart Popjoy Fund. Also in October, she gave virtual guest lectures to classes at the University of London and the University of Iowa on the topics of ecological art and “populist” art. She is proposing to offer classes on those topics at Penn State in the near future.   

In the fall of 2025, Robin Thomas participated in the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s Department Executive Officers Leadership Development program, which culminated in a three-day seminar at the Big Ten center in Chicago. At the beginning of March, he accompanied Ph.D. advisee Amy Orner to the National Gallery in Washington, where she presented her work on Edinburgh’s New Town at the Middle Atlantic Symposium. He also co-organized a series of three panels at the annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America in Boston in honor of Joseph Connors, his Ph.D. advisor. As part of these panels, he presented, “Taming the Heavens and Preserving Architecture: the Visual Rhetoric of Lightning Rods.” He continues to serve as a book review editor for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and attended the annual conference in Atlanta in April. His research on his next book project, The City in the Age of the Enlightenment, advanced through trips to Naples and Seville.