Fellowships

2008 Professional Development Fellows and Honorable Mentions

CAA has awarded four fellowships, two each in art and art history, and six honorable mentions through the Professional Development Fellowship Program.

Fellows are honored with a one-time grant of $15,000 to help them with various aspects of their work, whether it be for job-search expenses or purchasing materials for the studio. CAA believes a grant of this kind, without contingencies, can best nurture artists and scholars at the beginning of their professional careers. Both fellows and honorable mentions receive free one-year CAA memberships and complimentary registrations to CAA’s Annual Conference in Los Angeles.

CAA initiated the program in 1993 to help student artists and art historians bridge the gap between their graduate studies and professional careers. The program’s main purpose is to support outstanding students from socially and economically diverse backgrounds who have been underrepresented in their fields. By offering financial assistance to promising MFA and PhD students, CAA can assist the rising generation during this important transitional period in their lives.

Nichole N. Bridges

Nichole N. Bridges is a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research and dissertation focus on the critical import of souvenir ivory sculpture made by Kongo sculptors for sale to foreigners on the Loango Coast of west-central Africa, ca. 1840–1910. Long dismissed as sculptures that solely acquiesced to Western tastes, the ivories are hybrid creations that reflect both Western and Kongo visual appeal, and which document and critique the dramatic social changes that occurred on the Loango Coast in the context of the Atlantic trade and early colonial period. Bridges’s work is based on research in museums, private collections, and archives in the United States and Europe during 2005–6, and on fieldwork in Pointe Noire, Republic of Congo, during 2007.

Her research and writing have been supported by fellowships from the University of Wisconsin; the Smithsonian Institution, for domestic research based at the National Museum of African Art; the Belgian American Educational Foundation, for research in Europe based at the Royal Museum for Central Africa; the Fulbright Program; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Before attending graduate school, she served for two-and-a-half years as a museum educator at the Brooklyn Museum. Bridges earned an MA in art history from the University of Wisconsin and a BA in fine arts and French from Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Wendy Ikemoto

Wendy Ikemoto is currently completing her PhD in the history of art and architecture at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her dissertation, “The Space Between: Paired Paintings in Antebellum America,” privileges format as a field of signification. It focuses on the paired, or pendant, structure and especially on the representational potential of the interval between canvases. Through a series of three case studies, her dissertation uncovers the historical value of the pendant format in the mid-nineteenth-century United States.

Presently, Ikemoto is developing a metageographical study of American art in the Pacific world. She addresses the formative role of Pacific networks in American art history by studying the visual and material culture associated with four major modes of US-Pacific engagement: whaling, missionary work, collection, and immigration. The project is part of her professional aim to better integrate the Pacific Rim into the discourse and curriculum of American art history.

Ikemoto was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawai‘i and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University in California in 2002. She has won several teaching awards from Harvard as well as travel grants from the Harvard University Graduate Student Council, the Charles Warren Center, the Association of Historians of American Art, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. She has been the recipient of major research fellowships from the Terra Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation (both in conjunction with the American Council of Learned Societies), the Smithsonian American Art Museum/Douglass Foundation, and Harvard University. Her article, “Putting the ‘Rip’ in ‘Rip Van Winkle’: Historical Absence in John Quidor’s Pendant Paintings,” is forthcoming in American Art.

Mary Reid Kelley

Mary Reid Kelley was raised in the South and Midwest in an extended family of educators, writers, and historians. She studied art and women’s studies at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and is currently pursuing an MFA in painting from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

An interest in language, literature, and history informs her work, which includes video, animation, performance, and painting. Her paintings often depict dolls or models that reenact historical figures and images. In June 2008, Reid Kelley traveled to France and Belgium to visit and research the graves of forty-three Yale students who were killed in the First World War.

Reid Kelley also participated in a fellowship at the Beinecke Rare Books library at her school, where she researched writers and artists who were involved in both WWI and the twentieth-century avant-gardes. An avid interest in the poetry of this period led her to write the poems that she performs in her videos; the visual character of these works is influenced by cartoons and Cubism.

Justin Shull

Humor, provocation, and the landscape are central to Justin Shull’s projects, which aim to challenge assumptions about the natural world—the environment and other living beings—and our place in it, as well as the role of the artist and the nature of artistic disciplines. Growing up near the forests, mountains, and lakes of New Hampshire, Shull became enamored with the tradition of landscape art, and his awareness of nature and its infrastructure encouraged him to engage that tradition. His work reenvisions a mobile, artificial version of the landscapes and nature around him.

Shull studied studio art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, with a semester in Corciano, Italy; a semester in Berlin, Germany; and two summers at Chautauqua School of Art in Chautauqua, New York. After graduation, he explored a number of landscapes around the country before entering the MFA program in visual arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, from which he will graduate in May 2009.

Shull has been included in recent group shows at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art and in the Conflux Festival 2009, the Baltimore Sculpture Project, and Park(ing) Day NYC 2009.

2008 Honorable Mentions

Dara Greenwald

Dara Greenwald is a media artist, organizer, and writer. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of the Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York. She holds a BA in women’s studies from Oberlin College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She worked at the Video Data Bank from 1998 to 2005 and was a part-time faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film, Video, and New Media Department from 2003 to 2005.

Greenwald’s videos have screened widely at such venues as the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco; Ocularis and Eyebeam, both in New York; the Liverpool Bienniele in England; Videolisboa in Portugal; and the Aurora Picture Show in Houston. She is a founding member of the feminist street-dance troupe, Pink Bloque. Her writing has appeared in Punk Planet, the Brooklyn Rail, the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, and Bad Subjects, and in the anthology Realizing the Impossible: Art against Authority (Oakland: AK Press, 2007), edited by Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland.

With Josh MacPhee, she curated Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now, which originated at Exit Art in New York (September 20–December 8, 2008); it is now on display at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University (January 23–March 8, 2009) and afterward travels to RPI (March 27–June 8, 2009.) Another recent collaborative project, with MacPhee and Olivia Robinson, is Spectres of Liberty.

Julie Ann Nagle

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Julie Ann Nagle received her BFA degree at New York’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2004. After working in the Sculpture Department at Parsons the New School University, also in New York, she enrolled at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where she is currently a second-year graduate student in sculpture and extended media.

Nagle’s role as an alchemist, romantic, pioneer, and innovator mirrors the experimentation of the nineteenth-century scientist. The promise of technology, the Enlightenment, and industrialization are ones that could never really be kept. They were meant to keep the population forward-looking. So the anachronistic measures she takes in her work require a looking-back, but only insofar as she looks forward. Her work derives from the impulse to discover esoteric narratives of obscure, forgotten characters. Some of them were regarded as heroes in their time, but on close inspection we find that they were conflicted, morally or ethically. Nagle’s engagement with these mythologies articulates her own revision of the world. Rather than searching for an objective truth, she seeks the most imaginative story, then adds both homage and critique. Details are compounded until the original story is rendered ridiculous and undecipherable.

Nagle was awarded a full-tuition scholarship and appointed exhibit coordinator at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden for the duration of her studies. She has been awarded several grants, including a Ruth Varner Otto Grant and the Elliot Nash Memorial Prize for Excellence in Sculpture, and has exhibited nationally and internationally, showing in New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, Washington DC, and Tokyo.

Alpesh Kantilal Patel

Alpesh Kantilal Patel recently submitted his dissertation, “Queer Desi Visual Culture across the Brown Atlantic,” to the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom for a PhD in art history and visual studies. His dissertation puts Desi, or the South Asian diaspora, as a category of visual knowledge under erasure through an embodied exploration of subject formation in urban space and through artworks of British- and American-based artists of South Asian descent. Prior to moving to the UK in 2005, he lived and worked in New York and received his BA in art history with distinction from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Patel is presently revising his dissertation into a series of journal-length articles and then into a book. One forthcoming article, “Paul Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic,’ Its Critiques, and the Brown Atlantic: Towards an Embodied and Intersectional Model of Queer Desi Urban Subject Formation,” is to be tentatively published in Migrations and Identities: A Journal of People and Ideas in Motion as part of the conference proceedings for “Hybridity, Mestizaje, Méttisage, Creolisation, Tropicalism, Minoritarianism: New Terms for Old Phenomena?” He is also exploring the phenomenological aspects of visual identification of subjects through an investigation of the official report investigating the tragic events leading to Jean Charles de Menezes’s misidentification as a terrorist by London police and his subsequent death in the wake of 7/7.

Patel was awarded an Arts Council grant by the British government to produce the exhibition Mixing It Up: Queering Curry Mile and Currying Canal Street, a series of site-specific art projects deployed in museums and public spaces in the city of Manchester in fall 2007. Partially inspired by the production and reception of Mixing It Up, he is theorizing the role of public art in producing a more ethical and embodied public sphere.

Will Tucker

Will Tucker is an MFA student in sculpture at Ohio State University in Columbus. In 2006, he graduated with a BFA, focusing in sculpture, from the University of Kentucky in Lexington. Drawing from the background of Appalachia and the political struggle surrounding mountaintop removal, his work traces the contingencies of electronic networks to the locations of resource extraction.

Working with electrified toaster wire, coal slurry and ash, and neon-sign transformers, Tucker’s architectural interventions interrupt white walls and circuit boards. His installations break down, short out, and spill under the hard edges of rational structures, evoking the unforeseen consequences of improvement schemes like the Tennessee Valley Authority. Tucker questions the relationship of the body to a mediated world that measures pollution in “carbon footprints” while imagining electronic networks as free-floating and unbounded. Unfolding in real time and space, his installations produce embodied reactions to environmental externalities, stripping away the insulation that secures the image of a hyperefficient technological present by placing its primary energy resource in the past.

Tucker has worked with the University of Kentucky’s student environmental organization to produce a community-generated installation for Earth Day at the Lexington Recycling Center. He has been involved with local organizations such as Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, which works for social justice throughout the state’s coalfields.

Amy Von Lintel

Amy Von Lintel is a doctoral student specializing in modern art and visual culture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her dissertation, “Surveying the Field: Popular Illustrated Art Histories in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France,” examines the genre of the illustrated art-history survey between 1845 and 1900 and the ways in which these compact, affordable, and widely circulating books influenced the field of art history. While the history of art history has most often been traced along national lines, the history of the illustrated survey enables a focus on the field’s international roots as well. These books helped to consolidate a canon of historical artworks that itself spanned the globe, expanding beyond ancient and modern Europe to include objects from the Middle East, Asia, and Meso-America, while they taught this canon to diverse, multinational audiences through a combination of illustrations and textual description. Von Lintel’s study proposes that the field of art history was forged as much in the popular illustrated book market of the nineteenth century as in the more recognized contexts of the art museum and the university art-history department.

In 2007, Von Lintel was awarded a fellowship from the Council for European Studies for dissertation research in Europe. She has recently presented papers at the 2008 CAA Annual Conference in Dallas–Fort Worth, the International Association of Word and Image Studies Conference in Paris, and the North American Victorian Studies Association Conference at Yale University. Her article, “La Lithographie originale en couleurs: Influential Treatise and Objet d’art,” was published in Rutgers Art Review in 2006. She received her MA in art history from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, in 2003 and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Kansas in Lawrence in 2001, with BA degrees in art history and French.

Kelly L. Watt

Kelly L. Watt is a PhD student and Frederic Lindley Morgan Scholar of Architectural History in the Art History Program at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, specializing in the art and architecture of medieval Iberia. She received her MA in art history from the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, where she completed a thesis on Insular manuscripts. Since beginning her doctoral work in 2004, her interests have focused on the sociopolitical complexities of power as revealed in the frontier architecture of the Reconquista.

Her dissertation, “Medieval Churches on the Spanish Frontier: How Elite Emulation in Architecture Contributed to the Transformation of a Territorial Expansion into Reconquista,” looks at tenth- to twelfth-century churches established at the geographical border between the southern Islamic and northern Christian kingdoms of Iberia. Building on scholarship that posits that Christian kings insinuated themselves into monastic legacies in order to legitimize their rule, Watt argues that this strategy served as a model for nonroyal patrons of frontier churches. These benefactors used visual emblems of authority recognizable to their multicultural audience and, in so doing, created outposts of political power that proved crucial to their military success.

Watt has presented portions of her dissertation at regional conferences and will present her latest research at the 2009 CAA Annual Conference in Los Angeles, in a session sponsored by the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies. Her work has been supported by the American Philosophical Society’s Lewis and Clarke Fund for Exploration and Field Research and numerous University of Louisville assistantships and travel awards.

Fellowship Juries

Professional Development Fellowship Jury for Visual Arts: Virginia Derryberry, University of North Carolina, Asheville; Diana Frid, University of Illinois, Chicago; Reni Gower, Virginia Commonwealth University; and Dennis Y. Ichiyama, Purdue University.

Professional Development Fellowship Jury for Art History: Susan Dixon, University of Tulsa; Linda Ferber, New-York Historical Society; David Little, Minneapolis Institute of Arts; and Margo Machida, University of Connecticut, Storrs.

About the Fellowships

CAA also thanks the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, as well as individual supporters who have contributed to these fellowships.

Published on February 18, 2009.

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