Unlike most top-ranked research universities, Case Western Reserve has a major metropolitan art museum right across the street. Photo by Mike Sands.
In a gallery reserved for special exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, a golden bowl from ancient Sicily gleams in a glass display case.
It is a ritual object, not a vessel for everyday use. Worshippers filled it with wine or other liquids and poured libations to the gods. A wall label notes that the goddess of harvests, Demeter, would have been a suitable recipient of such offerings. After all, the bowl is embossed with images of fruitfulness: concentric bands of beechnuts and acorns, and, along the rim, blossoms interspersed with bees.
Dating from about the third century B.C., the bowl was discovered near the site of a Sicilian Greek colony, one of many that flourished in classical times. But art historians cannot be sure where it was made. Invading armies—Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Romans—often carried such objects far from their place of origin. That is especially true of works as valuable as this one, which was fashioned from two-and-a-half pounds of gold.
The bowl is among more than 150 rare artifacts now on view in Sicily: Art and Invention Between Greece and Rome, a show organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. When the exhibition opened this fall, visitors from Case Western Reserve were among the first to see it. Seminar leaders in the SAGES program brought their students. The Friends of Art, volunteers who support the university’s Department of Art History and Art, organized a tour and lecture. Graduate students from the department spent hours in the galleries. They were all taking advantage of an opportunity unusually close at hand; unlike most top-ranked research universities, Case Western Reserve has a major metropolitan art museum right across the street.
Jenifer Neils accompanied three of her graduate students on a tour of the Cleveland Museum of Arts major fall exhibition. From left: Professor Neils, Ashley Bartman, James Wehn and Dominique DeLuca. Photo credit: Mike Sands
Jenifer Neils, the Ruth Coulter Heede Professor of Art History, is teaching a graduate course inspired by the exhibition, and her students joined her there on a recent afternoon. Dominique DeLuca and Ashley Bartman are each completing a master’s degree in art history and museum studies; James Wehn entered the doctoral program earlier this fall. The master’s students both have internships at the museum—DeLuca in medieval art, Bartman in European paintings and sculpture—and Wehn is volunteering in the prints and drawings department. In addition, Bartman is a teaching assistant in an introductory survey course at the university. “On Fridays,” she says, “I get to take my students around the museum and apply the concepts they learned in lecture to objects they can actually see and study closely.”
As she examines the libation bowl, Bartman is thinking ahead to a tour she will give later this week. Only five such bowls from antiquity have survived intact, but depictions of them sometimes appear on Greek painted pottery. Maybe, Bartman says, she will download some images to her iPad and bring it with her to the exhibition.
“You won’t need your iPad,” Neils assures her. She leads the students to another masterwork in the show: a large and beautifully preserved Greek mixing vessel, with figures painted in red on a black background. Demeter herself appears on its surface, holding a shining bowl in her left hand.
During their walk through the galleries, Neils and her students discuss many questions of historical interpretation—analyzing the imagery on Sicilian coins, speculating about the identity of a winged goddess portrayed in a terra cotta sculpture. But they also scrutinize the form and arrangement of the exhibition itself: the wall colors and sightlines, the grouping of objects, the texts describing them. At every stage, they are thinking about the choices curators make in presenting artifacts to visitors who may be encountering a historical period or culture for the first time.
Students at Case Western Reserve have long enjoyed these kinds of educational and aesthetic experiences, thanks to a wide-ranging collaboration between the university and the Cleveland Museum of Art. The two institutions have operated joint doctoral and master’s programs since 1967. Several curators hold adjunct appointments at Case Western Reserve and teach courses in art history and museum studies. Both graduate and undergraduate students acquire practical experience as museum interns, and they enjoy access to the Ingalls Library and Museum Archives, the third-largest art research library in the United States.
Now, this partnership has been enhanced immeasurably by a major gift—a $15 million endowment created by Nancy and Joseph Keithley. Their donation, made through the Nancy and Joseph Keithley Fund at the Cleveland Foundation, will have an especially profound impact on the doctoral program, increasing financial assistance to students, providing new internship and research opportunities and enriching course offerings for future scholars and museum professionals. It will also help shape the education of undergraduates and master’s degree candidates and bring innovative exhibitions, publications and programming to the larger community.
“We feel strongly about the world-class quality of institutions in Cleveland,” said Nancy Keithley, a museum trustee, and Joseph Keithley, a university trustee, in a prepared statement. “We also believe collaboration increases exponentially their benefit and influence within our community, and well beyond it. We are thrilled to help catapult this partnership to a new level of global impact.”
For several years, says Catherine Scallen, chair of the Department of Art History and Art, there has been talk of expanding the collaboration between the university and the museum. Which raises the question: Why now?
“Our relationship with the Cleveland Museum of Art has always been distinctive,” says Catherine Scallen, chair of the Department of Art History and Art. “We’re not trying to be like anybody else. We’re trying to maximize the opportunities we have here.” Photo by Russell Lee.
Scallen points to “visionary leadership on both sides, starting from the very top.” She also notes that foundations and private donors are increasingly eager to support collaboration, especially between institutions in the arts and humanities.
“The stars finally aligned,” she says. “We didn’t have everything in place before.“
One year before the Keithleys made their gift, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the university and the museum a seven-year, $500,000 grant to redesign the joint doctoral program and provide fellowships to doctoral students. Some of the innovations made possible by the Mellon grant will now be sustained permanently by the new Nancy and Joseph Keithley Institute for Art History. In addition, the institute’s director will oversee several new initiatives. For art history students, all of this will translate into an exciting array of opportunities.
Fellowships. The joint doctoral program will admit three new students each fall and award them annual stipends of $25,000 for five years. In addition, the College of Arts and Sciences will provide full tuition support. This level of funding, Scallen says, will attract top candidates and allow them to devote themselves entirely to their studies. In most art history programs, doctoral students take eight to 11 years to earn their degrees. Here, the goal is for students to complete the program in five years and begin their careers unburdened by debt.
Internships. The program has always encouraged students to seek positions as interns in the museum’s curatorial departments. Now, every doctoral student will be guaranteed an internship, and this experience will become a degree requirement.
Support from the Keithley endowment will also increase the number of internships available to undergraduates. These positions are open to applicants from any university in the country; many are awarded to students from Case Western Reserve.
Courses in Object-Based Art History. The program will establish two new courses devoted to exploring the museum’s permanent collections. Both will take an object-based approach to art history, emphasizing the physical characteristics, cultural context and aesthetic qualities of individual works of art.
In the first course, students will develop their own exhibitions or digital projects and share the results of their scholarship with a larger audience. This course may be taught by faculty members or by curators, whose involvement in the doctoral program will be expanded with support from the Keithley gift.
In the second course, students will engage in the physical examination of works of art, a field known as technical art history. They will address questions about the materials of which works are made, the damage or deterioration that occurs over the centuries and the effects of repairs or restoration. Students will also learn how new technologies, including various imaging techniques, yield important findings about the physical history of art objects.
The technical art history course “is one of the most innovative aspects of the revised doctoral program,” Scallen says. “Students will acquire forms of expertise that have formerly been regarded as the province of art conservators, but not necessarily of art historians.”
Research Funds. Both graduate and undergraduate students will be eligible to apply for travel funds to pursue independent research projects. A senior at work on an honors thesis, for example, could seek support for a visit to a museum or archive anywhere in the world.
Students will also benefit from the Keithley endowment’s support for the Ingalls Library, which will receive funding for new acquisitions and other essential needs. There will be publications highlighting the Keithley institute’s progress and impact. Finally, the university and the museum will be able to offer joint programs, including public lectures, that will be open to the entire campus and the community.
Dana Cowen, a doctoral student completing her degree this year, has benefited greatly from the partnership that the Keithley gift will now strengthen and sustain.
Cowen wrote her dissertation about Albrecht Dürer, one of the great masters of the Northern Renaissance. Materials she needed for her research, including rare, fragile books from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were available in the Ingalls library. “Having access to the Ingalls collection over the years I’ve been working on the project was a great help to me,” she says.
As a doctoral student in art history, Dana Cowen found a mentor in museum curator Jon Seydl. She also relied on the rare book collection of the Ingalls Library and Museum Archives. Photo by Mike Sands.
Beyond this, Cowen acquired a great deal of practical experience in the museum itself. While earning her master’s degree, she interned in the collections management and education departments, As a doctoral student, she began an internship with Jon Seydl, the Paul J. and Edith Ingalls Vignos, Jr. Curator of European Paintings and Sculpture. At the time, the museum was in the midst of a major renovation and expansion, and she worked with Seydl on the reinstallation of galleries devoted to German and French painting. She helped decide where objects would go and which ones would have extensive wall labels. “I learned a lot about how you engage a visitor in these types of gallery settings,” she explains.
Cowen says that her most memorable project was Rembrandt in America, a special exhibition for which she served as research coordinator. “I helped write the label copy, and I wrote the brochure, and I went to all of the meetings to see the input from the different departments of the museum,” she recalls. “It was the most wonderful experience I’ve ever had. Being in the gallery when they were installing the show was my favorite part, and just standing there alone with the works when they were all up, and thinking, ‘It’s going to open tomorrow, and everyone’s going to see it.’”
A few months ago, as Cowen was making final preparations for her dissertation defense, Seydl asked whether she would be interested in curating an exhibition about Dürer, drawn entirely from the museum’s holdings. If she liked, she could submit a proposal to the director and the head of exhibitions. “I didn’t know you could do that,” Cowen recalls. She took him up on the idea, and her proposal was accepted.
And so, next June, in the first-floor galleries devoted to works on paper, Cowen will present depictions of women in Dürer’s engravings and woodcuts, juxtaposing images of the Virgin Mary with those of goddesses, peasants and courtly women. It will be the first exhibition she has ever created on her own. And thanks to the Keithleys’ generosity, future graduate students, too, may have the chance to make their curatorial debuts at the Cleveland Museum of Art.