News - April 17, 2009

Drawing the Other: VPA and SUF Art Professors Collaborate on Faculty Exhibit

The SUF Art Gallery exhibition Drawing the Other: Works on Paper by SU and SUF Faculty features the work of thirty-two faculty members from SU’s School of Art and Design and SU in Florence Studio Art professors. The recent opening drew a crowd of almost 100 guests, appreciative of the unique opportunity for the students at SUF to see the work of their professors from both the Florence and the home campus.

Students from the Studio Arts program were enthusiastic about the exhibit. Said Casey Landerkin (SU Illustration Major, 2010), “To know that your teachers are not just admirable as teachers, but as artists too, is an empowering feeling. At the gallery opening I got to see the personal works of the people who I am learning everything from, and I can see the bits and pieces of knowledge and skill I have taken from each of them, and what I need to take from them next."

The idea for the exhibit was born during a visit to the home campus by SUF Director Barbara Deimling and SUF painting professor Kirsten Stromberg. In meetings with faculty and staff at VPA the two realized that a collaborative exhibit would be a wonderful opportunity for fostering cross-campus communication and projects. Returning to Florence, they worked together with Exhibits Coordinator Devorah Block to develop a theme for the exhibit. SOAD Department Chair Ludwig K. Stein was instrumental in finalizing the details of the project and enlisting the participation of his faculty.

Noted SUF Director Barbara Deimling, “The exhibition invites the visitor to think critically about such diverse themes as difference, integration, plurality, otherness and movement—topics that are at the very core of international education for faculty and students alike.”

Drawing the Other: Works on Paper by SU and SUF Faculty
SUF Art Gallery
Via dei della Robbia 99
Florence, Italy
April 2-May 2, 2009
For more information contact: gallery@syr.fi.it

SUF announces fifth book in the Villa Rossa Series

The fifth volume in the Villa Rossa Series is underway and will be available for purchase in early fall 2009. The book, entitled Sandro Botticelli and Herbert Horne: New Research, contains the texts of six papers delivered by internationally renowned scholars during a three-day conference held in Florence, Italy in October 2008 in celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of Horne’s celebrated monograph on Botticelli.

The essays span Horne’s remarkable personality and career, problems of fundamental importance concerning the identities of some figures in famous works by Botticelli, and what constitutes authorship in certain works in the production of which Botticelli was only partly involved.

Two of the papers contain new discoveries by SUF Professor Antonella Francini and former SUF Professor Louis Waldman. Francini presents a poem she has just discovered by Herbert Horne about a portrait by Botticelli in London while Waldman presents a contract—the only contract known for a work by the artist—that he recently discovered for a little-known late painting by Botticelli.

Sandro Botticelli and Herbert Horne: New Research
Edited by Rab Hatfield
Paperback: 160 pages
Distributor: Syracuse University Press (Fall 2009)
Language: English
ISBN: 8895250044