Ph.D. Program in Art History, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Congrats to PhD candidate Isabel Elson-Enriquez who has just been announced as the Imogene Gieling Associate Curator of Craft and Decorative Arts at the Oakland Museum of California, a position made possible by a generous gift from the late Bay Area jewelry designer Imogene Gieling.

In this role, she will help steward OMCA’s extensive holdings of ceramics, jewelry, textiles, metalwork, glass, and furniture, spanning the 19th century to the present.

She is currently completing her dissertation on the emergence of plastic as a sculptural medium in the post-war period, specifically tracing the evolving relationship between plastic and the human body as synthetics took over our material environment.

Our department’s first-year cohort has finished their first year! 🙃🌺

Here’s a nice pic of all of them with Dr. Siona Wilson

Pictured are: Marina, Ellie, Maverick, Dorothy, Theodora, Lydia, Ben, Danny

CUNY GC Art History at the Venice Biennial vernissage ! PhD candidates Miller Schulman and Jonathan Odden at “Seaworld Venice” by Florentina Holzinger (Austrian Pavilion) 🚽

odden

CUNY Graduate Center Art History students and faculty traveled to the Yale Center for British Art on Thursday, April 23, to participate in a study day organized around the exhibition Artists and the East India Company.

The visit included a panel on “Authorship” featuring Professor Caitlin Beach, as well as time in the galleries with works including the Lucknow scroll and Rina Banerjee’s installation in the YCBA lobby.

Participants included Professor Caitlin Beach and PhD students Debarati Sarkar, Kitty Holbrooke, and Dorothy Kwok.

A nice pic of GC Art History PhD candidates (left to right) Quinn Schoen, Jeremy Bleeke, and Forrest Pelsue after giving their papers as part of MoMA’s Marron Research Consortium. Very good work !🪻

Many congrats to Ph.D. candidate Mia Curran for recently presenting her paper “Pattern Politics: Aaron Douglas and the Quilters of the Tennessee Valley Authority” at the Frick IFA Symposium on the History of Art ⭐️

Image: Cover of The Crisis, September 1927, Aaron Douglas

Mark your calendars for next Tuesday! Dr. Maya Harakawa (University of Toronto) will present ‘The Evolution of Afro-American Artists:Rewriting Histories of Black Art at CCNY c. 1968.’ Tuesday, April 21, 2026 at 5:30 PM, room 3421, the Graduate Center.



Dr. Harakawa is an alumnus of the GC Art History PhD program – she received her doctorate in 2022 and was advised by Dr. Siona Wilson. Among her many achievements, this year she was awarded the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize by The Art Bulletin.

We are all very much looking forward to her seminar :)

Images:

Photograph of children visiting The Evolution of Afro-American Artists at the City

University of New York. Photo published in February 1968 issue of Ebony magazine.

Cover of Ebony magazine, February 1968 with feature on The Evolution of Afro-American Artists.

Exhibition poster, The Evolution of Afro-American Artists.

Charles White, Juba, 1965. Lithograph on paper.

We are very much looking forward to This Portrait is NOT an Indian, a day of talks and performances this Wednesday, April 15th.

Event schedule:
Wanda Nanibush Sovereign Acts
Kent Monkman The Emergence of a Legend
Jackson Polys Performing ‘Indian’
Visual Sovereignty with Jolene Rickard, Alan Michelson, Joseph Pierce, Wanda Nanibush
An Infected Sunset performance by Demian DineYazhi’ with Rain from Heaven

This Portrait is NOT an Indian is taking place Wednesday, April 15, 2026 from 4:00 PM–8:00 PM at Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC.

Register in link in bio !!

Congratulations to Dr. Anna Indych-López for the publication of her recent essay, “Riding in Place: Miguel Luciano’s Double Phantom/EntroP.R., (Un)tethered Diasporas, and Anti-Colonialism.”

Published by US Latinx Art Forum, Indych-López’s essay forms part of the “Diasporic (un)Tethering” series, which investigates artists whose work engages connection and/or disconnection from a homeland that is recognized or is not recognized by the nation-state, and the ways artists explore dispersal and relationships to space and people.

Image: Miguel Luciano, Pa-lan-te, (2017), neon, overall: 120 × 24 inches, and Double Phantom/EntroP.R., (2017), 1952 Schwinn Phantom bicycles, flags, overall: 120 × 40 × 32 inches. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Link to read in bio :)