In February, Bryn Mawr, along with the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University, co-sponsored the 29th Annual Graduate Student Symposium on the History of Art at the Barnes Foundation. The symposium attracts graduate students in art history from top programs in the Mid-Atlantic. This year’s symposium featured a keynote by Christiane Gruber, a prominent scholar of Islamic art at the University of Michigan.
Hilde Nelson, a third-year graduate student, represented Bryn Mawr and presented a talk entitled “’Other Than What Is Given’: Interrupted Visuality in Ja’Tovia Gary’s The Giverny Suite.”
Based on her master’s thesis, her talk explores filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Ja’Tovia Gary’s 2019 three-channel video installation, The Giverny Suite, which advocates for the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women.
“I argued that Gary uses interruptive cinematic techniques—including the glitch, the rack focus, the jump cut, and direct animation—to rupture the coherence of the screen and point to the unseen “out-of-field” beyond the film’s frame as an otherwise into which Black women can disappear and escape,” Nelson says.
Nelson says the symposium features a range of research and expertise, which encourages interdisciplinary and thematic thinking. Scholars presented on topics including Greek caryatids, illuminated manuscripts, Chinese abstract painting, and Lakota weaving.
“Because the symposium spans time periods and geographies,” she says. “I was prompted to structure and contextualize my work—which is animated by frameworks of contemporary art, film theory, and Black studies—for a wide audience, an important rhetorical skill crucial to academic inquiry, curatorial work, and beyond.”
Bryn Mawr has a distinguished tradition in the study of the visual arts. The College has been cited as one of a few influential institutions that helped establish art history's place in the American academy. Erwin Panofsky produced his Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance during his time at the College in 1937-38 on a Mary Flexner Lectureship. Today, the Department of History of Art offers study in diverse geographic and cultural fields of art history from antiquity through the present, including the visual and material culture of the Americas, the Middle East, China, South Asia, and Europe.
In addition to its undergraduate program, Bryn Mawr offers an A.B./M.A. program and a Ph.D. program.