Art History Department and Art History Association celebrate fourth annual Undergraduate Art History symposium
The Art History Department and the Art History Association celebrated their fourth annual SUNY New Paltz Undergraduate Art History symposium this past April.
This event, which was the brainstorm of alumni Jonathan Birns '19 and Liz Dragan '19, began as a one-day in-person conference for students in the Hudson Valley to share their art historical research to a wider audience in 2019. Since then, the symposium has grown into a four-day virtual event featuring talks by nearly 100 students from 80 different collegiate institutions around the globe. It is the largest conference of its kind for undergraduate students, and it remains a heavily student-directed event.
The selection of papers was undertaken through a blind-review process done by the members of the Art History Association's executive committee, and these same four students (Brooke Cammann, Shay Steuart, Mya Bailey, and Maddy Colonna) also served as the wonderfully professional and polished moderators for the online sessions.
This year, we invited students from FIT to collaborate with us in the symposium's organization to give them unique professional experience and we began the event with a truly moving keynote address by Dr. Renée Ater, Provost Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, which focused on St. Mary's College of Southern Maryland's efforts to memorialize its own legacy of slavery in Shane Albritton and Norman Lee's "For Absence to Presence, Commemorative to Enslaved Peoples of Southern Maryland" (2020).
The research presented by the students this year encompassed an extraordinary breadth of material, both chronologically and geographically, and tackled critical issues in the field today, making for an incredibly diverse and energizing four days of talks and discussions. All of the students' presentations, including that by SUNY New Paltz's own Harrison Morris '22, were recorded and are now available on a private YouTube channel accessed via the event's website.
Another key component to the overwhelming success of this event was the enormous contributions of Susan Smutny, the Visual Resource Librarian for the Art History Department. She not only built the vibrant website for the event, but she also provided all of the tech support both before, during, and after the symposium, that allowed for everything to run flawlessly.
