ARTIST/SCHOLAR RESIDENCY 2022, THE NAKED ARCHIVE
Unseasonably warm weather eased our early November artist/scholar residency, which hosted four researchers working on the Bauhaus and related subjects including children’s books of the era aand nudism among the German avant-garde and how it translated to the US. The group of multi-lingual scholars examined photographs and art archived by CCMHT as well as over 400 books relating to Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Sege Chermayeff, Juliet Kepes and their circle, translating Hungarian, German and French transcriptions, dedications and letters. This research initiative will continue on a semi-annual basis as this year just scratched the surface. The filmmaker Ryan Foley documented the proceedings in this 4 minute film.
Elizabeth Otto is a specialist on gender and visual culture in early twentieth-century Europe and Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Among her books are Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (2019) and the co-authored Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective (2019). She has edited five books, including The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (2011) and Passages of Exile (2017). Her essays and reviews have been published in journals including Art Forum, Genders, History of Photography, and October. Otto’s work has been supported by numerous organizations including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), and the Getty Research Institute. During the 2022–23 academic year she will be writing a new book titled Bauhaus Under National Socialism with the support of a year-long fellowship from Germany’s Gerda Henkel Foundation and a short-term grant at the US Holocaust Memorial Foundation’s Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Research.
Jordan Troeller is a historian of modern and contemporary art and postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research addresses the relationship between gender, representation, and historiography, with an emphasis on the exchange between Europe and the Americas. Doctoral research on the role that photography played in staging contemporaneity at the Bauhaus led, in part, to her 2020 essay “Lucia Moholy’s Idle Hands,” published in October, which won the Emerging Scholars Publication Prize (Honorable Mention), given by the Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art (Collage Art Association). Her current book project, supported by the Terra Foundation, the Henry Moore Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant looks at a group of “artist-mothers” in midcentury California, many of whom studied with Bauhaus émigrés. Recent publications have appeared in kritische berichte, Women’s Art Journal, and Hyperallergic as well as the exhibition catalogue Object Lessons: The Bauhaus and Harvard (2021). In addition, she has held curatorial positions at the List Visual Arts Center (MIT) and the Goethe-Institut Boston, and is currently working on the first-ever Lucia Moholy retrospective, with Jan Tichy, for the Kunsthalle Praha. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, and the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Veronika Fuechtner is Interim Chair of Jewish Studies and Associate Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth. In addition, she frequently holds an appointment as Adjunct Associate Professor in the department of medical education at the Geisel School of Medicine. She also teaches in Comparative Literature, Jewish Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies. Fuechtner is the author of Berlin Psychoanalytic (University of California Press, 2011) and the co-editor of Imagining Germany, Imagining Asia (with Mary Rhiel, Camden House, 2013) and A Global History of Sexual Science 1880-1960 (with Douglas E. Haynes and Ryan Jones, University of California Press, 2017). She is completing a monograph on Thomas Mann's Brazilian mother. Her research interests include the history of psychoanalysis and sexology, the relationship between science and culture, discourses on race and ethnicity, German-language modernism, contemporary culture, German-language film, and global cultural and scientific histories. She has received research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Sciences Research Council. She has served on the national steering committee of Women in German, on the 20th and 21st LCC forum executive committee of the MLA, and currently serves on the advisory board of PMLA. In spring 2020 she was the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and for the academic year 2020/21 she was a fellow at Wellesley's Newhouse Center for the Humanities.
Oliver A. I. Botar is Professor of Art History and Associate Director (Graduate Studies and Research) at the School of Art of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. His Ph.D. (University of Toronto) was on Biomorphic Modernism and Biocentrism. The nexus of Biocentrism and Modernism, the work of László Moholy-Nagy and the origins of new media art have been research focuses. He has lectured, published, and has curated exhibitions in Canada, the US, Europe and Japan. He is author of Technical Detours: The Early Moholy-Nagy Reconsidered (2006), Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts (2014) and a book on Bauhäusler Andor Weininger’s Canadian sojourn, as well as numerous articles and book chapters. He is co-editor of Biocentrism and Modernism (with Isabel Wünsche, 2011), and telehor (with Klemens Gruber, 2013). Botar has also produced articles and exhibitions on Canadian art, and is currently working on a book on settler art in Winnipeg during the period 1913-1950.