Curator | Rotunda Collaborators | Symposium Session 1 | Session 2 | Session 3 | Session 4
Exhibition curator
Richard Guy Wilson
Commonwealth Professor of Architectural History, University of Virginia
Chair of the Department of Architectural History, University of Virginia
Richard Guy Wilson holds the Commonwealth Professor's Chair in Architectural History at the University of Virginia where he is also Chair of the Department of Architectural History. His specialty is the architecture, design, and art of the 18th to the 20th century both in America and abroad. He received his undergraduate training at the University of Colorado and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Michigan. He taught at Michigan and Iowa State University before coming to Virginia in 1976. Wilson has received a number of academic honors, among them a Guggenheim fellowship, prizes for distinguished writing, and, in 1986, was made an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects. He received the outstanding professor award at the University of Virginia in 2001. A frequent lecturer for universities, museums, and professional groups, Professor Wilson has also published widely. He is the author or co-author of 14 books that deal with American and modern architecture and has worked as a curator on major museum exhibitions on the American Renaissance, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Machine Age.
About the exhibition >
Exhibition blog, join the discussion >
Rotunda collaborators
Judith Shatin
William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Music, University of Virginia
Composer, sound artist, community arts partner, and educator
Judith Shatin is a composer, sound artist, community arts partner and educator. She is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor at the University of Virginia, where she founded and directs the Virginia Center for Computer Music. She composes in genres ranging from chamber, choral and orchestral to digital and multimedia. A recipient of four NEA Fellowships, she has been honored with awards from the American Music Center, Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Arts Partners Program, Meet the Composer, the New Jersey State Arts Council and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, among many others. Shatin's music is performed worldwide and at festivals such as the Aspen, BAM Next Wave, Grand Teton, Havana in Springtime, and West Cork Festivals. Called "highly inventive… on every level; hugely enjoyable and deeply involving" (Washington Post), her music has been commissioned by ensembles ranging from the Kronos Quartet to the National Symphony. She has held residencies at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Brahmshaus in Baden-Baden, Mishkan Amanim in Israel, and in this country at MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her music reflects her fascination with the sounding world around us as well as a fresh approach to acoustic instruments. Her music can be heard on the Capstone, Centaur, Innova, Neuma, New World and Sonora labels. She lives in Charlottesville with her husband, Michael Kubovy, a U.Va. Professor of Psychology with whom she has co-taught "The Mind of the Artist," and "Psychology of Music."
About the digital video, Rotunda >
Read about the making of Rotunda >
Robert Arnold
Director of the School of Film & Photography, Montana State University
Filmmaker
Robert Arnold was born in New Jersey in 1954. He received the BFA in 1977, and the MA in 1980, in Sculpture, before turning to film theory and practice, earning a Ph.D. in Film Theory from the University of Iowa in 1994. He has published several articles in academic film journals and has won numerous awards for his experimental film and videos, which have been exhibited widely at international festivals. His recent video installations are in major collections including the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image. He has taught filmmaking and film theory since 1985. For the past eight years, he was Professor of Film Production at Boston University and also served as Visiting Professor of Video and Installation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland. He is currently Director of the School of Film & Photography at Montana State University in Bozeman. He is a recipient of a 2004 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency and a 2001 South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Artists. He resides in Bozeman with his spouse Katie Travis and daughter Maya Rain.
About the digital video, Rotunda >
Session 1 | Friday, November 20
Bruce Boucher
Director, University Art Museum, University of Virginia
Lecture
Palladio in a Cold Climate
Bruce Boucher has been the Director of the University of Virginia Art Museum since March 2009. Previously he was Eloise Martin Curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Art at the Art Institute of Chicago and taught for a number of years at University College London as a professor of the history of art. He studied at Harvard, Oxford, and the Courtauld Institute of Art and is the author of numerous books and articles on Italian sculpture and architecture, including Andrea Palladio: The Architect in His Time and Italian Baroque Sculpture.
Cinzia Sicca Bursill-Hall
Professor and Director of Art History Program, Department of Art History, Università di Pisa
Lecture
Palladio's drawings in eighteenth-century English collections
A former Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, Cinzia Sicca was awarded her Ph.D. in 1988 for a dissertation on Lord Burlington architect and collector of architectural drawings. Since 1993 she has been Associate Professor at the University of Pisa, where she also chairs the higher degree board in history of art. In 1987 and 1990 she has been Visiting Fellow at the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, Santa Monica. During the summer of 2001 served as the British Academy Visiting Professor at the University of Leicester, where she was also the Junior Lecturer from 1978 until 1982. In 2002-2003 she served as Frese Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. In 2002 she was awarded a two year Getty Collaborative Research Grant for a project on John Talman's Collection of Drawings as a Historia of Art from Antiquity to Christianity. She has organized conferences in association with the Paul Mellon Center, London and with I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, as well as sessions at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Conferences.
Her recent research focuses on the history of painting and sculpture between 1500 and 1799, with a particular emphasis on the artistic and cultural relations connecting central and northern Italy to England, France and the United States. She is currently working on an international exhibition on William Kent with venues in London and New York, and on an exhibition on Anglo-Florentine artistic links in the sixteenth century to be held at the Museo del Bargello, Florence.
Richard Hewlings
English Heritage
Lecture
Chiswick House (the model): Is it Palladian at all?
Richard Hewlings read history at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and history of art at the Courtauld Institute, London. He has worked for English Heritage and its predecessor body, the Department of the Environment, as an Inspector of Ancient Monuments since 1972-compiling the statutory lists of historic buildings from 1972 to 1980, advising the Historic Buildings Council for England on grant applications from 1980 to 1987, and advising the Crown on the conservation of royal palaces from 1987 to 2003. He has been a Historian within English Heritage's Properties Presentation Department since 2003, and he edits the academic journal English Heritage Historical Review.
He is also a member of the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art at Cambridge University, of the Courtauld Association of Former Students, and he was a Trustee of the Georgian Group from 1995 to 2003. He was the Inspector of Ancient Monuments for Chiswick House (and other properties) from 1987 to 2003, and wrote the 1989 English Heritage guidebook Chiswick House and Gardens. He was editor of The Georgian Group Journal from 1995 to 2007, and is the author of over 100 articles on (mainly) eighteenth-century architecture, of which six have been on Lord Burlington and Chiswick.
Calder Loth
Architectural Historian, Virginia Department of Historical Resources
Lecture
Palladio and the American Architectural Image
Calder Loth is the retired Senior Architectural Historian of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources for which he now serves as a consultant. He has a bachelor's and master's degree in architectural history from the University of Virginia and serves on the university's historic preservation advisory committee. In 2008 he was the recipient of the first Secretary of the Interior's Preservation Award for service to state preservation programs. Mr. Loth currently enjoys lecturing on architectural literacy for the Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America. Finally, he is serving as a co-curator for the RIBA's exhibition of Palladian Drawings to open at the Pierpont Morgan Library in April, 2010.
Session 2 | Saturday, November 21
William L. Beiswanger
Robert H. Smith Director of Restoration, Monticello
Lecture
Lessons from Palladio at Monticello
William L. Beiswanger is the Robert H. Smith Director of Restoration at Monticello, where his responsibilities include documenting the design and construction of Monticello as well as developing and coordinating a program for the restoration of the house and re-creation of the landscape.
Susan R. Stein
Richard Gilder Senior Curator and Vice President for Museum Programs, Monticello
Lecture
Furnishing Monticello: Function and Fashion
Susan R. Stein is the Richard Gilder Senior Curator and Vice President of Museum Programs at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home in Charlottesville, Virginia. For more than twenty years, she has studied and written about Thomas Jefferson. She was the curator of The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello exhibition (1993) and principal author of its accompanying book. Her current projects include the restoration and interpretation of Monticello's upper floors and dependencies (the work and living spaces located near the house), Mulberry Row, and planning new exhibitions. She directed the interpretive elements of the new Thomas Jefferson Visitor Center - an introductory film (Thomas Jefferson's World) and four exhibitions in the Smith Gallery.
Elizabeth V. Chew
Curator, Monticello
Lecture
What Jefferson Saw on the Vaunted Scene
Elizabeth Chew is Curator at Monticello. She is an art historian interested in relationships between material culture, architecture, and gender and family politics in the early modern Atlantic world. She has published numerous articles on gender and space, portraiture, domestic interiors, and collecting in 17th and 18th century Britain and America. Her paper today relates to a current project on the European precedents of Thomas Jefferson's Indian Hall at Monticello, and some of his more obscure activities in Paris and London.
Hugh Howard
Author of Houses of the Founding Fathers, Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson, The Painters Chair
Lectures
Doctor Kimball's Time Machine: A Look at Sidney Fiske Kimball,
The Man Who Rediscovered Jefferson-as-Architect
Hugh Howard is a sometime builder - he built himself a tripartite Palladian house in the Federal style. He has written for television, including a six-hour A&E Networks series titled In Search of Palladio. But primarily he's a storyteller, a writer of books. He has been a freelance writer for twenty-five years. Prior to that he was senior editor and vice president at The New York Times Book Company. He graduated from Tufts College Magna Cum Laude with a B.A. in English literature.
Howard's most recent book is The Painter's Chair: George Washington and the Making of American Art, (February 2009, Blooomsbury Press), a group portrait of Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull, Edward Savage, and Gilbert Stuart, as well as a look through their eyes at the indispensable Washington.
Among Hugh Howard's other books are Houses of the Founding Fathers (Artisan, 2007), Colonial Houses: The Historic Homes of Williamsburg (Abrams, 2004), Natchez: Jewel of the Mississippi (Universe, 2003), Thomas Jefferson, Architect (Rizzoli, 2003); his memoir House-Dreams; Wright for Wright, an architectural biography of Frank Lloyd Wright (Rizzoli; 2001); and The Preservationist's Progress, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991). At present he is at work on a book about the War of 1812, titled Mr. and Mrs. Madison's War.
In the context of this symposium however, it is Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson (Bloomsbury, 2006) that most concerns us. The book is a dual biography that examines the early days of American architecture as recounted by scholar Fiske Kimball (1888-1955). As historian Joseph Ellis has said, "Hugh Howard argues convincingly that Kimball and Jefferson were the Boswell and Johnson of American architecture. Their conversation managed to leap over two centuries of separation and establish, for the first time, the origins of an indigenous American architectural style. And speaking of style, this book truly has it."
Session 3 | Saturday, November 21
Craig Reynolds
Elizabethtown Community College in Kentucky, M.A., Virginia Commonwealth University
Lecture
Temples of Justice: Thomas Jefferson and the Palladian Courthouse in Virginia
Craig Reynolds holds an MA in architectural history from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he began studying Jeffersonian Architecture with Charles Brownell. During his time in Virginia he worked with the Publications Office of the Virginia Historical Society, had a research internship at the Thomas Jefferson Library, and received a grant from the Department of Historic Resources to study Jeffersonian courthouses. The co-authored courthouse study which surveyed Jefferson's influence on Virginia courthouse design was published electronically on the DHR website. Craig has given multiple papers on Jeffersonian architecture, including one at the United States Military Academy at West Point which will be published by the University of Virginia Press as part of an edited volume. He is currently the Gallery Director and an instructor of art history and humanities at Elizabethtown Community College in Kentucky.
 |
|
|
Lily Fox-Bruguiere
M.A. Candidate, Architectural History, University of Virginia
Lecture
An Uncultivated Legacy: Jefferson's Botanical Garden at the University of Virginia
Lily Fox-Bruguiere is a second year Master's candidate in Architectural History, with a focus on landscape history. A Charlottesville native, Lily graduated from the University of Virginia with a Bachelor's degree in Art History in 2001. She then worked as a gardener for seven years before returning to school, including three years as a gardener at Monticello, where her education on Jefferson and his love of plants began. In addition to pursuing a Certificate in Historic Preservation, Lily is researching the history of botanical gardens and Jefferson's plans for a botanical garden at the University of Virginia in particular.
Bryan Clark Green
Ph.D. University of Virginia, Director of Historic Preservation,
Virginia Commonwealth Architects
Lecture
Workmen at the University
Bryan Clark Green, PhD is an Architectural Historian and Director of Historic Preservation with Commonwealth Architects of Richmond, Virginia where he plays a key role in the on-going revitalization of the mid-Atlantic region's architectural landscape. Mr. Green's work includes researching and writing historic structure reports, drafting conservation assessments and rehabilitation plans, designing, conducting, and managing field investigations, undertaking feasibility studies, advising on rehabilitation tax credit projects, and preparing National Register of Historic Places nominations. His work has covered resources ranging from 18th century taverns to buildings from the 1939 New York World's Fair, and varies in type from log houses to lighthouses, and from small museums to multistory office buildings. His publications include In Jefferson's Shadow: The Architecture of Thomas R. Blackburn and co-authorship of Lost Virginia: Vanished Architecture of the Old Dominion and Building the Presidents House: Newly Discovered Architectural Plans for James Madison's Montpelier. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, he received his MA and PhD from the Architectural History department at the University of Virginia.
|
|
|
Joseph Dye Lahendro
AIA, Historic Preservation Architect, Facilities Management, University of Virginia
Lecture
At the Wellspring: Fiske Kimball at the University of Virginia
Jody has been Historic Preservation Architect in UVA's Facilities Management for the past five years, managing work on the University's more than 100 designated historic buildings, including the Academical Village. Previously he had his own architectural practice in Richmond for 18 years, specializing in historic preservation, restoration and adaptive reuse. He also served as preservation architect for the Taliesin Preservation Commission as it began its charge to preserve Frank Lloyd Wright's home in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Jody received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Virginia Tech, and his Master in Architectural History from U.Va. The background for his talk today comes from his master thesis, Fiske Kimball: American Renaissance Historian.
Session 4 | Saturday, November 21
R.R.S. Stewart
M.A., Architectural History and Urban and Environmental Planning, University of Virginia
Lecture
Brooks, Pratt, and the Romantic Picturesque at University of Virginia
R.R.S. Stewart was born and raised in Dubuque, Iowa. The beauty of that area, the ancient Native American Indian Effigy mounds, and Dubuque's being the oldest European-American settlement in Iowa started her interest in Historic Preservation. Growing up on the Iowa/Wisconsin border, seeing Taliesin hovering over a sea of corn also contributed to Ms. Stewart's interest in Architecture. Her travels throughout the U.S. and Europe further enhanced her architectural interest. R.R.S. has visited all 50 U.S. state capitals and 17 national capitals.
She received a Bachelor of Individualized Studies in Architectural Conservation, Mass Communication, and Women's Politics from the University of Minnesota. Ms. Stewart studied at the University of Edinburgh for three semesters, concluding with a post-occupancy evaluation of the Scottish Parliament complex, which incorporated 17th century structures into a post-modern assembly by Enric Miralles, Bendetta Tagliabue (EMBT, Spain) and RMJM (Scotland) Ltd.
R.R.S. received a Master's Degree in Architectural History, a Certificate in Historic Preservation and a second Master's in Urban and Environmental Planning from the University of Virginia. Her degrees focused on American Architecture and Art prior to 1950, Scottish Landscape Architecture from 1600 – 1750 and Preservation Planning. Ms. Stewart's master's thesis was "Designing a campus for African-American females: the National Training School for Women and Girls 1907 – 1964". She currently lives in Dubuque, doing consulting work and pursuing other employment.
Garth Anderson
M.A. Candidate, Architectural History, University of Virginia,
University of Virginia Facilities Management
Lecture
Working in Jefferson's Shadow: the University's Architectural Commission
Garth Anderson is a 25 year veteran of the University; his first 12 years were with the Health System supervising the clinical investigation laboratory for the blood bank. He was a co-author on 18 published articles and letters, and 24 presented abstracts. Electing to concentrate on his computer skills, he joined Facilities Management as their Resource Center Manager. Garth catalogued the architectural drawing archive that contains material as early as the 1893 Fayerweather Gymnasium set. With the acquisition of a 36 inch wide scanner, the entire collection has been digitized and available to consultant architects, engineers, and historians. The collection spurred his interest into the development of the University. A frequent researcher in Special Collections, Garth studies the architects who contributed to the University in the 20th Century and the internal and external events that determined the University's growth.
Garth was appointed to the Albemarle County Historic Preservation Committee and served on it for eight years. In 2008, he received one of the University's Outstanding Contribution Awards. He has taken classes in the School of Architecture through Continuing Education, this fall he began the Master's Program in Architectural History.
Lydia Brandt
Ph.D. Candidate, Art and Architectural History, University of Virginia
Lecture
The World Heritage List Goes Colonial Revival: The University of Virginia Gardens
Lydia Mattice Brandt is a PhD Candidate in Art and Architectural History here at the University of Virginia. She completed her undergraduate degree in Art History at New York University and her Master's in Architectural History and Historic Preservation at the University of Virginia, School of Architecture. She is currently pursuing her dissertation on replicas of George Washington's Mount Vernon built at world's fairs between 1893 and 1934, thanks to a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
Emilie Johnson
Ph.D. Candidate, Art and Architectural History, University of Virginia
Lecture
The University Discovers Its Women–Mary Munford Hall at the University of Virginia
Emilie Johnson, a current Ph.D. Candidate in Art and Architectural History here at the University of Virginia, received her B.A. in Art History from Wake Forest University and her M.A. (also in Art History) from Williams College. Before coming to Charlottesville to pursue her graduate work, Emilie worked at multiple art museums including the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Building Museum both in Washington, DC and also the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Her dissertation considers the multiple layers of plantation complexes in the Antebellum Deep South including great houses, domestic outbuildings, slave quarters, and agricultural and processing structures. Emilie is also active with local historic preservation groups such as Preservation Piedmont and the Albemarle County Historic Preservation Committee. She is particularly involved with documentation projects and issues surrounding demolitions.
|
|
|
Brian Cofrancesco
B.A. Candidate, Architectural History, University of Virginia
Lecture
Louis Kahn at the University
Majoring in Architectural History and pursuing minors in Architecture and Historic Preservation, Brian Cofrancesco is a third year undergraduate student focusing on Early and 19th century American architecture. His interests in architecture and the past led him to apply for the position of curatorial intern for the Thomas Jefferson's Academical Village: the Creation of an Architectural Masterpiece exhibition, and he spent the past year working with the U.Va. Art Museum staff to prepare for its opening in September. Brian is also a local historian in his hometown of Meriden, CT, and at the University is the Undergraduate Representative of the Thomas Jefferson Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians and President of the service club Circle K International.
