Although our newsletter has been dormant for several years, we have been anything but in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History.  We have instituted a number of significant changes, many of which are now taking root.  These changes include restructuring our curricular offerings, separating from Interior Design (now a stand-alone program), appointing several new faculty members, fostering a more active Visiting Artist and Scholar program, launching a new student gallery, and developing several important local and national partnerships.

The most notable curricular changes involve balancing traditional approaches and ideas with those that are contemporary.  To this end, we have expanded our Modern and Contemporary Art History courses and created and developed our New Media area. (New Media can incorporate the most contemporary approaches that involve digital technologies, but it can also be combined with traditional media.)  These changes allow for greater flexibility in both our undergraduate and graduate curriculums, and are geared to increase the level of intellectual engagement of our students and provide more challenging courses that seek to balance historical and contemporary approaches.  With these and other changes, we hope to promote more opportunities for our students to work with a range of faculty and fellow students, as well as provide regular exposure to the area’s many important collections and libraries.

The department has welcomed three new faculty members. Alexander (Zan) Dumbadze, Assistant Professor of Art History, joined us in 2005; he received his PhD from the University of Texas and teaches courses in Modern and Contemporary Art History. Siobhan Rigg, Assistant Professor of New Media, arrived in 2006; she received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and is helping to shape much of our New Media program.  Bibiana Obler joins us this fall. She earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and is teaching courses in Modernism and Art of the 20th Century.

Complementing the roster of faculty members, our Visiting Artists/Scholars Program enables us to invite a diverse group of artists and scholars to campus.  Each lectures about his or her work, participates in class discussions, conducts studio visits and critiques, and attends informal lunches for students and faculty.  Recent visitors have included Siebren Versteeg (from New York), Hasan Elahi (New York and Berlin), Virgil Marti (Philadelphia), Pae White (Los Angeles), Beral Madra (Istanbul), Hiraki Sawa (New York and London), Joshua Shannon (Washington, D.C.), Matthew Jackson (Chicago), Renée Stout (Washington, D.C.), Katherine Sherwood (San Francisco), Suzanne Hudson (Washington, D.C.), and Oliver Herring (New York and Berlin).

The Visiting Artist/Scholar Program, as well as our student gallery, has helped us to bridge the various disciplines within the department and achieve a greater sense of community. Last spring a group of graduate students organized the exhibition Conversations, which paired six MA students with six MFA students. They collaborated on the selection and installation of the show, and then self-published a small catalogue. We hope to have more such exhibitions in the coming year in our newly-opened student gallery, Classroom 102.  This space took shape on the first floor of the art building through the grassroots efforts of the faculty and students.  With its visibility and accessibility, Classroom 102 will function as an important cornerstone of the department, a place for faculty, students, and visitors to gather as members of the FAAH community.

Also this year, the department, along with the local gallery Transformer, co-sponsored a panel discussion, Art School Confidential: Rethinking Art Education, which was moderated by Associate Professor of Photography Dean Kessmann.  Additionally, FAAH premiered the Contemporary Art Think Tank (CATT), co-organized and presented by Zan Dumbadze with colleagues from the University of Maryland and the University of Illinois.  CATT brought together scholars, critics, and students from various institutions for a two-day symposium to discuss topics shaping contemporary art.

We hope the changes outlined here, as well as others, will increase the intellectual life of the Department, while expanding our boundaries in order to discover new connections and partnerships throughout the College, University, the Washington D.C. area, and beyond.  We encourage our alumni and friends to join us in support of our activities, as we continue to pursue our goal to build a dynamic Department that focuses on creative and scholarly excellence.

For further information about our programs please visit our website, at www.gwu.edu/~art.