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Staff Updates – July 2011

/ Staff Updates

On May 17, 2011, Board Member Edgar Marx, Jr. and Chief Curator Jeannine O’Grody, PhD participated on a panel at the annual Association of Art Museum Curators conference in New York City. The subject of the panel was Developing Donor Cultivation Confidence; Edgar and Jeannine spoke about their experiences as donor and curator at the BMA.

In April 2011, Anne Forschler-Tarrasch, PhD, the Marguerite Jones Harbert and John M. Harbert III Curator of Decorative Arts, served on a review committee for the National Endowment for the Humanities “Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections” grants program.  Anne was invited to Washington, D.C. to participate in a one-day session to discuss the NEH program and review current applications. Later that month, Anne gave a lecture at the annual meeting of the Wedgwood International Seminar in Chicago.  Her lecture, “Milkmaids and Mistresses: Wedgwood’s Dairywares in the 18th and 19th Centuries,” will be included in the Proceedings of the Wedgwood International Seminar to be published later this year.

In June, Anne gave the keynote address at a special symposium of the Wedgwood Society of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, in honor of the organization’s 35th anniversary.  She also lectured at a meeting of the Wedgwood Society of Southern California in Los Angeles.  She recently contributed an essay about the Buten Wedgwood Collection to the journal Ars Ceramica, a publication of the Wedgwood Society of New York, of which Anne was recently made an honorary member.

Anne was invited to present a lecture at the Second International Meeting of the Friends of Ornamental Cast Iron in Bendorf-Sayn, Germany in September 2011. She will discuss the reattribution of an iron statuette produced in Berlin around 1821, a promised gift to the Museum. The meeting brings together scholars and collectors from around the world to present and discuss the latest research in the field.

Graham C. Boettcher, PhD, The William Cary Hulsey Curator of American Art, recently served on the panel of judges for Birmingham Magazine’s 2011 “Beautiful People” issue. On August 5, Graham will speak at the annual New Orleans Antiques Forum, organized by The Historic New Orleans Collection. The subject of this year’s forum is “French at Heart: Continental Influence in the Gulf South.” Graham will deliver a talk entitled, “Paris on the Bayou: The French Artistic Presence on the Gulf Coast,” in which he will discuss French-born artists working in coastal Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama prior to the Civil War. For more information, see: http://www.hnoc.org/programs/AntiquesForum.html

Suzy Harris, Associate Curator of Education, presented the Museum Division Awards at the National Art Education Association conference in Seattle in March 2011. At this meeting, she also concluded her four-year terms of service on both the Museum Division Development Committee and the editorial review board of Art Education: The Journal of the National Art Education Association.