We are excited that Joanna Epstein has received the 2018 GSAS Master's Award for Academic Achievement in the Humanities for her Museum Studies Master's Thesis entitled "Racialized Places: Historic Sites, National Self-Image and the African American Historical Record" (MA Thesis Advisor - Dr. Marissa H. Petrou, Faculty Fellow, Program in Museum Studies). Awards of $500.00 were given for the most distinguished master's thesis or final project in each academic division to those who received their master’s degrees in May 2017, September 2017, or January 2018. Recipients of this award will be acknowledged at the GSAS Master’s Convocation ceremony in May 2018. Joanna graduated with MA in Museum Studies in May 2017 and currently works as Administrative Aide at the Center for Experimental Humanities, New York University.

The Best Thesis award was given to Joanna Epstein for her thesis “Racialized Places: Northern Historic Sites, National Self-Image and the African American Historical Record.”

Mathilde Lejeune has been awarded the Program's Distinguished Thesis award for her work "Putting a Halt to Heritage Heist: International Efforts to Combat Art Trafficking During Armed Conflict."

Sara Lowenburg received Honorable Mention for her thesis Serving Those Who Served: Engaging Veterans in Museums.

Congratulations to the Class of 2017!

We are pleased to welcome Kim Kanatani, Sharon Vatsky and Sheri Levinsky-Raskin to our Adjunct Faculty. Kim Kanatani, Deputy Director and Gail Engelberg Director of Education, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation will co-teach Museum Education (MSMS-GA 2224) with Sharon Vatsky, Director of School and Family Programs, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Sheri Levinsky-Raskin, Assistant Vice President, Research and Evaluation, Intrepid Air, Sea and Space Museum will teach Topics in Museum Studies: Research and Evaluation in Museums.

A Russian translation of Bruce Altshuler’s book, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the Twentieth Century, will be published in Spring 2018 by the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, with a new introduction by the author.  He will speak in Moscow on the occasion of the book’s publication.  In February 2018, for a conference at Arte Fiera in Bologna, Italy, Dr. Altshuler lectured on the relationship between the art market and exhibitions of the historical avant-garde, and in March 2017 he spoke at and organized a session on art museums for the conference Museums and their Publics at Sites of Conflicted History, at the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw, Poland.  Other museums at which he has lectured in the past few years include the Brooklyn Museum, Detroit Institute of Arts, Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Tensta Konsthalle (Stockholm), Jumex Museum (Mexico City), Museum Sztuki (Lodz, Poland), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), and Serralves Museum (Porto, Portugal). In 2016 Dr. Altshuler published essays in The Art Newspaper on the achievements of Tate Modern (London) and on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s opening of the Met Breuer.  

Dr. Miriam Basilio (joint appointment in the department of Art History with Museum Studies) was granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor effective September 1, 2013. She is on sabbatical leave for academic year 2013-14, working on her second book which focuses on the role of Alfred Barr in defining the "problematic term 'Latin-American art'" through his particular strategies of collection and display at The Museum of Modern Art. Earlier this year, Miriam Basilio lectured on "The Evolving Latin American Canon" at the Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX), in a two-day international symposium, From the Other Shore: Narratives and Perspectives on Spanish & Latin American Art. The symposium, which took place on May 1-2, 2013, was organized to "analyze the various ways in which ideas and perceptions about Spanish and Latin American art have evolved in the last decades..." Here is the full program of the symposium; Professor Basilio's talk and the Q&A session afterward are here and here. She also gave a presentation at the Encuentros trasatlánticos: discursos vanguardistas en España y Latinoamérica, held at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain) in July. Professor Basilio also lectured at the Institute of Fine Arts in October. Her talk "The Evolving Canon: Latin American Art at MoMA, 1945-55" was part of the Institute's Latin American Forum. In November 2013 she will lecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Dr. Glenn Wharton left his position as Media Conservator at the Museum of Modern Art last summerin 2013 to accept a Clinical Associate professorship in Museum Studies, effective July 1, 2013. Since then he has launched a number of research projects related to the disposition of contemporary art in museums. In 2018 he began an in-depth survey of time-based media holdings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2017 he was awarded a Guest Scholarship at the Getty Conservation Institute for research leading to a book on the conservation of contemporary art. In 2015, with Co-Director Deena Engel from Computer Science, he launched the Artist Archives Initiative at NYU. He continues to serve on the board of the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art -- North America (INCCA-NA), and as advisor to NYU's Grey Art Gallery and other arts organizations. He organized a roundtable discussion at NYU in October 2013 on Archiving Performance Art for the Future with artist Lorraine O'Grady, and spoke at the University of North Carolina on Collaborative Heritage Preservation with Descendant Communities. In November 2011, Professor Wharton published The Painted King: Art, Activism, & Authenticity in Hawai’i with the University of Hawai’i Press.