Department news
Annually, the Art and Art History Department sponsors a trip to New York City for the Studio Art and Art History Seniors. The trip offers plentiful networking and career development opportunities and gives students a taste of what it’s like to live and work in the creative field.
New York City trip
Dr. Felicia Else explains how this opportunity fits into the Department’s educational goals: “The New York trip could not be a more ideal way to promote our students’ educational goals, embracing the interests of both Studio and Art History. Students learn from seeing a wide variety of art in different contexts – from ancient statues in established museums to cutting-edge Contemporary works in small galleries and studios. But we take this to another level by arranging behind-the-scenes meetings with artists, curators and gallery dealers.” This year, students visited the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the George Adams Gallery, and the Gagosian Gallery, among others. Additionally, students were offered networking opportunities with art professionals and Gettysburg alums. Access the photos here.
Guest lectures
The Art and Art History Department is proud to support two events as part of a new and exciting initiative: Diversity, Inclusion and Social Justice in Art and Art History.
Damnable Blackness
Devlon Waddel
February 6, 2020
Baltimore-based Devlon Waddell, a self-described “creator,” visited campus to give a talk on his varied artistic pursuits and his entrepreneurship. Waddell has written books on his struggles growing up and he founded a non-profit to benefit youth in Baltimore. He advised students to be optimistic and spontaneous in their creative processes, but to be thoughtful in their decisions.
The Destruction of Memory
Tim Slade
October 29, 2019
Filmmaker Tim Slade visited Gettysburg College to present a screening of The Destruction of Memory, which he wrote, directed, and produced. The award-winning film has been shown at museums, universities, and cultural institutions around the world, including the British Museum and the Met. The Destruction of Memory is a thought-provoking film that chronicles the wartime destruction of cultural heritage sites that has occurred over the past century.
Alumni talks
Rebecca Duffy ’16
Rebecca Duffy, Art History ’16 visited the college to deliver a talk on designing object-driven exhibits. Duffy received her master’s degree from the Winterthur Program at the University of Delaware and she now works as the Education Coordinator at the Read House and Gardens in Delaware. During her talk, Duffy spoke of the ways that object-centric research can draw stories out of an object. She also offered advice to Professor Sun’s Art History Methods class concerning efficiency in research, and she suggested that they consider the multiple angles that a story might be told from.
Sneha Shrestha ’10
Studio Art alum Sneha Shrestha ’10 was welcomed back to Gettysburg on November 13th, 2019. Originally from Nepal, Sneha has made a name for herself in the art world under the alias IMAGINE and her works have been commissioned around the world. In 2013, she established Nepal’s first Children’s Art Museum and in 2017 she received her master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Sneha stressed that a liberal arts education gives you the tools to follow your passion, and she challenged students to ask questions, in art and in life.
Student spotlight
Abigail Coakley ’20 Art History and Anthropology Major
“The experiences that I have had in the Art and Art History Department over the past four years – from curating exhibits and presenting my research to going on field trips to major museums and studying abroad – have been a great part of my Gettysburg experience. My Art History knowledge also benefitted me greatly during archaeology internships, a summer job at a museum, and my conservation work in Special Collections. Completing my capstone paper from home due to the pandemic was an unexpected challenge, as it was for many others, but I was glad to have the chance to pursue my own Art Historical research project. After graduating, I plan to take some time off to work before applying to graduate schools for Museum Studies.”
Sidney Caccioppoli ’21 in Madrid, Spain and Prague, Czech Republic
“My opportunities to study abroad in both Madrid and Prague last year led me to such wonderful experiences where I could expand upon my learning at Gettysburg College. As an Art History major, it was incredible to be able to have classes in museums and travel to places where I could see works of art up close and then bring those experiences back to campus.”
Carolyn Hauk ’21 in Rome, Italy
“My semester abroad in Italy—the crucible of some of Europe’s greatest art movements––was truly an enriching, unforgettable experience! While I was studying in Rome, I was enrolled in courses focused on Baroque Art, Ancient Roman Archeology, and Conservation Methods, all of which featured lectures at locations around the Eternal City. My conservation course allowed me to observe and work with conservators in labs around Rome, in the Vatican Museums, and at Florence’s Opificio Delle Pietre Dure. This photo was taken at the Vatican Museums’ laboratory, where I observed Raphael’s Oddi Altarpiece in the process of being repaired. I encourage all Art History and Studio Art Majors to expand their studies abroad for a semester or more!”
Paige Deschapelles ’20 in Budapest, Hungary
“Studying abroad in Budapest, Hungary has been one of the best experiences during my four years at Gettysburg College! As an Art History and Studio Art double major it was so exciting to finally be able to travel to places I have been learning about for years. Also, my program had an incredibly diverse student body which made my understanding of art and culture that much richer!”
Senior capstones: art history
Ashley Jeffords’ capstone explores how the Buddhist art canon is influenced by developments in religious practice through focusing on hand mudras used on Buddhist icons.
Narrative Panels with Scenes from the Buddha’s Life, 2nd Century.
Abigail Coakley uses her capstone to focus on twentieth century Japanese woodblock prints, which exhibit the development of modernity in Japan, a return to traditional Japanese styles and landscapes, and elements of cultural exchange with the Western world.
Kawase Hasui, Zojo Temple, Shiba, 1925.
Paige Deschapelles dedicated her capstone to studying the portraits produced by Alberto Giacometti in the aftermath of World War II and analyzed his shift to realism, arguing that these paintings represent the reclaiming of the human essence and figure and promote a sense of empathy.
Alberto Giacometti, Annette, 1961.
Noa Leibson studied sculptures and paintings of chariot racing in Ancient Greek art to understand contexts of gender and class in this little-represented sport.
Marlay Group Kylix, 430-420 BCE.
Tianrun Zhao’s study showed how the trajectory of Xu Bing’s interest in cross-cultural communication evolved through his cross-culture life experience, and the reasons Xu choose written language characters as a means for communication in an increasingly interconnected world.
Xu Bing, Art for the People, 1999.
William Caterham’s capstone paper addressed the enigma that is Hieronymus Bosch, specifically looking at European patronage structures as they help explain the artist’s wide recognition during his lifetime as well as elucidate his eccentric aesthetic.
Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1503-1515.
Senior capstones: studio
Darby Nisbett’s capstone consists of flowers made with chalk pastels and focuses on the balance between fragility and resiliency. Flowers were a vehicle for her to explore her own experiences with various medical problems that cause her to feel fragile and breakable.
Elijah Cormier’s capstone focuses on forced visibility; the notion that to be seen or heard, one has to tailor themselves to the satisfaction of others even if it's detrimental to the self.
Lars Healy’s capstone explores the complicated intersections between queer relationships, trans bodies, intimacy, sex, and relationship violence and abuse through figurative oil paintings.
Paige Deschapelles: During the Spring semester of 2020, the body of work Paige produced included a wide variety of materials; she was inspired by working with ready-made items and manipulating their structures and functionality until they were almost unrecognizable.
Nathalia Mazza’s capstone project uses mixed media to reflect the obsessions, impulsivity and other struggles that she faced, growing up without the knowledge of being autistic in a neuro-typical society.
Hannah Dalzell painted silly images that evoke various kinds of emotions in different viewers, incorporating references to memes and pop culture.
Cayla Cornwell created a series of paintings focused on idealistic landscapes.
Faculty highlights
Faculty and staff
Art History
- Shannon Egan: Director of Schmucker Art Gallery.
Focus: American Art, History of Photography, 20th and 21st c. art. - Felicia Else: Chairperson, Professor.
Focus: Italian Renaissance Art - Nicholas Miller: Assistant Professor.
Focus: Modern Contemporary Art, Arts of the African Diaspora, Postcolonial Studies - Yan Sun: Professor. Focus: Bronzes in North China
- Sarah Gillespie: Adjunct Instructor
Studio art
- Brent Blair: Adjunct Instructor.
Focus: Traditional Photography - Tina Gebhart: Associate Professor.
Focus: Functional Ceramics, Conceptual Objects, Glaze Chemistry. - Henry Gepfer: Adjunct Assistant Professor.
Focus: Printmaking - Austin Stiegemeier: Assistant Professor.
Focus: Painting - Mark Warwick: Professor.
Focus: Sculpture - John Kovaleski: Adjunct Assistant Professor
- Shannon Gross: Adjunct Assistant Professor
Staff
- Leslie Casteel: Academic Administrative Assistant
- Derek Rosenberry: Studio Technician
- Sydney Gush: Schmucker Art Gallery Preparator, Digital Scholarship Specialist
John Kovaleski
Adjunct Assistant Professor John Kovaleski has contributed a piece based on The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells to Long Story Short: Turning Famous Books into Cartoons (Akashic Books, July 2020), a collection of cartoons, illustrations, and paintings that condense the complicated narratives of famous books into one-page works of art.
Yan Sun
Professor Yan Sun is currently working on a book manuscript titled Many Worlds under One Heaven: Identity, Power and Material Culture in the Northern Frontiers of the Western Zhou. It will be published by the Columbia University Press.
Austin Stiegemeier
Assistant Professor Austin Stiegemeier curated a digital exhibition titled “Through our Eyes”which features over 150 photographs taken by refugee/asylum seeking youth students of the Mazi School in Samos, Greece in 2018. The Project was created by Nicoletta Novara, an instructor/advocate for Still I Rise NGO. https://astiegem.sites.gettysburg.edu/through-our-eyes/
Tina Gebhart
Professor Gebhart was invited by the Everson Museum’s Curator of Ceramics to exhibit four artworks in “Critical Function II” (2020), showcasing profoundly academic functional ceramics. Her solo exhibition “Rigor Vitae” was shown in Kyoto, Japan in conjunction with the World Parkinson’s Congress in June 2019. Her Cinderella Teapot was awarded “Best Thrown & Altered” at the “Strictly Functional Pottery National XXVI” (2018). Prof. Gebhart encourages interest in the overlaps between ceramics and other academic disciplines -- such as archeology, chemistry, history, business, industry, anthropology, sociology, and social justice. She is developing coursework for business practices in studio art.
Felicia Else
Professor Else spent much time gathering and sharing her research on 16th century Florence while also meeting up with current and former Art History Gettysburgians! At the College Art Association’s annual conference in New York City, she co-organized a session titled, “Of Mutable Monuments and Changing Attitudes: Learning from the Long History of Altering, Appropriating and Recontextualizing Italian Art” where she was able to meet up with alums from her First Year Seminar, Sydney Braat ’18 and Daniella Snyder ’18, an Art History major also presenting at this prestigious conference. During the summer of 2019, Prof. Else was conducting research in Florence on giants and the Mock-Heroic in Renaissance Art at just the right time to meet up with current Art History major Emily Lashendock ’21. Prof. Else also presented a paper on art, festivals and collections of nature in Medici Florence at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in St. Louis and co-organized sessions on giants and dwarfs in the Renaissance at the Renaissance Society of America’s annual meeting in Philadelphia in April of 2020.
Student-curated
Artful Nature and the Legacy of Maria Sibylla Merian
September 4 – November 12, 2019
Student curators Emily Roush ’21 and Shannon Zeltmann ’21 worked dutifully over the spring of 2019 to put together an exhibit in Schmucker Art Gallery showcasing the detailed illustrations of seventeenth century naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian. They were aided by Art History professor Felicia Else and Biology professor Kay Etheridge, experts on Renaissance art and Merian respectively. Merian’s work is notable for her innovative way of depicting fauna amongst their floral habitats and her exquisite use of naturalism. Her extensive travels were especially remarkable considering her status as a woman. In their gallery talks, Roush, Zeltmann, and Etheridge addressed how Merian’s works had been highly influential to other artists and naturalists, including Carl Linnaeus, but she is not frequently recognized for her work. This exhibit combines the worlds of art and science to exemplify how the two fields are intertwined. The two student curators got first-hand experience in curating an exhibition and they were able to learn about all the factors that go into the creation of such an exhibit. According to Shannon Zeltmann ’21, the most challenging parts were the multiple rounds of editing that their writing went through while her favorite part was seeing everything come together at the end of the process. Additional research and images of the exhibition can be found on the supplemental Wordpress site: https://wonder-cabinet.sites.gettysburg.edu/artful-nature/
Luxurious Surfaces: Chinese Decorative Arts from the 15th to the Early 20th Century
December 4, 2019- March 6, 2020
At the end of each Fall semester, students enrolled in the Art History Methods course have the opportunity to demonstrate their scholarly work in their own curated exhibition in Schmucker Art Gallery. Under the direction of Professor Yan Sun, students, William Caterham ’20, Ashley Jeffords ’20, Merlyn Maldonado Lopez ’22, Sarah Paul ’22, James Raphaelson ’21, Megan Reimer ’22, Shannon Zeltmann ’21, and Tianrun Zhao ’20 curated sixteen selected works from Gettysburg College's Asian Art Collection. After a semester's worth of extensive research, these students explored characteristics of Chinese decorative art forms and how their meaning shifted as market economies were changing China’s major urban centers during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912) dynasties. Each student was responsible for selecting an artwork, conducting original research, writing an accompanying catalogue entry, and didactic label. Such a wide array of artworks including silk embroideries, porcelain vases, and jade carvings made for a wonderful study of Chinese artistic traditions and how they changed in conjunction with growing markets.
Schmucker Art Gallery highlights
Andrew Ellis Johnson + Susanne Slavick: Getting There
September 4 – December 6, 2019
Andrew Ellis Johnson and Susanne Slavick's joint exhibition was a captivating exploration of the issues surrounding immigration and the global refugee crisis. Made with a variety of mediums from ink and acrylic to blood and dirt, the works challenged viewers to think critically about the stereotypes associated with immigrants and to make an effort to empathize with those who have been forced to leave their homes and make journeys to new lands. The works were accompanied by evocative texts written by the artists themselves as well as a selection of poets and writers.
Sandy Winters: Creation and Destruction
January 24 – March 6, 2020
Artist Sandy Winters has always perceived nature as an unwavering force, always in a state of creating and overcoming worlds of fantasy and artifice. In her work, Winters combines print-making, drawing, and painting to create landscapes of abstract forms and future environments dominated by bio-mechanical hybrids of organic forms. Repetitive motifs unify her work in a collective study and also suggest a genetic and reproductive trait in these futuristic biomes.
Winters received her BS from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA from Cornell University. For over forty years, her work has been exhibited across the country in solo and group shows. In 2018, Winters was awarded an Artist in Residency position at the University of Kansas.
West Gallery highlights
Glenn Zweygardt Sculpture
November 14, 2019– January 10, 2020
Renowned sculptor Glenn Zweygardt exhibited a selection of his work in Gettysburg College’s West Gallery this year. Zweygardt’s sculptures can be found in parks in cities throughout the world. This exhibition celebrated the college’s recent acquisition of Zweydardt’s work Trilogy Graces, which now sits outside of Brua Hall. The artist's works are frequently inspired by nature as well as anthropomorphic forms. In his gallery talk, Zweygardt spoke about the techniques that go into his creative process, from welding to brass casting, stone coring, and glass-making. He gave some advice to the studio art students present, stating that “creativity is limitless once you learn fundamental techniques.”
Through Our Eyes
March 16 – April 10, 2020
Through Our Eyes features photographs captured by thirty-nine refugee children who are forced to live in the overcrowded camp on the island of Samos, Greece. As part of a photography project for the youth center operated by Still I Stand NGO, the images portray the dangerous conditions of camp life and the painful experience of being a refugee in 2020. Assistant Professor of Art & Art History Austin Steigemeier planned for the exhibition to be displayed in the West Gallery in the spring of 2020, but the outbreak of COVID-19 complicated its in-person presentation. Partnering with Musselman Library and project creator Nicoletta Novara, the exhibition was digitally recreated and presented on the College’s website. “It’s powerful. It’s heartbreaking. And most of all, it’s necessary.” Find the link to the exhibition here: https://astiegem.sites.gettysburg.edu/through-our-eyes/