One career is enough for most people, but you have managed to have three. As teacher and scholar you have helped students, alumni, and general audiences experience more deeply Western art from the 18th century to today. You also helped develop the practice of apprehending art through the lenses of its social and historical contexts, powerfully so in your books on Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies and on Sarah Bernhardt, and even your work on the significance of the Barbie doll. At the same time, you have been an award-winning curator, mounting exhibitions of noted breadth and depth at the Jewish Museum in New York City and Florida’s Selby Gardens. Then, against all odds, you added a career on the stage. You have taken on the personality of Bernhardt in a series of stage interviews. Your one-woman performance, titled Sarah Bernhardt’s Handkerchief, is a beautiful and fearless examination of the effects of suicide on families. And you now are appearing around the world in the multi-genre troupe that performs Paramodernities, a four-hour exploration of the boundaries of word and dance. These three strands—teacher, curator, performer—you have woven together into a career worthy itself of study.
I hereby declare you Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art, Emerita, entitled to all the rights, honors, and privileges appertaining thereto.
June 2, 2019
Megamenu Social