Unknown artist, Two Horsemen with Armies, 15th Century (detail). Tempera, ink, gold leaf, manuscript page, Naskh script, late 15th cent. Shiraz school. Grinnell College Museum of Art Collection 1985.006.524, gift of Nanette Rodney Kelekian.
Jenny Anger, Professor
Four Metaphors of Modernism: From Der Sturm to the Société Anonyme (University of Minnesota Press, 2018)
Four Metaphors of Modernism is the first book-length study in English of Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm—the journal, gallery, performance venue, press, and bookstore in Berlin (1910-1932). In the book, Jenny Anger places Der Sturm in conversation with New York’s Société Anonyme, an American avant-garde group modeled on Der Sturm and founded by Katherine Sophie Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. Focusing on the recurring metaphors of piano, glass, water, and home, Anger interweaves a historical analysis of these two organizations with an aesthetic study of the metaphors that shaped their practices.
The book arose in part out of classes Anger has taught at Grinnell and affirms her belief in the unexpected yet meaningful connection.
Michael “Mac” Mackenzie, Professor
Otto Dix and the First World War: Grotesque Humor, Camaraderie and Remembrance (Peter Lang, 2019)
Mac Mackenzie researches a number of areas of 20th century German art history, including architecture and urban planning, and the competing cultures of East and West Germany after World War II, but especially the art of the period between the World Wars. He recently published a book on Otto Dix, a painter who fought in the trenches of the First World War, suffered from PTSD, and made powerful, disturbing, and often humorous art about his experiences.
Much of his scholarship comes out of courses he has taught that explore what it was like to live in Paris and Berlin in the 20th century.
Fredo Rivera ’06, Assistant Professor
“Incomplete postmodernism: The rise and fall of Utopia in Cuba,” in Second World Postmodernisms: Architecture & Society under Late Socialism (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019)
Fredo Rivera is a contributing author to Second World Postmodernisms: Architecture & Society under Late Socialism, edited by Vladimir Kulic and featuring essays by fifteen authors. Rivera wrote Chapter 8, “Incomplete postmodernism: The rise and fall of Utopia in Cuba,” which explores postmodern semblances within Cuban architecture from the 1970s to the 1990s. The essay discusses the role of graphic art in the built environment, as well as new architectures of tourism that emerge prior to and during Cuba’s Special Period (1991-2000).
The essay’s focus on modernity and postmodernism is more broadly discussed and debated in Rivera’s courses on architecture.
Eiren Shea, Assistant Professor
Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange (Routledge, 2020)
Eiren Shea's new book, Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange investigates the dress and textiles of the Mongol period in order to examine the impact of the Mongol courtly vocabulary on the arts and culture of China, Central and West Asia, and Europe.
This research directly connects to her class ARH 212: The Global Mongol Century. Themes about the transfer of artistic motifs and technology and cultural exchange across Asia are also explored in ARH 211: Arts and Visual Cultures of China, and her new special topics class ARH 295: Edo to Istanbul.