CAA News Today

Doralynn Pines is an independent scholar and consultant based in New York and a member of the CAA Board of Directors. She served as associate director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and was chief librarian of the museum’s central research library.

The Digital World Meets Art History at Princeton University

On July 12, 2012, the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University in New Jersey sponsored a one-day conference that covered topics of digital archiving, research, and technical innovation in art history. Entitled “The Digital World of Art History: Databases, Initiatives, Policies, and Practices,” the conference was attended by almost one hundred art historians, art librarians, and museum and visual-resources curators. The year 2012 marks the ninety-fifth anniversary of the index, which was founded in 1917 by Charles Rufus Morey. The anniversary also celebrates the fact that the index’s information, held in library reserves for decades, has evolved into a growing digital database for use by scholars all over the world.

Organized by Colum Hourihane, director of the index, the conference featured eighteen invited speakers who discussed topics as varied as the future of art bibliography (Carole Ann Fabian, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University), copyright, scholarship, and fair use in the fine arts (Gretchen Wagner, ARTstor), art-historical research (Gwen David, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Queens College, City University of New York), and a database of performances of medieval narratives (Evelyn [Timmie] Birge Vitz and Marilyn Lawrence, both from New York University). Melitte Buchman, also of NYU, spoke about current best digital practices. The Morgan Library and Museum was represented by curators and librarians (Maria Oldal, Elizabeth O’Keefe, William Voelkle), who described their recently completed collaboration with the index. Approximately 58,000 images from over nine hundred Western medieval and Renaissance manuscripts will soon be available through the Morgan Library’s website and through the index.

Several talks outlined exciting new digital projects currently underway at Princeton, including databases and new initiatives at the index (Judith Golden, Jessica Savage, Beatrice Radden Keefe, Jon Niola, Henry Schilb), in the Visual Resources Collection (Trudy Jacoby), and in the Digital Humanities Initiative (David Mimno). Sandra Ludig Brooke, a librarian at the Marquand Library of Art and Archeology, spoke about the Blue Mountain Project, a team effort of scholars and librarians to catalogue, and make freely available, digital editions of avant-garde arts journals produced in Europe and North America between 1848 and 1923. The project is off to a running start with a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

To wrap up the conference, Eleanor Fink of the World Bank Group presented “Art Clouds: Reminiscences and Prospects for the Future,” a look back at the well-known projects she oversaw during her tenure at the Getty Information Institute, including the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), the Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN), and the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA). She also noted how far the field had come, with collaborative and cross-platform efforts being the norm. In looking to future prospects for seamless access to art information, Fink pointed to Linked Open Data and some recent projects that have begun to use it.

Hourihane has just announced the online publication of the papers on the Index of Christian Art website.

Nora Griffin is an artist and CAA assistant editor.

Kirk Ambrose (2013–16)

Kirk Ambrose

Kirk Ambrose, associate professor of medieval art history and chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado in Boulder, will become editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin. His three-year term begins on July 1, 2013, after he concludes a year as editor designate. Ambrose will succeed Karen Lang of the University of Warwick in England, who has led the journal since 2010.

As incoming editor, Ambrose plans to build on the legacies of two previous Art Bulletin editors, Karen Lang and Nancy Troy, and to develop alternative forums for debate within the journal, such as the recently inaugurated special features “Regarding Art and Art History” and “Notes from the Field.” Like Lang, he is also inspired by the journal’s approaching centennial, in 2013, and sees The Art Bulletin’s current moment as intellectually parallel to the “speculative and creative” art history that was being practiced in its pages in the early twentieth century. The recent decision of the German government to fund “clusters of excellence” has resulted in new structures at universities and has spurred Ambrose into dialogue with a group of international scholars from Brazil, France, India, and Turkey, to better understand the nuances of how “art-historical research and pedagogy is now conceived.” This international perspective on art history will be thoroughly addressed in a new series of short essays for The Art Bulletin, tentatively titled “Whither History?” in which invited scholars will “reflect upon how trends toward globalization in the humanities have had an impact on the ways we conceive art history.”

In 1999, Ambrose earned his PhD in the history of art from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with a dissertation on “Romanesque Vézelay: the Art of Monastic Contemplation,” completed under the guidance of Ilene Forsyth and Elizabeth Sears. Ambrose’s education also includes a BA from Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1990 and additional study at the Goethe Institut in Düsseldorf, Germany, and McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

A faculty member at the University of Colorado since 1999, Ambrose has taught a range of courses on topics of medieval art history and methodology at the undergraduate and graduate level and has served as an MA and PhD thesis advisor for many students. A specialist in Romanesque sculpture, Ambrose is dedicated to the idea of art history as a global discipline and to this end has worked to diversify his department at Colorado. He recently worked with the administration to create a tenure-track position for an art historian specializing in colonial Latin America.

Within Ambrose’s own field of interest, he has consistently chosen topics and methodologies of inquiry that enlarge the scope of medieval studies. His book Monsters in Twelfth-Century European Sculpture, is forthcoming from Boydell and Brewer, and he received a Samuel H. Kress Foundation grant for the volume The Nave Sculpture of Vézelay: The Art of Monastic Viewing (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2006). Recent book chapters include “Male Nudes and Embodied Spirituality in Romanesque Sculpture,” published in Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), edited by Sherry Lindquist. A 2011 essay, “Viollet-le-Duc’s Judith at Vézelay: Romanesque Sculpture Restoration as (National) Art,” published in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, discusses the restoration of a medieval monument in nineteenth-century France as it relates to the country’s republican politics. He recently contributed to The Art Bulletin a review of Friedrich Kittler’s Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, translated by Anthony Enns, that was published in the March 2011 issue, and a short piece on appropriation and medieval art in the multiauthored section “Notes from the Field” in June 2012.

Ambrose’s practice of a socially and culturally mindful art history has led to opportunities beyond the classroom. With colleagues Davide Stimilli and Lisa Tamiris-Becker, he is currently planning a 2014 exhibition at the University of Colorado Art Museum, tentatively titled Aby Warburg and the Beginning of Cultural Studies in the American Southwest. Ambrose states, “Warburg’s 1895–86 expedition to the Southwest is well known, but this journey looks very different when viewed from an American, rather than European, perspective. Much of Warburg’s vision appears indebted to a network of mostly Jewish merchants across the Southwest, who sold photographs of Indian rituals as well as ceramics and other objects that Warburg collected.” For Ambrose the exhibition is a means to explore the multifariousness of art-historical vision, and how “art practices can serve as vehicles of knowledge” for scholars at the turn of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.