5 p.m., July 28, 2008----Janet Dees, a doctoral student in art history at UD, is heading to New Mexico, where she has received the Eugene Thaw Curatorial Fellowship for two years at SITE Santa Fe, a contemporary arts organization.

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“Santa Fe is a small city but is a concentrated center for the fine arts,” Dees said, “and I am very excited to have been selected for the fellowship. Every two years SITE Santa Fe organizes an international biennial of contemporary art which is a window to contemporary art from all over the world, and I am looking forward to being a part of it,” she said.

Dees will be writing gallery guides, helping with catalogs, doing research and production for exhibitions and working with artists--and last, but not least, working on her dissertation. Ann Gibson, professor of art history, is her adviser.

Dees' research involves three well-known performance artists, who were involved in combining both visual and performance arts--Sherman Fleming, Adrian Piper and Linda Montano. For example, Fleming, a painter and sculptor, performed metaphorical concepts, such as “struggle,” where he stood and was one by one loaded down with boards, with which he had to contend.

A graduate of Fordham University, Dees said she planned to major in computer sciences but became fascinated by art history. “Art history is such an interdisciplinary field, involving art, philosophy, politics and history,” Dees said.

After graduation Dees became involved with the African Burial Ground Project in New York, an historic site in lower Manhattan where an African burial ground was discovered during a construction project. She also was a lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a curatorial intern at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

At UD, Dees was curator of the exhibition, In Remembrance: Artists from the Paul R. Jones Collection, and served as a teaching assistant and instructor. This summer, she also was an instructor at UD's Arts and Humanities Summer Institute.

Among her honors, she received the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Predoctoral Fellowship from the National Gallery of Art for traveling abroad to Belgium and France and awards for outstanding achievement and excellence in teaching from UD's Department of Art History.

Article by Sue Moncure
Photo by Kathy Atkinson