H o m e c o m i n gFive Decades of American Art Studies at the University of Kansas

November 8-10, 2018Symposium Program

This symposium celebrates our PhD alumni in American art –39 since 1970– and the career of Charles Eldredge, Hall Distinguished Professor Emeritus of American Art and Culture, who recently retired after 42 years at KU.

Born and raised in New England, Charles Eldredge earned his BA from Amherst College and PhD from the University of Minnesota. He began his KU career in 1970 as a curator at the University of Kansas Museum of Art. Quickly promoted to director, he went on to oversee the building of the Spencer Museum of Art. After serving for six years as director of the National Museum of American Art (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum), Eldredge returned to KU in 1988 as the Hall Chair. An authority on modern American art, Eldredge is the author of 16 books and exhibition catalogues and over 50 articles, essays, and catalogue entries. His major publications include American Imagination and Symbolist Painting (1979), Art in New Mexico, 1900-1945: Paths to Taos and Santa Fe (1986), Georgia O’Keeffe: American and Modern (1993), John Steuart Curry’s Hoover and the Flood: Painting Modern History (2007), and Eloquent Objects: Georgia O’Keeffe and Still-Life Art in New Mexico (2014). He has mentored scores of students, and directed 25 dissertations. Eldredge has served the profession as an advisor to the Henry Luce Foundation art programs and trustee of the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and Terra Foundation for American Art. KU recognized Eldredge’s accomplishments through a William T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence (2003) and the Balfour S. Jeffrey Research Achievement Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2008).

We gratefully acknowledge the Hall Family Foundation for establishing the Hall Chair in American Art and Culture, and the Franklin Murphy Lecture Fund for making this symposium possible. Thanks are due as well to Don Sloan for his planning help, and especially to Lisa Cloar, the art history department office manager, for her work in organizing the symposium events.

It is our great pleasure to welcome back to Lawrence so many of our alumni and friends for this celebration of our nationally recognized graduate program in American art history, whose PhD alumni are listed at the back of this program.

David CateforisProfessor and Chair of Art HistoryThe University of Kansas

Welcome to “Homecoming: Five Decades of American Art Studies at the University of Kansas”

Murphy Distinguished Alumni LectureRandall Griffey (PhD ’99), Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The Yellow Brick Road to The Met: Reflections on Kansas, Art History, Then, and Now”vSpencer Museum of Art Auditorium

Gallery Talk in the exhibition “Larry Schwarm: Kansas Farmers” by Kate Meyer (PhD ’11), Assistant Curator of Works on Paper, Spencer Museum of ArtvConnie Perkins Central Court, Spencer Museum of Art

Gallery Talk in the exhibition “Soundings” by Charles Eldredge, Hall Distinguished Professor Emeritus of American Art and CulturevLarry and Barbara Marshall Family Balcony, Spencer Museum of Art

Symposium Session I (Moderator: John Pultz)vAlderson Auditorium, Kansas Memorial Union

Emily Stamey (PhD ’09), Curator of Exhibitions, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, “Glass Slippers, Poison Apples, and Contemporary Art”

Brittany Lockard (PhD ’12), Assistant Professor of Art History and Creative Industries, Wichita State University, “Cindy Sherman’s Disaster Series: Vomit and the Rise of Eating Disorders in America”

Ellen C. Raimond (PhD ’16), Assistant Curator for Academic Programs, Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, “Stars, Stripes and Immigration: The Self-Portraits of Tseng Kwong Chi, Nikki S. Lee, and Annu Palakunnathu Matthew”

Mindy N. Besaw (PhD ’15), Curator, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, “History is Painted by the Victors: Paradigm Shifts in American Art”

5:15 PM:

1:45 PM:

2:15 PM:

3:30 PM:

Schedule

Thursday, November 8, 2018

Friday, November 9, 2018

Kerry Morgan (PhD ’02), Director of Gallery and Exhibition Programs, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, “De-Centering Whiteness: History Lessons from Sam Durant’s Scaffold”

Franklin Murphy Keynote LectureElizabeth Broun (PhD ’76), Director Emerita, Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery, “Charles Eldredge: Action Figure on the Potomac” vAlderson Auditorium, Kansas Memorial Union

Reception vAlderson Auditorium, Kansas Memorial Union

Light BreakfastvAlderson Auditorium, Kansas Memorial Union

Symposium Session II (Moderator: Elizabeth Broun) vAlderson Auditorium, Kansas Memorial Union

Jerry N. Smith (PhD ’12), Chief Curator, Dayton Art Institute, “A Look at Washington on His Deathbed, 1851, by Junius Brutus Stearns”

Jill R. Chancey (PhD ’06), Assistant Professor of Art History, Nicholls State University, “On the Threshold: Eastman Johnson’s Piccolo Player”

Letha Clair Robertson (PhD ’10), Professor of Art History, Collin College, “Art + Industry in a Confederate POW Camp: Carved Powder Horns from Camp Ford”

Elizabeth A. Williams (PhD ’15), David and Peggy Rockefeller Curator of Decorative Arts and Design, RISD Museum, “Gorham Silver: Designing Brilliance, 1850-1970”

Cofee Break

5:15 PM:

6:15 PM:

8:30 AM:

9:30 AM:

10:45 AM:

Saturday, November 10, 2018

Symposium Session III (Moderator: Marni Kessler) vAlderson Auditorium, Kansas Memorial Union

Deborah J. Wilk (PhD ’05), Associate Professor of Art History, University of Wisconsin – Whitewater, “Stay-at-Home Moms: Performing Motherhood at the Border”

JoLee G. Stephens (PhD ’11), Adjunct Instructor of Art History and Humanities, Howard Community College, “Staging the Exotic: American Art and the Dance of Denishawn”

Cynda L. Benson (PhD ’94), Professor of Art History, Savannah College of Art and Design, “Romaine Brooks and the Theatrical Gothic”

Lara Kuykendall (PhD ’11), Associate Professor of Art History, Ball State University, “Florine Stettheimer’s Dada Patriotism”

Nancy Strow Sheley (PhD ’00), Professor Emerita of English, California State University Long Beach, “Becoming Agnes Pelton”

Lunch (Provided for all symposium attendees)

Symposium Session IV (Moderator: David Cateforis) vAlderson Auditorium, Kansas Memorial Union

Mark White (PhD ’99), Wylodean and Bill Saxon Director, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, “Catharsis and Spectacle in Will Shuster’s Zozobra”

Lea Rosson DeLong (PhD ’83), Independent Scholar and Curator, Des Moines, Iowa, “Depression and Disappointment: Gordon Samstag’s Young Man Desires Position”

J. Richard Gruber (PhD ’87), Director Emeritus, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, University of New Orleans, “Thomas Hart Benton: Seeing the South”

11:00 AM:

12:30 PM:

1:45 PM:

Saturday Schedule Continued

3:15 PM:

3:30 PM:

5:00 PM:

Reed Anderson (PhD ’08), Associate Professor of Art History, Kansas City Art Institute, “Grant Wood’s Sultry Night and the Politics of Depicting Men Bathing”

Shirley Reece-Hughes (PhD ’06), Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, “West Texas Incident: Everett Spruce’s Surreal Regionalism”

Coffee Break

Symposium Session V (Moderator: David Cateforis) vAlderson Auditorium, Kansas Memorial Union

Kathryn Boyer (PhD ’94), Independent Art Historian and Owner of Boyer Ink, Trollhättan, Sweden, “Compartment C, Car 293: Exploring the Realism of Edward Hopper”

Donald E. Sloan (PhD ’04), Assistant Professor Emeritus of Art History, University of Wisconsin – La Crosse, “The Rise and Fall of Political Art”

Laura Minton (MA ‘14, ABD), Curatorial Assistant, Prints and Drawings, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, “Traveling in Place: The Art of Joseph E. Yoakum”

Samantha Lyons (MA ‘12, ABD), Graduate Research Assistant, Kress Foundation Department of Art History, University of Kansas, “All in Good Taste: Robert Kushner’s Fashion Feasts, c. 1970”

Sam Watson (PhD ’05), Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, “Embodied Difference: Andy Warhol and R.C. Gorman Share a Meal”

Conclusion

Speaker Bios For the titles of the speakers’ dissertations, see the list, “Completed KU PhD Dissertations in American Art at the University of Kansas,” following the bios.

Reed Anderson is Associate Professor of Art History at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he teaches courses in American art, 19th-century European art, and the history of printmaking. Anderson also collects prints and specializes in etchings by early 20th-century American artists. He is currently working on an exhibition devoted to the American expatriate Herman Armour Webster, whose successful career as a printmaker living and working in Paris spanned six decades.

Cynda L. Benson completed her KU dissertation “Early American Illuminated Manuscripts from the Ephrata Cloister” in 1994 and concurrently curated an exhibition and published a catalogue on that topic at the Smith College Museum of Art. Since then she has been a professor of art history at the Savannah College of Art and Design teaching and researching American and modern art with a special interest in American women of the 19th-20th centuries and the portrayal of artists in fiction.

Mindy N. Besaw was appointed curator at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in 2014. At Crystal Bridges she oversees the collection from colonial times to 1945 and spearheaded a renovation and reinstallation of the early American art galleries, completed in March 2018. Besaw is co-curator, with Candice Hopkins and Manuela Well-Off-Man, of Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now (2018). Besaw previously served as curator of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West’s art collection.

Kathryn Boyer is an independent art historian and owner of Boyer Ink, offering professional writing, translating, and editing. Based in Trollhättan, Sweden, Boyer was a lecturer at Gotland University between 2004 and 2011. Since 2001 she has been an instructor at the Folkuniversitetets gymnasium in Trollhättan.

Elizabeth Broun directed the Smithsonian American Art Museum and its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, from 1989 through 2016. During her tenure, the SAAM became a leader in distance learning and digital media and greatly expanded its research resources. Broun also led comprehensive renovations of the Old Patent Office Building (SAAM’s home) and the Renwick Gallery. Her exhibition catalogue, Albert Pinkham Ryder won the Alfred H. Barr Award from the College Art Association in 1990, and in 2013, Broun received the Frederic Edwin Church Award from the Olana Partnership.

Jill R. Chancey is Assistant Professor of Art History at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana. She previously served as curator of the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel, Mississippi. Chancey currently represents Louisiana for the Feminist Art Project and on the board of the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC). Her recent research interests include Eastman Johnson’s images of musicians, and folk art installations of the Gulf South. Lea Rosson DeLong, a Des Moines, Iowa-based independent scholar and curator, has published on Alexandre Hogue, Grant Wood, Christian Petersen, and other artists of the 1930s, as well as on contemporary art. A frequent guest curator at the University Museums of Iowa State University, she previously held positions at Drake University and the Des Moines Art Center. Her book, The Samstag Legacy: An Artist’s Bequest, was published by the University of South Australia in 2016.

Randall Griffey is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He previously served as Chief Curator and Curator of American Art at the Mead Art Museum, Associate Curator of American Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and a visiting Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. His recent exhibitions include Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today Mural Rediscovered (co-curated with Elizabeth M. Kornhauser and Stephanie Herdrich) and Marsden Hartley’s Maine (co-curated with Donna M. Cassidy and Elizabeth Finch). Griffey’s essay, “Reconsidering the ‘Soil’: The Stieglitz Circle, Regionalism, and Cultural Eugenics in the Twenties” in the Brooklyn Museum’s Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties, won the Outstanding Catalogue Essay of 2011 from the Association of Art Museum Curators.

J. Richard Gruber, active as an independent art historian and writer, is Director Emeritus of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, University of New Orleans. He also served as Director of the Wichita Art Museum, Director of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Deputy Director of the Morris Museum of Art and Director of its Center for the Study of Southern Painting. He taught art history and museum studies classes at the University of New Orleans, at Augusta State University and at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He is the author of numerous exhibition catalogues, including Thomas Hart Benton and the American South (1998).

Speaker Bios

Lara Kuykendall is Associate Professor of Art History at Ball State University where she teaches courses on American art and museum studies. Her publications include “John Steuart Curry: Regionalism at War” in The American Midwest in a Scattering Time: How Modernism Met Midwestern Culture (ed. Sara Kosiba, Hastings College Press) and “Palmer Hayden’s John Henry Series: Inventing an American Hero” in Locating American Art: Finding Art’s Meaning in Museums (ed. Cynthia Fowler, Ashgate).

Brittany Lockard is Assistant Professor of Art History and Creative Industries at Wichita State University. Her research interests include body diversity, identity politics, and food. Her published work to date examines depictions of large bodies and how those representations resonate with cultural constructions of fatness. Her most recent publication is “The Fat Body as Anatomical and Medical Oddity: Lucian Freud’s Paintings of Sue Tilley,” in Visualizing the Body in Art, Anatomy and Medicine since 1800: Models, Modelling (forthcoming from Routledge).

Samantha Lyons is a KU PhD candidate specializing in modern and contemporary art. Her research explores international postwar artists’ engagement with clothing and the senses in her dissertation “Synaesthetic Dress: Episodes of Sensational Objects in Performance Art, 1955-1975.” Currently a graduate research assistant for Charles Eldredge, Lyons worked as a graduate curatorial intern at the Spencer Museum of Art, where she organized the 2017-18 exhibition “Power Clashing: Clothing, Collage, and Contemporary Identities.”

Kate Meyer has worked at the Spencer Museum of Art since 2001 and in 2011 she became the Assistant Curator of Works on Paper. Meyer collaborates with audiences across disciplines to integrate the visual arts into the teaching and research mission of KU. Meyer’s 2011 dissertation, “Broken Ground: Plowing and America’s Cultural Landscape in the 1930s,” evinces her research interests in art’s intersections with environmental and agricultural themes. Also demonstrating this interest is her recent edited book Larry Schwarm: Kansas Farmers (University Press of Kansas), and Spencer exhibition of the same title.

Laura Minton is the Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH). Prior to the MFAH, she held a curatorial and collections position at the Bardo Arts Center in Cullowhee, North Carolina. Minton also completed graduate internships in the academic programs and works on paper departments

Speaker Bios

at the Spencer Museum of Art. Her research areas include modern and contemporary, 20th-century American, and self-taught art. She is currently a doctoral candidate in art history at KU.

Kerry Morgan is the Director of Gallery and Exhibition Programs at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), a position she has held since 2009. As part of her responsibilities she oversees two prestigious fellowship programs for Minnesota artists, the MCAD-Jerome Foundation Fellowships for Early Career Artists and the McKnight Fellowships for Visual Artists. Morgan received a BA in art history and history from Smith College, and her MA and PhD in art history from KU.

Ellen C. Raimond is Assistant Curator of Academic Initiatives at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. She previously held several internships at the Spencer Museum of Art and worked as a Program Coordinator in KU’s Office of First-Year Experience while earning her doctorate with a specialization in the history of photography. Raimond’s current research focuses on the historical representations of immigrants to the United States in relation to contemporary artistic practice.

Shirley Reece-Hughes is Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and is developing a retrospective exhibition and catalogue on the Texas artist, Everett Spruce. In 2018, she co-organized and co-curated “A New American Sculpture, 1914–1945: Lachaise, Laurent, Nadelman and Zorach,” contributed an essay to the Whitney Museum of American Art’s catalogue on Grant Wood, and created the Amon Carter’s first exhibition and catalogue dedicated to living women sculptors. Letha Clair Robertson teaches art history at Collin College in Plano, Texas. She previously taught at the University of Texas at Tyler. Robertson specializes in 19th-century American art. She continues to research the art of Thomas Hicks, the subject of her KU dissertation, and art made by Civil War POWs, the subject of her talk in this symposium.

Donald E. Sloan pursued a first career in law (JD, Yale 1976), then returned to KU to pursue a PhD in art history. After receiving his PhD (2004), he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse as the only art historian in a studio art department. In 11 years there he taught 15 different courses, covering topics from the origins of art to contemporary. He returned to Lawrence in 2015 and has taught art history part-time in recent semesters.

Speaker Bios

Jerry N. Smith is Chief Curator at the Dayton Art Institute, where he oversees the curatorial and education departments. He previously served as Chief Curator and Interim Director at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida, and as curator of American and European art at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. He has overseen more than 50 exhibitions. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Arizona State University.

Emily Stamey is Curator of Exhibitions at the Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her most recent exhibition, “Dread & Delight: Fairy Tales in an Anxious World,” opened this August and will travel on to the Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College in Iowa and the Akron Art Museum in Ohio. While at KU, Stamey authored the catalogue raisonné of prints by Roger Shimomura. As a result of catching Jayhawk fever in Lawrence, she is currently working on a project that explores the intersections of basketball and contemporary art.

JoLee G. Stephens earned her PhD from KU with a dissertation, “Modern Art and Modern Movement: Images of Dance in American Art, c. 1900-1950,” that explored the relationship between the developing modern art and modern dance styles of the early 20th century. Since graduating from KU, she has presented this research at several academic conferences, including the 2014 and 2017 Southeastern College Art Conference. She continues to research and write about the correlations between the visual and performing arts. Since 2013, Stephens has been teaching art history and humanities at Howard Community College in Columbia, Maryland.

Nancy Strow Sheley is Professor Emerita of English, California State University Long Beach, where she taught from 2001 to 2018. She previously held appointments at Washburn University, West Virginia University, the University of Alabama, and Appalachian State University. Sheley was a Fulbright Scholar in Nicosia, Cyprus in 2008 and received a Fulbright-Hays Travel Abroad Grant to Rwanda in 2004. She serves on the editorial staff of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.

Speaker Bios

Sam Watson is an art history professor at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay. He previously spent many years teaching at Central College in Pella, Iowa and at the UW campus in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. His research interests continue to focus on 20th-century American art and he recently presented a paper on the queerness of Maurice Sendak at the annual SECAC conference.

Mark White is the Wylodean and Bill Saxon Director of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma. He previously served as Curator of Exhibitions at the Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, as Associate Professor of Art History at Oklahoma State University, and as the Eugene B. Adkins and Chief Curator at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art. White specializes in art of the American Southwest and is currently working on a project with former Oklahomans Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Jerry McMillan, and Mason Williams.

Deborah J. Wilk is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater. Her research focuses on gender, architecture, and migration. She is working on a book entitled “Delivering Citizenship” and an article about protest and performance. Her publications include “Of Milk and Homeland: Breastfeeding, Immigrant Mothers, and Eugenics,” in Reconciling Art and Mothering (Ashgate), and “9 Guitars” in ModernStarts (MoMA). Wilk is the regional coordinator for the Feminist Art Project.

Elizabeth A. Williams is the David and Peggy Rockefeller Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the RISD Museum, where she is organizing the exhibition and publication Gorham Silver: Designing Brilliance 1850-1970. Her research focuses on 18th-21st century American/European decorative arts and design. Williams previously served as Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. She holds a PhD in art history from KU and an MA in art history and a BS in architectural studies from the University of Missouri.

Speaker Bios

Completed PhD Dissertations in American Art at the University of Kansas

Diane Chalmers Johnson, “Will H. Bradley and Art Nouveau in America,” 1970. Advisor: Klaus Berger

Elizabeth Broun, “American Paintings and Sculpture in the Fine Arts Building of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893,” 1976. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Marilyn Anne Kindred (American Studies), “The Army Officer Corps and the Arts: Artistic Patronage and Practice in America, 1820-85,” 1981. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Sandra Rosson (Lea Rosson DeLong), “The Career of Alexandre Hogue,” 1983. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

J. Richard Gruber, “Thomas Hart Benton: Teaching and Art Theory,” 1987. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Dixie Jeanine Webb, “The Aesthetic of the Industrial District: Images of the Factory in American Art, 1918-1940,” 1992. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Patricia A. Fairchild, “Primal Acts of Construction/Destruction: The Art of Michael Heizer, 1967-1987,” 1993. Advisor: Timothy Mitchell

Susan Jane Baker, “George Tooker and the Modern Tradition,” 1994. Advisor: David Cateforis (begun under Timothy Mitchell)

Cynda L. Benson, “Early American Illuminated Manuscripts from the Ephrata Cloister,” 1994. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Kathryn Boyer, “Political Promotion and Institutional Patronage: How New York Displaced Paris as the Center of Contemporary Art, c. 1955-1968,” 1994. Advisor: David Cateforis (begun under Timothy Mitchell)

Lisa Dorrill, “Picturing the Dirty Thirties: Paintings and Prints of the Dust Bowl,” 1998. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Leesa Fanning, “Abstract Expressionism and the Body: Philosophical and Cultural Interpretations,” 1998. Advisor: David Cateforis

Randall R. Griffey, “Marsden Hartley’s Late Paintings: American

Masculinity and National Identity in the 1930s & ‘40s,” 1999. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Mark Andrew White, “From Dynamism to Objectivity: The Late Career of George Bellows,” 1999. Advisor: David Cateforis

Nancy Strow Sheley (American Studies), “Bringing Light to Life: The Art of Agnes Pelton (1881-1961),” 2000. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Kerry A. Morgan, “From the Courtroom to the Gallows: Picturing Justice in American Visual Culture, 1850-1880,” 2002. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Maria Elena Buszek, “Pin-up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality and the Pin-Up Genre, 1860 to the Present,” 2003. Advisor: John Pultz

Martha Gage Elton, “Bertram Hartman (1882-1960), An Early Modernist from Kansas,” 2004. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Scott A. Shields, “Legends of Bohemia: The Monterey Peninsula and Its Early Art Colony, 1875-1907,” 2004. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Donald E. Sloan, “‘Why Not Revolution?’ The John Reed Club and Visual Culture,” 2004. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Samuel E. Watson, “Childhood’s End: Representing American Youth, c. 1940-1970,” 2005. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Deborah J. Wilk, “The Representation of Immigration in Art and Architecture in New York City, 1850-1920,” 2005. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Jill Rachelle Chancey, “Elaine de Kooning: Negotiating the Masculinity of Abstract Expressionism,” 2006. Advisor: David Cateforis

Shirley Reece-Hughes, “David Bates: Southern Culture, Places and Memories through the Eyes of an Expressionist,” 2006. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Reed Anderson, “James Ormsbee Chapin and the Marvin Paintings: An Epic of the American Farm,” 2008. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Brett Knappe, “Barbara Morgan’s Photographic Interpretation of American Culture, 1935-1980,” 2008. Advisor: John Pultz

KU American Art Dissertations

Cheryl Ragar (American Studies), “Plunging into the Very Depths of the Souls of Our People: The Life and Art of Aaron Douglas,” 2008. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Emily Stamey, “Pop, Place, and Personal Identity in the Art of Roger Shimomura,” 2009. Advisors: David Cateforis and Charles Eldredge

Letha Clair Robertson, “The Art of Thomas Hicks and Celebrity Culture in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York,” 2010. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Lara Kuykendall, “‘By Popular Demand’: The Hero in American Art, c. 1929-45,” 2011. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Kate M. Meyer, “Broken Ground: Plowing and America’s Cultural Landscape in the 1930s,” 2011. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

JoLee Gillespie Stephens, “Modern Art and Modern Movement: Images of Dance in American Art, c. 1900-1950,” 2011. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Brittany Lockard, “Size Matters: Imagery of the Fat Female Body in the Art of Lucian Freud, Jenny Saville, Joel-Peter Witkin, Laurie Toby Edison, Leonard Nimoy, and Laura Aguilar,” 2012. Advisor: David Cateforis

Jerry N. Smith, “Auto-America: The Automobile and American Art, Circa 1900-1950,” 2012. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

Stephanie Fox Knappe, “Art Perpetuating Fame: The Posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” 2013. Advisor: Charles Eldredge

April M. Watson, “On the Streets and In the Suburbs: Photographers of the American Social Landscape, 1963-1976,” 2013. Advisor: John Pultz

Mindy N. Besaw, “Re-Framing the American West: Contemporary Artists Engage History,” 2015. Advisors: Charles Eldredge and David Cateforis

Elizabeth A. Williams, “Casting a New Mold: The American Silver Industry and Japanese Meiji Metalwork 1876-1893,” 2015. Advisor: Sherry Fowler

Ellen Cordero Raimond, “Upending the Melting Pot: Photography, Performativity, and Immigration Re-Imagined in the Self-Portraits of Tseng Kwong Chi, Nikki S. Lee, and Annu Palakunnathu Matthew,” 2016. Advisor: John Pultz

KU American Art Dissertations

Please Join Me in Supporting Future Generations of KU American Art Students

Thank you for joining us to celebrate the accomplishments of our graduate alumni in American art. We are looking ahead to continued success in educating students in this field and preparing them for rewarding and meaningful careers. To help ensure that bright future, a generous alumnus has established the American Art Graduate Student Support Fund – the American Art Fund, for short. This fund will support graduate students studying American art at KU, including through scholarships, travel funding, and research assistantships. The American Art Fund will be a vital resource in helping us to attract and retain talented students from around the US and abroad to study American art history at KU.

Please join me in contributing to this very worthy cause. Donations will be matched up to a total of $20,000 by the founder of the American Art Fund. You may give securely online through KU Endowment’s giving portal, www.kuendowment.org/givenow. There will be a field in which you can indicate that your gift is for the benefit of the American Art Fund. You may also give in honor of Charles Eldredge. With your help, we can ensure the ongoing vitality of American art studies at KU and honor the tradition of excellence in that field that Charles Eldredge established here. Thank you for your consideration and support.

David CateforisProfessor and Chair of Art HistoryThe University of Kansas

Notes

Notes