News from the Art History Department at Tyler School of Art and Architecture
The panel is “Unstable Monuments: Nation, States, Spaces and Conflicts in Public Sculpture 1811-1947. Noah will be presenting a paper, “Claiming Independence/Claiming Columbus”
Mapping the Global Middle Ages, 1000—1400 CE, a collaborative digital mapping project created by students in Prof. Kopta’s course Art of the Global Middle Ages in the Art History Department at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, is now live!
Explore the project here: https://arcg.is/19DW1e1
Framed as “A Modern Pilgrimage of the Middle Ages,” the project works to challenge fantasy-driven images of premodern culture and instead foregrounds movement, encounter, devotion, and exchange across a genuinely global world. By expanding the concept of pilgrimage beyond a Western Christian framework, the students reimagined how premodern viewers and modern audiences might navigate networks of trade, belief, and intellectual life spanning continents.
Through digital mapping, the exhibition shows how objects that appear unrelated in isolation come into focus as part of interconnected global systems. The result is a compelling model for teaching and visualizing an inclusive art history, and for using digital tools to rethink periodization and geography.
This project was developed by TJ Bowers, Mia Garay, James Harbison, Henry Lawrence Hess, Audrey Esty Howerin, Arianna Jordan, Said Manuel Nunez Lopez, Ilse Smith, Emma Vanderbilt, Emma Julia Wahlers, Clay Whelan, and Ashley Yeboah. Works draw from collections including the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and beyond.
The review has been published in Art History : i
The review of ‘Property Rights’ can be found here, in Art History, Volume 48, Issue 3, June 2025, pp. 619–622
11 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 4
Booth Hall, room 3634 Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester NY
About Alpesh Kantilal Patel
Alpesh Kantilal Patel’s (they/he) art historical scholarship, curation, and criticism reflect their queer, anti-racist, and transcultural approach to contemporary art. They are an associate professor of global contemporary art at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University. Recently, they were an artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and curator at large at UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, where they organized a series of exhibitions under the theme, “Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans* Subjectivity.” Patel will talk about their current research and how these critical touchstones in queerness, anti-racism, and transculturalism has led into several publications and curatorial projects within the world of contemporary glass.
Every two weeks, I would switch between the Fine Arts and the American Furniture, Decorative, and Folk Arts Departments. My summer-long project focused on database taxonomy, where I categorized +25,000 files according to historical classification (ex. Old Masters, Couture, 19th-Century Continental Furniture) after Freeman’s database merged with Hindman. From writing condition reports to cataloging objects for an upcoming auction, the Decorative Arts department offered something new every day. Additionally, I participated in live auctions through online and phone bidding. Research proved to be a vital skill, as I was frequently assigned pricing catalogues to study. I was able to use my notetaking and visual analysis skills to recognize patterns in quilts, carved horses, and Chippendale furniture. I could also create historic connections despite not directly knowing the context of the object, such as the rising popularity of mahogany furniture being directly attributed to growing transatlantic slavery.
Find Mariola’s insights here: https://news.temple.edu/news/2025-10-14/temple-leaders-reflect-identity-and-experiences-hispanic-americans
Molly Bernhard (PhD candidate) will be giving a talk at the 16th-Century Society Conference titled “”In Situ: Battle-Scarred Art from Early Modern Italy”
Camila Medina (PhD candidate) and Alexandra Schoolman (PhD candidate) will give talks at the SECAC annual conference. Medina will present “Queering the Grid: Mary Vieira, Gego, and the Transmateriality of Abstraction in the Cold War.” Schoolman’s talk is “Mourning Spaces: Memory, Marking, and Refuge in the Site-Specific Works of Horacio Zabala, Lotty Rosenfeld, and Artur Barrio.”
Cecelia Heintzelman will present at the 51st Annual Byzantine Studies Conference: “To Have and To Hold: The Enkolpion and Divinity in Byzantium.”
Over the summer, Leah published an article on Richard Rauschenberg’s “The Happy Apocalypse” here: https://contemporary.burlington.org.uk/journal/journal/spiritually-overqualified-robert-rauschenberg-and-the-happy-apocalypse-commission
Has a piece in The Delaware Contemporary show “Challenging the Algorithmic Gaze” (until December 5): https://www.decontemporary.org/reimagine-reveal
Gave the keynote, “Looking up at and from the Unfathomable Scale of Disaster” at the “Art, Urbanocene and the City, the 7th Art and the City Conference in Villa Arson, l’Université Côte d’Azur.
And the lecture, “Art as Reconstruction in the Perilous Territory of Not-Belonging”, part of the panel “Wartime Cities: Resistance, Creativity, Resilience” at the VI Midterm Conference of the European Sociological Association Research Network: Urban Sociology
As an expert on American art, Pauwels was interviewed by Temple Now. You can read her insights about the opening of the Calder Gardens here: https://news.temple.edu/news/2025-09-22/temple-experts-calder-gardens-new-gem-philadelphia-s-art-and-culture-scene
Emily’s clarity in learning goals and creativity with rigor in assignments resonated deeply with the undergraduates she taught in the writing class “Memory in Contemporary Global Art”.
She noted in her teaching statement that “teaching art history can equip students with skills and ethical commitments that they can carry with them into a plethora of career paths, as well as engage them with current events…my goal as an educator is to address students holistically to develop critical thinking skills, visual literacy, and empathy that will inform how they interact with the wider world.”
