Welcome Art Colleagues! The art department recently has welcomed six new colleagues in Studio and Art History.
David Morales, Federico Cuatlacuatl, Tiemperos Del Antropoceno – 2020, Ongoing Series, Multimedia Installation & Video
Born in Cholula, Puebla, Mexico, Federico Cuatlacuatl is an Indigenous artist based in Virginia. He grew up in Indiana and received his MFA in 2015, specializing in Digital Arts from Bowling Green State University. He joins us as Assistant Professor of Studio Art with a specialty in New Media. Federico's work is invested in disseminating topics of Latinx immigration, social art practice, and cultural sustainability. Building from his own experience growing up as an undocumented immigrant and previously holding DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), Federico’s research is primarily concerned with pressing realities in current social, political, and cultural issues that Latinx undocumented immigrants face in the U.S. Federico’s independent productions have been screened in various national and international film festivals, including Mexico; Canada; Finland; Athens, Greece; Delph, England; Lucknow, India; Paris, France; and the Azores Islands off of Portugal. As founder and director of the Rasquache Artist Residency in Puebla, Mexico, he actively stays involved in socially engaged works and binational endeavors.
Adriana Greci Green has joined UVA as The Fralin Museum of Art’s Curator of the Indigenous Arts of the Americas, a newly created position within the Mellon Indigenous Arts Program. She oversees The Fralin’s growing collection of more than 700 objects of Native American art and 2,000 objects of Pre-Columbian art of varying origin and media, and works to bring object lessons into the undergraduate and graduate classroom. Greci Green is an art historian, curator, and anthropologist whose expertise in Native American art histories holds an emphasis on the Plains and Great Lakes regions. Her research focuses on 18th- to 20th-century American Indian histories, exploring the contexts in which material culture, art, dress, and cultural performance are produced and circulated, both historically and today. She also looks at how Native Americans have been represented in museums, popular culture, and the media. Her interests in sociocultural anthropology include representations of identity, the economic significance of women’s work, Indigenous aesthetic systems, and material culture studies. She teaches Native American Art in the art department.
In 2018, the UVA Art Department welcomed Giulia Paoletti as Assistant Professor of African Art. A specialist in African photography and African art more broadly, Paoletti has extensive curatorial experience, most notably as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2016-18). Her 2015 exhibition "In and Out of the Studio: Photographic Portraits from West Africa," which she co-curated at the Metropolitan Museum, presented one hundred years of portrait photography in West Africa. The exhibition overlapped her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, which focused on the history of photography in Senegal from 1860-1960 and which won the Arts Council of the African Studies Association’s 2017 Roy Sieber Award for Best Dissertation in African art. Approaching the medium from a variety of angles—from the historical to the contemporary; from Sufi Islamic to secular portraiture; and from medium specificity to intermediality—her work has appeared in edited volumes and academic journals including the Metropolitan Museum Journal, Tribal Arts, and African Arts. Her research was supported by awards and fellowships from, among others, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. She has taught at Columbia University, Barnard College, and the Pratt Institute; and she has lectured widely in this country and abroad.
Neal Rock, Assistant Professor of Studio Art (Painting), is a Welsh-born visual artist now based in Charlottesville. He holds a BFA in painting from the University of Gloucestershire, UK; an MFA from Central Saint Martins School of Art & Design in London; and a practice-based Ph.D. in painting from London’s Royal College of Art. With a visual art practice that encompasses interdisciplinary approaches to painting informed by histories of prosthetics, abstraction, embodiment and post-Humanism, he has exhibited extensively across Europe and the United States since the early 2000s. His work has been featured in commercial solo exhibitions in London, Amsterdam, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles, and Rock has participated in international survey exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo); the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston); New York’s Storefront for Art & Architecture; and London’s Royal Academy of Art and ICA, amongst others. He was awarded a Grant Wood Painting Fellowship at the University of Iowa, alongside other residencies and fellowships including, MASS MoCA, Yaddo, VCCA and South Dakota State University.
In 2019 we welcomed back Dylan K. Rogers as Lecturer in Roman Art and Archaeology. After receiving his PhD in Classical Art and Archaeology from the department in 2015, Rogers went on to serve as the Assistant Director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. While in Greece, he continued his research on Roman fountains and published his book Water Culture in Roman Society (Brill, 2018). He also began researching more broadly on Roman Greece, especially in understanding expressions of identity in the region through material culture. In 2018, he co-edited volume What's New in Roman Greece? Recent Work on the Greek Mainland and the Islands in the Roman Period (National Hellenic Research Foundation). His research explores Roman identity, urbanism, water culture, sensory experience, and domestic religion, and he has developed a number of new courses for the department based on these topics.
Henry F. Skerritt, an art historian and curator hailing from Perth in Western Australia, is the Curator of the Indigenous Arts of Australia at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection. He has curated numerous exhibitions including No Boundaries: Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Abstract Painting (2015); Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia (2016), and The Inside World: Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Memorial Poles (2019), and was editor of the accompanying catalogs. Skerritt holds a PhD in art history from the University of Pittsburgh and a Masters of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne. He is currently working on a touring exhibition that surveys eight decades of bark painting from northern Australia curated collaboratively with the Yolngu community at Yirrkala. Skerritt has written extensively on Aboriginal art and culture. In the art department, he teaches Australian Aboriginal Art, with a particular focus on the works of contemporary artists.