My love affair with architecture began when I was a young girl, spending a great deal of time exploring Eero Saarinen's John Deere Headquarters in Moline, Illinois. My study of architecture follows my work as an art historian specializing in both Netherlandish art of the seventeenth century and teaching in university museums. As a first-generation student, I have a passion for the kind of teaching that empowers students. My ten years of teaching experience includes leading "Art and Architecture of the British Isles" as part of a study abroad program to England and Scotland. In architectural practice, I seek to foreground sustainability, civic responsibility, and inspiring design.
I came to Knoxville in 2014, hired to develop the Academic Programs department at the McClung Museum to use the collection and institution to teach classes across campus, with 42 departments engaging with the museum at my departure. I collaborated with faculty to design class visits that tackled not only teaching course content but also skill building, including critical thinking, problem solving, visual and cultural literacy, and research. I developed an internship program for third year law students to work on NAGPRA issues and the repatriation of objects in our collection. I also collaborated with the nursing school to develop a program that helped nursing PhD students make the transition from clinician to researcher. While at KU's Spencer Museum I led weekly class visits from various departments and initiated the development of the museum's mobile app, which became the model for the university. This background is inherently interdisciplinary, and informs how I think about the built environment, conscious of the multiple lenses of understanding and investigation that inform any project.
I decided to pursue the M.Arch after working with Sanders Pace Architecture on a renovation project for my 1956 home. I split my time between Knoxville and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I serve on my co-op's Board of Directors. When not engaged in academic work, I am usually biking, hiking the Smoky Mountains, riding to hounds on horseback, volunteering on an organic vegetable farm, or visiting friends and museums in New York.
McClung Museum, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, US, Curator of Academic Programs
In this position I was responsible for the development, implementation, and oversight of academic initiatives that enhance the McClung’s contribution to the University’s academic agenda. Collaborating with faculty across campus, the CAP encourages and facilitates the meaningful participation of the McClung and its collections and exhibitions in undergraduate curricula. This includes working with museum curators to plan exhibitions relevant to university teaching, outreach to faculty, leading class discussions in the museum for courses in departments across campus, and educating faculty on teaching strategies that enrich their curriculum and pedagogy. They will work closely with the Museum’s curators, staff, and UT faculty in all disciplines to meet their teaching objectives through innovative collections-based curriculum. The Curator will collaborate with the Museum’s curators and with faculty members to implement internships and to plan class visits, exhibitions, lectures, workshops, and research projects that engage the Museum’s resources. Academic Programs, at its core, seeks to make the museum a site of interdisciplinary, intellectual engagement, where members of the academic community can expand on classroom teaching by engaging deeply and effectively with the museum, the university as a whole, and the community.
Position responsibilities:
Program development and planning: 30%
· Works with faculty to develop new courses, exhibition concepts, or research projects using the McClung collections
· Oversees student research installations
· Seeks out and encourages the use of the museum’s resources by departments and professional schools not traditionally understood as museum clients
· Conducts university-wide research on class offerings before each semester and contacts faculty of relevant classes to encourage use of specific exhibitions and collections
· Coordinate exhibit-related programming, including visits by outside scholars and speakers, that engage students and faculty
· Creates, with the collaboration of colleagues across campus, and implements strategic plans and initiatives of the McClung Museum to fulfill the teaching goals of the university
· Maintains a Faculty Advisory Board for Academic Programs
· Attends and occasionally presents at national conferences
· Recommends acquisitions that fulfill the academic mission of the Museum and its responsibility to the University
· Maintains affiliations with colleagues within university museums nationally
Teaching: 30%
· Oversees and administers all university class visits in the galleries, Object Study Room, and laboratories.
· Oversees special access to the museum galleries and collections for courses, faculty and academic colleagues from other institutions, and students
· Develops and leads workshops on object-based teaching and museum studies for university faculty and instructors.
· Teaches or co-teaches courses using the museum’s collections or exhibitions
Administration: 30%
· Manages the daily operation of Academic Programs projects and oversees annual and multiyear plans in accordance with the strategic plans of the Museum and the University
· Develops and maintains Academic Programs budgets
· Participates in development and implementation of institutional plans and initiatives
· Coordinates and facilitates the activities of other museum staff with the work of Academic Programs
· Develops and implements evaluation strategies and statistics on use, impact, and effectiveness of academic programs.
· Seeks sources of funding and works with museum and university collaborators to develop proposals and grants
· Oversees Academic Programs Graduate Assistant
Collection and Exhibition Research (10%)
· Researches and writes on the collection in areas of expertise
The University of Tennessee - Knoxville, Knoxville, TN, US, MArch, Masters of Architecture
Graduation: May 2024
The Graduate Architecture Program at Tennessee challenges students to do more than envision buildings. We explore and investigate issues of technology, material culture, and political economy alongside a commitment to histories and theories of the built environment. We prepare graduate students to be all-purpose intellectuals, willing to and able to engage in cultural production and agency. The Master of Architecture 3G program is designed to accommodate students who come from a variety of backgrounds, including those with no previous formal study in architecture or a degree from a non-accredited architecture program.
The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, US, Masters, History of Art
General history of art graduate program. I continued to the PhD, completing course work and doctoral exams. Writing my dissertation was interrupted by serious illness, metastatic cancer, but after almost four years of treatments and surgeries I was declared cancer-free, and have been for five years.
PhD Major: Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish Art
Minor: Twentieth-century American Art
Minor: Chinese Art of the Tang Dynasty
Dissertation topic: Images of Hunting in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Visual Culture
The University of Tennessee - Knoxville, Knoxville, TN, US, Bachelors, Philosophy, Art History
Undergraduate education in philosophy and art history, with several classes taken in laboratory sciences as I considered med school.
