Faculty News
Alan Braddock advised Art History major Caroline Katz in an Independent Study course that culminated with the publication of her essay titled "Blunt Matter: The Significance of Paint in Pablo Picasso's Guernica" in Yale University's Asterisk* Undergraduate Journal of Art and Art History (June 2021). Regarding his own research, Professor Braddock completed the manuscript of his new book, Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History, which is under consideration for publication by Yale University Press. He also published two essays: “Activist Abstraction: Anita Krajnc, Save Photography, and the Industrial Climate of Meat,” in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, edited by T.J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, and Subhankar Banerjee (New York: Routledge, 2021), 353-64, and "Mestizo Mnemonics, Diego de Valadés, Rhetorica Christiana, and the Earthly Art of Memory,” in Picture Ecology, ed. Karl Kusserow (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum and Yale University Press, 2021), 114-31. In 2021, Braddock gave lectures at the invitation of four different institutions: the Bristol Art Museum (U.K.), the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and the Enfield Shaker Museum in Enfield, New Hampshire. In his free time, he finally learned how to make good Sicilian-style tomato sauce.
Xin Conan-Wu is appointed the Margaret Hamilton Associate Professor of Art History and becomes the Associate Chair of the department. She successfully led the third annual Art History Senior Research Colloquium (Spring 2021). In this capstone seminar, 12 art history majors developed and refined in depth research on various topics, ranging from the historical to the contemporary, and presented their findings to the public in a full-day online conference. Professor Conan-Wu gave two virtual talks, “The Walled Grove: Chinese Gardens in History” at the East Asian Center of University of Virginia and “The Alternative Mountain-and-Water” at the Department of Art & Art History, University of Texas at Austin. She has completed the manuscript of her new book, The Lure of Supreme Joy: Place-Making and Pedagogy in the Neo-Confucian Academies of Zhu Xi. She is invited to join a Byzantine-Chinese cross-cultural research project called PAIXUE, in which historians from the two sides pair up to work in conversation. And she is now working on an article entitled “Seeing Mount Lu: On an Ontological Shift in the Chinese Gaze” for the conference, “Classical Antiquity in Byzantium and Middle Period China: Revivals and Reinventions in Visual and Intellectual Culture”.
Brian Kreydatus exhibited in several group exhibitions including, La biennale international d’estampe contemporaine de Trois- Rivieres, Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, Canada and the Delta National Small Prints Exhibition, Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, AK where his print “The 14th of April: Gabriel texting” was awarded the Curtis Steele Merit Award.
Mike Jabbur exhibited work in “New Ceramics in the Old Dominion: Virginia Potters” as part of the virtual 2021 NCECA ceramics conference, “Vase” at Alma’s RVA gallery in Richmond, VA, “Sweet Things” at Riverside Pottery in Cape Girardeau, MO, “Cup: The Intimate Object XVII” at Charlie Cummings Gallery, and he was the featured artist on Artaxis.org and at Eutectic Gallery’s “pot shop” in Portland, OR. 
He is currently preparing work for “Gifted” at LUX Center for the Arts in Lincoln, NE (2021), and “The American Pottery Festival” at Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, MN (2022). At William & Mary, he taught ceramics courses and began a three-year term as Chair of Art & Art History. https://potshop.eutecticgallery.com/featuring-mike-jabbur
Catherine Levesque curated the Art History Curatorial Exhibition, “The Art of Well-Being” at the Muscarelle Museum of Art, and published an article “‘Imitation and Its Discontents’: Hercules Segers’s Window,” in, Tributes to David A. Freedberg: Image and Insight.
Elizabeth Mead presented a paper "The Silence of White" at the international symposium on Poetry and
Colour for which she also produced a new artwork. Along with several online exhibition with the international collective Pell Lucy and the New York Artists Circle she was invited to exhibit at Page Bond Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, Dana L. Wiley Gallery in Dayton, Ohio, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum in Portland, Oregon. Her exhibition Fictional Reality: The Photograph and Its Object presented by the Virginia Museum of Fine Art and the Bronco Federal Credit Union will open at the Rawls Museum Arts in October. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with an essay written by the art historian Michael Schreyach.
Nikki Santiago had three solo exhibitions over the past academic year; First Street Gallery (New York, NY), Bridgewater College (Bridgewater, VA), and High Point University (High Point, NC). She was also featured in Fine Art Connoisseur's Artist's Profiles this past December. Nikki will be attending a full fellowship residency this winter at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ireland.
Sibel Zandi-Sayek, who was on research l
eave during 2020-2021, had a busy year. She worked on two projects that investigate architecture in relation to networks of mobility and exchange, and presented her work at different venues, including the International Lecture Series, Entangled Modernities: Perspective of a Global History of Architecture, organized by Bauhaus University, Weimar. She also contributed to Atlas des migrations et mobilités en Méditerranée: De l’Antiquité à nos jours, (Actes Sud, 2021); completed a chapter for The History of Cartography, Cartography in the Nineteenth Century, v. 5 (forthcoming by University of Chicago Press); and had an abstract accepted at the European Architectural History Network’s Thematic Conference on Architecture and Endurance in Ankara, Turkey. Additionally, she was a guest speaker for Rememberings: Human Rights, Historical Trauma and the Future of Pluralism, at the Swedish Research Institute, Istanbul. Beyond her own scholarship, she acted as discussant in the Book Talk “Landed Internationals: Planning Cultures, the Academy, and the Making of the Modern Middle East,” at the Duke University, Middle East Studies Center; was part of the 50th Anniversary Advisory Committee for the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association; and served on the inaugural jury for the On the Brink Book Award + Lecture established to recognize books that contribute to knowledge and perspectives across the design disciplines, including architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and urban design.
