Category: Art History
Art history Blue Hens define their fields
March 27, 2026 Written by Department of Art History Staff | Lead photo by Antonio Pannaccione
UD alumni demonstrate excellence in public service and higher education
From prestigious job promotions to groundbreaking museum exhibits, art history alumni continue to prove the impact of a University of Delaware degree.
Anna Andrzejewski receives inaugural professorship
Anna Andrzejewski (Ph.D. 2001), professor of architectural history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has been selected as the inaugural recipient of the university’s first-ever Frank Lloyd Wright Professorship in Modern American Architecture. The creation of the professorship is endowed by alumnus Dan Erdman and coincides with the celebration of the Department of Art History at UW-Madison's 100th Anniversary.
Thomas Busciglio-Ritter oversees American art at Milwaukee Art Museum
Thomas Busciglio-Ritter (curatorial track Ph.D.) has been the Abert Family Associate Curator of American Art at the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM), Wisconsin, since January 2025. At MAM, he oversees a diverse collection of North American paintings, sculpture, decorative arts and furniture dating from the late 17th to the mid-20th century. As of 2026, he is serving as site curator for the major touring exhibition Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World is a Mystery and is working on several projects, notably a complete reinstallation of the museum's American Wing and an exhibition about American painting and environmental consciousness between the 1920s and 1950s. He has contributed several articles and book chapters recently, including in the volume The Routledge Companion to Art and the Formation of Empire (2025) and for the Archives of American Art Journal (2026). Busciglio-Ritter also serves on the board of AHAA, the Association of Historians of American Art, and is a member of the scientific team building the digital catalogue raisonné of California landscape artist James Everett Stuart (1852–1941).
Michele Frederick promoted to full curator at North Carolina Museum of Art
Since 2021, Michele Frederick (curatorial track Ph.D. 2019) has worked to co-organize an exhibition with the Jewish Museum in New York: The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt. In the intervening time and in part because of her work on this show, she has been promoted from associate to full curator of European Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. Book of Esther is a major loan show exploring the reception of the biblical story of Esther among both Jewish and Christian communities in the 17th century and includes some treasures from the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam that have never been loaned to the United States before. The catalogue was published by Yale University Press in early 2025; the show opened in New York in March 2025, and in Raleigh in late September 2025. In Raleigh, the show has 121 objects from 39 lenders, including 5 countries, 9 states and 6 private collections. The show and/or catalogue have gotten great coverage in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker (by Adam Gopnik), and more recently Art & Object and The Burlington Magazine.
Emelie Gevalt appointed to leadership role at the American Folk Art Museum
In fall 2025, thanks to a landmark gift, Emelie Gevalt (Ph.D. 2024) was appointed as Deborah Davenport and Stewart Stender Deputy Director & Chief Curatorial and Program Officer at the American Folk Art Museum, where she has served as curator of folk art since 2019. In addition to her new leadership role, Gevalt continues to organize exhibitions of historical American folk art, most recently including An Ecology of Quilts: The Natural History of American Textiles, curated with fellow Winterthur graduate Austin Losada (WPAMC ’23). Her current project, opening in fall 2026, is the exhibition Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art. Timed to coincide with the U.S. semiquincentennial, Locating Girlhood will both celebrate the creativity of early American girls and young women and critically examine the colonial and federal ideologies that structured their worldview. The show, which includes dozens of major loans, will be accompanied by a multi-author publication, edited by Gevalt with exhibition co-curator Caroline Culp, and featuring contributions from scholars Elizabeth Eager, William Hunting Howell and Andrea Pappas, with a foreword by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Over the next several years, Gevalt will also manage an exciting new Art Bridges Cohort initiative, led by AFAM in partnership with five other institutions: Historic Deerfield, Maryland Center for History and Culture, Bayou Bend and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Peoria Riverfront Museum and Winterthur Museum.
Michael Hartman appointed curator at Rhode Island School of Design Museum
In October, after four years as the Jonathan Little Cohen Associate Curator of American Art at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Michael Hartman (Ph.D. 2025) was appointed the Houghton P. Metcalf, Jr. Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. 2025 also saw the publication of his first book, Reenvisioning Histories of American Art, a volume co-edited with Jami Powell and published by the University of Washington Press, which also features an essay co-authored by UD art history doctoral candidate Tom Price. This book was generously funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art and awarded a Wyeth Foundation Publication Grant. Hartman also opened an exhibition at the Hood Museum, Beyond the Bouquet: Arranging Flowers in American Art, which he spoke about on the Modern Art Notes podcast and planned a suite of exhibitions opening at the Hood Museum in 2026 in tandem with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He gave talks at MassMoca and the Colnaghi Foundation; was invited to participate in a convening related to the upcoming reinstallation of the American galleries at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; and continued as co-editor of book reviews for Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art.
Erin Hein joins the University of Iowa
Erin Hein (Ph.D. 2025) joined the art history faculty at the University of Iowa as a visiting assistant professor in August 2025. For a spring 2026 graduate course she is teaching on “Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo,” Hein was awarded a travel grant from the College Art Association for a class trip to New York, where students will see the landmark exhibition Raphael: Sublime Poetry at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and visit the Morgan Library’s Drawing Institute. On the trip, students will have the opportunity to study original artworks in dialogue with curators and scholars of Renaissance Art. Hein also published an essay, “Containing the Flood: Hydraulic Infrastructure and Theater Technology in Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Flooding of the Tiber,” in the October 2025 issue of Transpositiones, an interdisciplinary, open-access journal. In February 2026, Hein delivered a paper related to this research at the annual Renaissance Society of America Conference.
Jordan Hillman is assistant curator at the Bruce Museum
Jordan Hillman (Ph.D. 2024) is assistant curator of art at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. Her exhibition Georges Braque: Tactile Space opened in December 2025. It considers Braque’s interest in materials, texture and surface in his post-Cubist work in about 30 works from a private collection. She gave a talk on Braque at the Bruce and another at the Albany Institute of Art on the exhibition Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist. She is currently working on an exhibition Odilon Redon and the Specter of Science, for February 2027.
Gabriella Johnson awarded fellowship by Renaissance Society of America
Gabriella Johnson (Ph.D. 2025) was awarded a Samuel H. Kress Research Fellowship in Renaissance Art History by the Renaissance Society of America (2025) to support research on the Sicilian painter Agostino Scilla. She is currently the American Friends of Capodimonte Postdoctoral Fellow (2025-2026) in Naples, Italy, where she continues her research on how the Mediterranean shaped artmaking over the course of the 17th century. She is participating in Capodimonte’s reinstallation and digitization projects and hopes to develop vital curatorial skills at one of Italy’s most sensational museums, while also making its historic collections accessible to English-speaking audiences.
William Keller publishes book about Deane Keller
In the anniversary volume 150 Stories: Lives of the Artists at the League (The Art Students League of New York, 2025) William Keller (Ph.D. 2007) probes the training received by portraitist, mural painter and teacher Deane Keller (1901–1992), as well as the visual and spatial aspects of his New Haven studio workplace and their impact upon his work. Deane Keller was a student of the anatomist and draftsman George Bridgman at the Art Students League and taught drawing and painting at the Yale School of the Fine Arts until 1970.
Sarah Mead Leonard appointed to leadership role at Newberry Library
In November 2025, Sarah Mead Leonard (curatorial track Ph.D. 2020) began a new role as associate director of fellowships and academic programs at the Newberry Library in Chicago. In this role she directs Newberry's robust program of short- and long-term research fellowships as well as overseeing undergraduate seminars taught at the library. She is excited to be in Chicago and to connect with current and former Blue Hens through her work at the Newberry. She also continues to expand her work on William Morris and other aspects of 19th-century British art, material culture and landscapes. Her long-running Morris on Screen project, which documents Morris & Company patterns in film and television set design, was used by filmmaker Natalie Cubides-Brady to create the film Wallpaper for the 2025 William Morris Gallery exhibition Morris Mania. The intricacies of publication timelines mean that Sarah also anticipates three publications in 2026: a journal article for Victorian Studies and two chapters in edited volumes, focused respectively on the Morris on Screen project, Morris's 1883 fabric pattern Rose, and Morris's use of Indian indigo dye.
Jeffrey Richmond-Moll curates landmark exhibition
Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, Ph.D. ‘19, co-curated “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone” Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, where he is the George Putnam Curator of American Art. The exhibition is co-organized by Shawnya L. Harris and the Georgia Museum of Art and supported by grants from the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Henry Luce Foundation. It is the first retrospective of sculptor Edmonia Lewis. Lewis was born in 1844 in Greenbush, New York, and became the first Black and Indigenous artist born in the United States to achieve international fame as a sculptor. The exhibition is on view through June 7, 2026, and will then travel to the Georgia Museum of Art August 8, 2026–January 3, 2027, and the North Carolina Museum of Art April 3–July 11, 2027.
Galina Olmsted is associate curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art
Since beginning her new role as associate curator of European art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2024, Galina Olmsted (curatorial track Ph.D. 2019) has organized several exhibitions including At the Moulin Rouge, Hokusai | Monet, and Cassatt on Paper. She oversees Mia's collection of 19th and 20th century European painting and has brought several new artists into the collection, with a particular focus on Nordic artists such as Väinö Blomstedt, Ludvig Skramstad and Ingeborg Westfelt-Eggertz. Olmsted has also contributed to recent exhibition catalogues including Blanche Hoschedé-Monet In the Light (Indiana University, 2025) and Gustave Caillebotte: Painting Men, which traveled to the Musée d'Orsay, the Getty Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago in 2024 and 2025. In 2026, she will contribute to the catalogue accompanying Women Impressionists and the Land, which opens at the St. Louis Art Museum in October.
Lea Stephenson is curator at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
In early 2025, Lea C. Stephenson (Ph.D. 2025) joined the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) as the Kenneth R. Woodcock Curator of Historical American Art. Stephenson oversees PAFA’s collection from the 18th to the early 20th century, including the work of Benjamin West, Charles Willson Peale, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Mary Cassatt and Winslow Homer. In her curatorial work, she focuses on organizing exhibitions, acquisitions and producing new scholarship on PAFA’s collection. Currently, Stephenson is the co-curator for Nation of Artists, a major 2026 exhibition coinciding with America 250 that features over 200 objects. This exhibition presents the first large-scale reinstallation of PAFA’s permanent collection in over 25 years and offers a thematic perspective to American art in the institution’s Historic Landmark Building. In the next few years at PAFA, she will bring a traveling Cecilia Beaux exhibition to the museum and contribute to the exhibition catalog, while also developing a 5-year exhibition plan at the institution to explore the international narratives of American art and PAFA’s history. Stephenson completed her Ph.D. in art history at UD in 2025, where her dissertation explored late 19th century Egyptomania among American artists and collectors.
Karli Wurzelbacher is chief curator at The Heckscher Museum of Art
Karli Wurzelbacher (Ph.D. 2018) is chief curator at The Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, NY., In September 2025, she opened the exhibition Emma Stebbins: Carving Out History, the first to explore the work of the 19th-century American sculptor best known for creating Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain (1873), a public monument that celebrated the Croton Aqueduct, which brought clean drinking water to New York City. Stebbins was the first woman to receive a public sculpture commission in New York City. The exhibition brings together most of the artist’s rare extant work, as well as archival material and paintings and photographs by historic and contemporary artists including William Merritt Chase, Martha Edelheit and Ricky Flores. Wurzelbacher also edited the publication, distributed by Penn State University Press, that accompanies the show, which includes a foreword by Tony Award-winning playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner. The project has been featured in The Art Newspaper and Artnet, and on WNYC. After closing at the Heckscher Museum in March 2026, the exhibition will travel nationally thanks to the Art Bridges Foundation.
