Two art history professors win Guggenheim research fellowships

Ann Eden Gibson (left) and H. Perry Chapman, both professors of art history at UD, have been awarded 2004 Guggenheim Fellowships to pursue their research. Gibson, whose work focuses on 20th-century American and contemporary art, is researching a book about the diasporic images of African-American painter and muralist Hale Woodruff. Chapman, whose field is Northern Baroque art, will use the fellowship to complete a book 17th-century Dutch painting.

3:21 p.m., April 12, 2004--H. Perry Chapman and Ann Eden Gibson, both professors of art history at UD, have been awarded 2004 Guggenheim Fellowships to pursue their research.

“To have two Guggenheim winners in one year is a great honor for any department, especially one as small as ours,” Michael Leja, Sewell C. Biggs Chair in American Art History and chairperson of the department, said. He noted that two other art history professors, Nina Kallmyer and Larry Nees, previously won the fellowships, making one-third of the department faculty current or former Guggenheim honorees.

Ann L. Ardis, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said the awards recognize Chapman’s and Gibson’s “distinguished records of scholarship—and the promise of the projects they currently have under way.” She called the selection “a great honor” for the recipients and also for the department, the college and the University.

Chapman, whose field is Northern Baroque art, with a specialization in 17th-century Dutch painting, will use the fellowship to continue work on a book, “The Painter’s Place in the Dutch Republic, 1604-1718.” Gibson, whose work focuses on 20th-century American and contemporary art, particularly abstract expressionism, is conducting research for a book about the diasporic images of African-American painter and muralist Hale Woodruff.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced its 80th annual award winners on April 8. Gibson and Chapman are among 185 artists, scholars and scientists selected this year from more than 3,200 applicants, who will receive awards totaling $6.9 million.

“For me, the timing of this award couldn’t be better,” Chapman said. “I’m just finishing four years as editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin, which has been incredibly rewarding but also time-consuming. I learned so much from the experience, but I’m ready to turn back to my own work now.”

In teaching and research, she said, she takes an interdisciplinary approach that links such fields as history, literature, politics, economics and religion to art and artists. “The Painter’s Place,” she said, will bring together research she has been conducting for 25 years to “address what it meant to be an artist in the 17th century.”

That time period in the Netherlands is especially interesting, Chapman said, because art had changed, from being created for church or royal patrons to, instead, focusing on the home and domestic scenes. Self-portraits and images of the artist’s studio—many of them idealized or fanciful—became common, she said.

Chapman earned her doctoral degree in 1983 at Princeton University and joined the UD faculty in 1982. She has a fellowship next year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art and previously held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson Center and from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

She is the author of “Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits: A Study in 17th-Century Identity” and of numerous articles on Rembrandt, Jan Steen, art theory and biography and the artistic impact of the Dutch Revolt. She was co-curator of “Jan Steen: Painter and Storyteller” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 1996-97.

Gibson, whose book is tentatively titled “Hale Woodruff: A Life and Work Across Cultures,” said she is interested in the cross-cultural experiences of artists. While researching her doctoral dissertation, she said, she came across artists who were women, African-American or from other, non-European ethnic backgrounds with whom she had been unfamiliar.

“Their work looked quite good to me, and I started wondering why you never heard about them,” Gibson said. “As it turned out, I was in the right place at the right time to do research on them, because it was the ’70s, and the art world was opening up to broader possibilities.”

Woodruff, who grew up in Tennessee in the early 1900s and later worked and taught in Atlanta, was an abstract expressionist who was known to African-American scholars but largely overlooked by the broader art world, Gibson said. Her book will explore his life as well as examining how his experiences of moving from place to place in America and Europe is registered in his art, she said.

Gibson earned her doctoral degree from UD in 1984 and taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Yale University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the University of California at Los Angeles before joining the UD faculty as chair in 1998. She has held fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery, the Smithsonian and the Getty Research Institute.

She is the author of “Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Periodicals,” “Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics” and numerous journal articles. She co-curated “Judith Godwin, Style and Grace” for the Museum of West Virginia in 1997 and “Norman Lewis: The Black Paintings, 1946-77” at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1998.

Guggenheim fellows are selected based on recommendations from hundreds of expert advisers and are approved by the foundation’s board of directors. This year’s recipients represent 87 institutions of higher education.

“What distinguishes the Guggenheim Fellowship program from all others is the wide range in interest, age, geography and institution of those it selects as it considers applications in 79 different fields from the natural science to the creative arts,” the foundation said in announcing this year’s awards.

Past recipients include Ansel Adams, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Linus Pauling, Martha Graham, Philip Roth and Eudora Welty.

Article by Ann Manser
Photo by Kathy Atkinson

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