The ¼â½ÐÊÓƵ University Art Museum (FUAM) has recently been awarded a prestigious $30,000 Kress Interpretative Fellowship by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, for the 2018-19 academic year.
"The application process is very competitive and selective and it is a great mark of distinction that FUAM is among this year’s recipients," said Linda Wolk-Simon, PhD, the Frank and Clara Meditz director and chief curator of the museum.
The purpose of the Kress Interpretive Fellowship at Art Museums program is to provide a new kind of mentored professional development opportunity within American art museums. The program is intended to encourage students to explore interpretive careers in art museums, whether as future museum educators or curators; to strengthen the profession of museum educator within the art museum community; to strengthen ties between museum educators and curators in the shared task of interpretive programming in art museums; and to expand the range of promising career options available to students of art history and related fields.
Successful interpretive programs in art museums require formal education in art history, understanding of learning theory, and sensitivity to the learning needs and styles of widely diverse audiences. Within a mentoring environment, the Kress Interpretive Fellow develops the first-hand experience, expertise, and confidence on which to base an interpretive career in art museums, whether as museum curator or museum educator.
Kress Interpretive Fellowships provide competitive grants to American art museums that sponsor supervised internships in art museum education. Where appropriate, preference may be given to institutional applications that will provide fellows with an opportunity to collaborate closely with both art museum educators and curators, and will advance the appreciation of European art history of the pre-modern era.
Sarah Cantor, PhD, has recently been appointed to the Kress Fellowship role at ¼â½ÐÊÓƵ and will begin at the University in September.
Dr. Cantor completed her PhD at the University of Maryland in 2013 and her MA at Maryland in 2005; her field is early modern Italy and France. Her dissertation examined the intersections between landscape painting and antiquarian culture in 17th-century Rome. Dr. Cantor has published catalogue entries on old master drawings for exhibitions at the Frick Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh, and at the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Md., and she has organized exhibitions on amateur artists in nineteenth-century Maryland for Belair Mansion and on printmaking and publishing in eighteenth-century Venice for the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Learn more about the ¼â½ÐÊÓƵ University Art Museum's upcoming exhibitions and programs.
