News from the Art History Department at Tyler School of Art and Architecture
Jessica will present “Mapping the Hyperhorizon: Relational Visuality in Artistic Depictions of the Caribbean,” at FSU’s Department of Art History Annual Graduate Student Symposium.
And “What Remains Unsaid: Reading Kim Lim’s Words, Silences, and Afterlives of Artistic Speech,” at the In Her Words: Women Artists and Life Writing Symposium at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge University
Conversations at MOCA with exhibiting artist Hiba Schahbaz and curator Jasmine Wahi, moderated by Alpesh Kantilal Patel, PhD. Dive into Hiba Schahbaz: The Garden, her first major retrospective showcasing 15 years of lush paintings inspired by Sufi mysticism, global myths, the feminist gaze, and fantastical realms of sea, land, and sky. Framed as a jannat or Paradise Garden with Persian and Mughal char-bagh influences, the exhibition merges Indo-Persian miniature traditions with large-scale works evoking South Florida’s lush landscapes and themes of transformation, selfhood, and care.
Jessica’s review of Isamu Noguchi’s exhibit at the Clark Art Institute can be found here: https://www.bu.edu/sequitur/2026/01/14/isamu-noguchi-landscapes-of-time/
In a few weeks she will be presenting a paper at the 20206 CAA meetings: “Contextualizing Transnational Practices: Leveraging Art Historical and Digital Humanities Methodologies to Amplify Marginalized Narratives;” as part of the panel: Visibility as Resistance: Amplifying Marginalized Narratives.
Jessica will as well be co-chair for the session “Expanding Critical Frameworks: Unraveling Devaluation and Recontextualizing the Field of Fiber Art.” As part of this session, Liam Maher (PhD candidate) is presenting a paper titled “Conceptual Threads – Tina Girouard and Antoine Oleyant’s Drapo Vodou”.
and a Workshop Co-leader for: “Grids Across Borders: Art, Craft, and the Global Context.”
Her travel to CAA is funded by the Association of Print Scholars Travel Grant.
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.
Find Mariola’s insights here: https://news.temple.edu/news/2025-10-14/temple-leaders-reflect-identity-and-experiences-hispanic-americans
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.”
