Art & Art History Faculty

BA Trinity College
MA Princeton University
PHD Princeton University

Office Hours:
Fall 2012: Wednesdays 10:00 a.m. - 11:30 a.m., 41 Wyllys Avenue, Room 306

Professor of Art History
41 Wyllys Avenue 311
860-685-3779

Chair, Archaeology Program
860-685-3779

Professor, Archaeology Program
860-685-3779

pwagoner@wesleyan.edu

BA Kenyon College
PHD University of Wisconsin

ARHA181 - 01
Mughal India:Intro Art History

ARHA286 - 01
Empire And Erotica

ARHA290 - 01
Epic and Indian Visual Culture

ARHA383 - 01
Monument, Site, and Memory

Office Hours:

Most days and times available by appointment, 41 Wyllys Avenue, Room 311

Research Interests:

Phillip B. Wagoner's research focuses on the cultural history of the Deccan region of South India, primarily in the late medieval and early modern periods (1200-1600). His primary interest is in the historical interactions between the region's established Indic culture and the Persianate culture that arrived when the Delhi Sultanate annexed the region in the early fourteenth century. To study the dynamics of this process, he relies on a broad range of literary, epigraphic, architectural, and archaeological evidence, gathered over the course of numerous trips to the field since the early 1980s. Since 1987, he has been associated with the Vijayanagara Research Project, an international team of scholars in different disciplines dedicated to documentation and interpretation of the site of Vijayanagara, capital of the state that dominated the southern part of the Indian peninsula between the 1340s and 1565. This work has led to the publication of two books; one on late sixteenth-century understandings of Vijayanagara based on a Telugu historiographic text written in the region some 35 years after the collapse of the state (Tidings of the King: a Translation and Ethnohistorical Analysis of the Rayavacakamu, University of Hawai'i Press, 1993), and the other a 3-volume work presenting comprehensive architectural documentation of the over 400 temples and other structures preserved in one key zone of the site (co-authored with George Michell,Vijayanagara: Architectural Inventory of the Sacred Centre, New Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies and Manohar, 2001). He has also published numerous articles on various topics relating to Vijayanagara, including the pre-Vijayanagara history of the site, the reuse of architectural components retrieved from earlier buildings, the system of elite dress at the Vijayanagara court, the ability of political elites to move between the Indic and Persianate worlds, and the significance of Sanskrit historiographic traditions that represent Vijayanagara as a successor state to the Delhi Sultanate. Since 2000, his work has increasingly focused on Persianate Islamic architecture in the Deccan, and his articles have dealt with topics ranging from the first appearance of Sultanate style architecture in the region in the early fourteenth century, to the founding and design of Hyderabad, laid out as a new capital by the Qutb Shahi sultans in the late 16th century. He is currently completing a book, co-authored with historian Richard M. Eaton, titled Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India's Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600.

Scholarly Keywords:

South Asian and Islamic art history, South Indian cultural history, buildings archaeology and urbanism, Telugu language and literature

Kenan Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus and Professor of Art History, Emeritus

jpaoletti@wesleyan.edu

BA Yale University
MA Yale University
MAA Wesleyan University
PHD Yale University

Office Hours:
Emeritus jpaoletti@wesleyan.edu

Research Interests:
John Paoletti taught the history of Italian Renaissance art and of the art of the twentieth century from 1972 to 2009. He was a William R. Kenan Professor of the Humanities from 2005 until his retirement. He received the Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Wesleyan in 1997 and the Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award from the College Art Association in 2003. He was a Fellow at the School of Historical Studies, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton in the spring of 2001 and Visiting Professor at the Villa I Tatti, Harvard's Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence, in the late fall of 2008. He is currently serving as a member of the Committee on Prints and Illustrated Books, Museum of Modern Art, New York. From 1996-2000 he was the editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin, the journal of record in art history in the United States. He served as guest curator for exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Yale Center for British Art, as well as at Wesleyan. In a number of these exhibitions, students served with him as co-curators and co-authors of the catalogue material He is the co-author with Gary Radke of Art in Renaissance Italy, now in its fourth edition. With Roger Crum he is the co-editor of and contributing author to Renaissance Florence: a Social History, (New York, 2006). He has contributed catalogue essays for exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, the National Gallery of Art and the Nurnberg Kunsthalle. He is currently at work on a monograph on Michelangelo's David, a study of Medici patronage during the fifteenth century, and a monograph on Georg Baselitz.

Scholarly Keywords:
Art of the Italian RenaissanceArt in Europe and the United States after 1945

Academic Associations:
College Art Association(former Editor-in-Chief of The ArtBulletin, published by the CAA)

Assistant Professor of Classical Studies
Downey House 212
860-685-2067

Assistant Professor, Archaeology Program

kbirney@wesleyan.edu

BA Yale University
MT Harvard University
PHD Harvard University

CCIV201 - 01
Bronze Age Mediterranean

GRK365 - 01
Hesiod's Theogony

CCIV283 - 01
Greek Vases as Art & Artifact

GRK101 - 01
Introduction to Ancient Greek

Personal Web Site:
http://kbirney.faculty.wesleyan.edu/

Office Hours:

Spring 2013: Wednesdays 4-5 PM (and by appointment)

Scholarly Keywords:

Archaeology and History of the Ancient Aegean, Near East and Egypt, literary and historical interactions between Greece and the Near East

Lab URL:
http://ashkelon.site.wesleyan.edu/

Publications:
http://wesleyan.academia.edu/KathleenBirney

BA Grinnell College
MA University of Iowa
PHD Duke University

Office Hours:

Spring 2013: Wednesdays 1:00 pm-3:00 pm, and by appointment

Professor of Art
Art Workshop 007
860-685-3533

Art Studio Program Director

dschorr@wesleyan.edu

BA Brown University
BFA Yale University
MAA Wesleyan University
MFA Yale University

Personal Web Site:
http://davidschorr.com

Office Hours:

Year 2011/2012: Tuesday 10:00-12:00 p.m. and 2:00-4:00 p.m., 007 Art Workshops. It is recommended that students call first, ext. 3533, to be certain Professor Schorr is available.

A native of Chicago, educated at Brown and Yale, David Schorr works and resides in New York City and Middletown. He has been Professor of Art at Wesleyan since 1971 where he has taught printmaking, drawing, typography, book design, graphic design and calligraphy. He has been a Fulbright Scholar three times, to Italy in 1975, where he worked at the Calcografia Nazionale and to India in 1998 and 2001. He continues to go to India every year where he is adjunct professor at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. He has also been a fellow a number of times at Tamarind Institute (America's foremost shop of fine arts lithography).
He is represented by Mary Ryan Gallery in New York City where he shows regularly. In addition has had solo shows in Chicago, Milan, Rome, Naples, Paris, Athens, Toronto, Montreal and Copenhagen. His work has been reproduced extensively in the New York Times, The New Yorker and most significantly The New Republic, for which he has done over three hundred portraits. Schorr has illustrated numerous books, among them Parallel Lives, by Wesleyan author Phyllis Rose and four volumes of the fables of La Fontaine and a collection from Baudelaire translated by Wesleyan Professor Norman Shapiro.
His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Fogg Museum (Harvard), The New York Public Library, The Israel Museum (Jerusalem), and the Museum of Modern Art, among others. The Yale University Art Gallery just acquired his set of sixty engraved portraits of writers, Unconstraining Voices.

BFA Washington University
MFA Rutgers University

ARST131 - 01
Drawing I

ARST131 - 02
Drawing I

ARST131 - 01
Drawing I

ARST432 - 01
Drawing II

Office Hours:
Fall 2011, Sabbatical, 106 Art Workshops

Assistant Professor of Art
Davison Art Center 2nd Fl
860-685-3402

arudensky@wesleyan.edu

BA Wesleyan University
MFA Yale University

ARST451 - 01
Photography I

ARST453 - 01
Digital Photography I

ARST451 - 01
Photography I

ARST452 - 01
Photography II

Office Hours:
Fall 2011: Monday, 4:00-6:00 p.m., 2nd floor over Art Library

Professor of Art
Art Studio North 103
860-685-3525

jschiff@wesleyan.edu

BA Brown University
MFA University of Mass Amherst

ARST445 - 01
Sculpture I

ARST445 - 01
Sculpture I

ARST446 - 01
Sculpture II

Office Hours:
Fall 2011: By Appointment, jschiff@wesleyan.edu or ext. 3525, 103 Studio North

Research Interests:
Jeffrey Schiff is a sculptor/installation artist. He has received numerous fellowships, including the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Senior Scholar Fulbright Fellowship to India, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Schiff has exhibited his work widely, in New York City at the Sculpture Center, Stux Gallery, and Bose Pacia Gallery, in New Delhi at Nature Morte Gallery, and in institutions such as the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, Real Art Ways, and the Katonah Museum of Art. He has produced permanent public commissions at the Boston South Station Railroad Terminal and New Britain Courthouse (in process). He recently collaborated with Wesleyan students to produce The Library Project at Wesleyan University.

Scholarly Keywords:
My work explores the contingencies of order and disorder, and offers speculations about the complex ways in which the things of the world cohere, conglomerate, fragment, proliferate, and disperse. For the faculty exhibition, I have produced twoworks about stasis and movement, the propensity for pieces of the world to shift around, and the play between the desire to exert control and the temptation to escape it. Mobile Global is a prototype for a work envisioned to be much larger, in which several spools dispense carpeting onto mobile planes to produce a fragmented floor of shifting patterns. The numerous parts of the floor can roll about, changing the configuration of the floor and the juxtapositions of its colors and patterns.In Vertical Hold, I juxtapose sculpture's logic to that of photography. Digital images of clouds appear to be held in fixed positions by steel brackets attached tolong rods leaning from the floor. I am interested in the ease with which photographs fix the relationships between dynamic elements, whereas the physical realities of sculpture resist the illusion of arrested time.

http://jschiff.web.wesleyan.edu

Professor of Art
Art Workshop 007
860-685-3533

Art Studio Program Director

dschorr@wesleyan.edu

BA Brown University
BFA Yale University
MAA Wesleyan University
MFA Yale University

Personal Web Site:
http://davidschorr.com

Office Hours:

Year 2011/2012: Tuesday 10:00-12:00 p.m. and 2:00-4:00 p.m., 007 Art Workshops. It is recommended that students call first, ext. 3533, to be certain Professor Schorr is available.

A native of Chicago, educated at Brown and Yale, David Schorr works and resides in New York City and Middletown. He has been Professor of Art at Wesleyan since 1971 where he has taught printmaking, drawing, typography, book design, graphic design and calligraphy. He has been a Fulbright Scholar three times, to Italy in 1975, where he worked at the Calcografia Nazionale and to India in 1998 and 2001. He continues to go to India every year where he is adjunct professor at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. He has also been a fellow a number of times at Tamarind Institute (America's foremost shop of fine arts lithography).
He is represented by Mary Ryan Gallery in New York City where he shows regularly. In addition has had solo shows in Chicago, Milan, Rome, Naples, Paris, Athens, Toronto, Montreal and Copenhagen. His work has been reproduced extensively in the New York Times, The New Yorker and most significantly The New Republic, for which he has done over three hundred portraits. Schorr has illustrated numerous books, among them Parallel Lives, by Wesleyan author Phyllis Rose and four volumes of the fables of La Fontaine and a collection from Baudelaire translated by Wesleyan Professor Norman Shapiro.
His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Fogg Museum (Harvard), The New York Public Library, The Israel Museum (Jerusalem), and the Museum of Modern Art, among others. The Yale University Art Gallery just acquired his set of sixty engraved portraits of writers, Unconstraining Voices.

CER

ARST460 - 01
Intro To Sumi-e Painting

ARST461 - 01
Alternative Printmaking:

ARST460 - 01
Intro To Sumi-e Painting

ARTS618 - 01
Japanese Woodblock Printmaking

Office Hours:

Spring 2011 By appointment kshinohara@wesleyan.edu ext. 2816 104 Art Studio South

Research Interests:

Keiji Shinohara was born and raised in Osaka, Japan. After 10 years as an apprentice to the renowned Keiichiro Uesugi in Kyoto, he became a Master Printmaker and moved to the United States. Shinohara's natural abstractions are printed on rice paper with water-based inks from woodblocks in the Ukiyo-e style - the traditional Japanese printmaking method dating to 600 CE. Keiji Shinohara has been a visiting artist at over 100 venues. He has received grants from the Japan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and his work is in many public collections, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, and the Library of Congress.

Scholarly Keywords:

While living in Kyoto, I trained for ten years in the traditional Japanese woodblock printing style known as Ukiyo-e. The technical foundation for my artwork is rooted in that training, accompanied by techniques of contemporary western printmaking. Yet the imagery itself is very different from historical Ukiyo-e.
The process of printmaking is appealing to me because of its inherent surprises. There is always a negotiation going on with the material. Each piece of wood brings its own character to which I must adjust each time.
For me, the story behind the work is very important; there is a sense of narrative that is very private. The feelings and emotions that I convey through these abstract landscapes matter most to me. Almost always my images are of nature, but it is the essence of the landscape that I want to express, not realistic accuracy.
Because I am left-handed, part of my Ukiyo-e training included attending Sumi-e (ink brush painting) school to become more adept at using my right hand. Woodblock printmaking is a very precise step-by-step process of planning and design, so I really like Sumi-e for the freedom it gives me to express myself spontaneously.
This specific series was inspired by my observations of the attempts to preserve ancient wall paintings. Sometimes the areas that chip away are restored in an attempt to maintain the original vitality of the painting. Yet there is a certain beauty to wall paintings that honestly reflect the passage of time, which is what I wanted to capture in these pieces.

Professor of Art
Art Studio South 103
860-685-3516

ttelfair@wesleyan.edu

BFA Moore College Of Art
MFA Syracuse University

ARST439 - 01
Painting I

ARST440 - 01
Painting II

Personal Web Site:
http://www.forumgallery.com/adetail.php?id=164, http://www.tulatelfair.com

Office Hours:

Fall 2011: Tuesday and Thursday, 8:30-9:30 a.m. or by appointment, 103 Art Studio South

Research Interests:

The action in Tula Telfair's landscape paintings takes place above the level of our understanding, in a place where events are determined, not experienced: her vistas are imagined, not observed. Telfair paints at the intersection of memory and anticipation, transporting us back and forth between what we have experienced and what we want to investigate. To do so, is to expand the limits of naturalist majesty, to move through an endless combination of indefinite time and unknown place with an effortless fluidity made possible by consummate craft. Telfair builds and frames her fictional visions with brilliant color that illuminates her enormous, active and unforgettable skies. Horizons are transitory spaces, alive with the intensity of reflected luminance; clouds are spectacular dramas, unfolding and revealing their tumescent stories. In Pleasure does Not Readily Surrender to Analysis and Exploring the Material Limits, Telfair shows stacked multiple images, exploring the associative power of nature. No two locales seem the same, but the pull of the near-narrative is constant and magnified by the mutuality of time and mood in the choices the artist makes. The golden glow of the hidden sun and the razor edge of the horizon unite the disparate elements with sure-handed confidence and control. There is a nearly geometric progression to these works, their power multiplying continuously as we move from one image to another. Adding to the depth of the spaces and the mystery of the narratives in these works is the realization that the meadows, forests, streams and skies are not contained by the frame, rather they extend before, behind and beyond the edges of the picture plane. In Imagination in the Service of Truth and Is Memory the Product of Historical Time?, the endless horizons are illuminated by a laser beam of white-hot light that compels attention and concentration. The horizon is a chapter in the story each painting reveals, not an event itself. This brilliant light, compressed under heavy skies, is the result of forces unknown, hinting at powerful events that have occurred or will occur in the future Many of the works contain bodies of water. Endless winding streams or completely contained pools reflect the sunlight and the clouds, while conveying the mood of the tales the paintings tell. Water guides us through the paintings, always pointing us toward the subject. Whether flowing or still, the water in these paintings is an anchoring presence that reassures us of the possibilities inherent in the landscapes. Similarly, the mountains do not overwhelm, holding their place against the sky, while never dominating. The paintings are not simply focused on the struggle between the elements of nature, as they are illustrative of the tense harmony within it. The fate of these stories hangs on this fragile balance, resulting in images that excite, calm and fascinate - often all at once. Telfair's paintings achieve their success with incredible economy of emotions and bravura. There is the suggestion of what has happened or will happen, but rarely does she depict a major event outside of nature itself. These are judicious works, subtly modulating their way through the narratives they have to reveal. They do this with radiant light, color and palpable stillness. They communicate by combining stillness with motion, solitude with universality and definition with suggestion. Far from the backdrops of Renaissance landscapes, or the observed travelogues of the nineteenth century, these are fully contemporary paintings in their inspiration and their execution, simultaneously lush and minimal.

Scholarly Keywords:

Painting and Drawing: Professor Telfair spent her early childhood in Gabon, Africa, moving to the United States when civil war broke out. She has exhibited her work extensively in galleries and museums in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia, and additionally in Germany and France. Her paintings are in over thirty public collections including: Barclay Bank, Brauerei Beck & Company, Cable Vision, City of Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, Deloitte Touch, General Electric Corporation, Invenergy, Mastercard Corporation, Medicis Pharmaceutical Corporation, Metropolitan Life, Redding Art Museum, Russ Corporation, Steelcase Corporation, Syracuse University, The Chubb Group, The Federal Reserve Bank, The New Orleans Museum of Art, The Tower Group, The VanGuard Collection, Vlasic Corporation and Zilkha & Company. She received her BFA from Moore College of Art in 1984, and attended Syracuse University as a Graduate Fellow, receiving her MFA in 1986. Ms. Telfair is represented by Forum Gallery. All the images I paint are invented, and come purely from memory, not from observing a site, or utilizing photographic aids. Even though many of the required elements of the sublime are present, placing the work within the Romantic landscape tradition, I also employ devices that remind the viewer that these are simply paintings; two-dimensional surfaces covered with paint. Each image is bordered on three sides with a different colored edge. These lines appear to shift their color as they come directly in contact with the landscape, and can also make one side of the canvas appear to be closer to the viewer than the other. Although the images may appear familiar, using titles like, Debating the Precise Nature of Space or The Power of Interacting Volumes, distances them from association with any particular place, affording the viewer the opportunity to recall a personal experience. While maintaining an awareness of the material object, the depicted epic moments in nature, generally facilitate an emotional response. I am interested in the subjectivity of perception and the power of memory, using illusion to trigger recollections of things past.

Academic Associations:

College Art Association

Grants:

See: http://www.tulatelfair.com/resume.html

Lab URL:
http://www.tulatelfair.com

Publications:
http://www.tulatelfair.com/resume.html

http://www.tulatelfair.com

BFA Rhode Island School of Design
MFA University of Hartford

ARST437 - 01
Printmaking

Personal Web Site:
http://www.kateteneyck.com

Office Hours:

Fall 2011 Sunday 12:00-4:00 p.m. 105 Studio South (Woodshop) kteneyck@wesleyan.edu ext. 3670 105 Art Studio South (Woodshop)

Professor of Art, Emeritus

jfrazer@wesleyan.edu

BFA Texas College
MAA Wesleyan University
MFA Yale University

Research Interests:
John Frazer, Professor of Art, emeritus, obtained his Master of Fine Arts at Yale where he was a student of Josef Albers. He has been awarded two Fulbright Grants for study in France and in Japan. He has had numerous showings of his paintings and drawings in both 32 group and in 22 solo exhibitions throughout the world. Approximately 200 of his works are in private collections. He has made seven documentary films and has published a definitive study of the pioneer French filmmaker Georges Melies. Frazer has his home and studio in Middletown. For several years he has worked with a still life series that features fruits and vegetables suspended on strings as was often done prior to refrigeration, the goal being to look at these objects that are so easily overlooked.

Scholarly Keywords:
John Frazer, Professor of Art, emeritus, obtained his Master of Fine Arts at Yale where he was a student of Josef Albers. He has been awarded two Fulbright Grants for study in France and in Japan. He has had numerous showings of his paintings and drawings in both 32 group and in 22 solo exhibitions throughout the world. Approximately 200 of his works are in private collections. He has made seven documentary films and has published a definitive study of the pioneer French filmmaker Georges Melies. Frazer has his home and studio in Middletown. For several years he has worked with a still life series that features fruits and vegetables suspended on strings as was often done prior to refrigeration, the goal being to look at these objects that are so easily overlooked.