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Coins, Contact, and Connection: Teaching Art History Through Objects
By Madison Gilmore-Duffey (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art History, Florida State University) As Art Historians, we must contend with the fact that we so often teach from reproductions––usually digital. While the benefits of this technology cannot be understated, it is essential that we acknowledge its drawbacks as well. Through the screen, material culture is made…
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Medieval Aksum and the Queen of Sheba: The Iconography of a Twentieth-Century Ethiopian Seal Stamp
By Quentin Clark (PhD Student, Department of Art History, Florida State University) Provenance and Description A previously unpublished Ethiopian seal stamp, currently housed in the Blick-Harris Study Collection, was first acquired in 1976 by Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University, David P. Harris (1925–2019) (Fig. 1). It was subsequently bequeathed to Kenyon College in…
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Wait, Does this Make Me a Curator?
By Alexis Whitney ’25 Curating an exhibition from start to finish is no small task. However, as someone who dreams of working in a museum, it is a task I took on with pleasure (twice). As a VRC assistant working with the Blick-Harris Study Collection, I have had access to art objects and relics to…
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The Miracle Working Icon of The Blick-Harris Study Collection
By Collette Barnett ’25 When I began working with Russian and Eastern European items in the Blick-Harris Study Collection, I wasn’t sure where to start. But I knew one thing: I wanted to work with icons. There is something uniquely powerful about them. Not only do many of them provide a rich text and which…
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A Deeper Dive into the Medals of the 17th-20th Century
By Rory Engel ’26 I have always been fascinated by the materiality of art and small objects and who may have owned, touched, and interacted with them in the past. For this reason, working as an assistant in the Visual Research Center, specifically focusing on nearly twenty medals in the Blick-Harris Study Collection, has been…
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A Time Machine of Art and Passion: My Experience at the VRC
By Moe Belghith ’25 In my previous blog post, I compared my job at the Visual Resources Center (VRC) to operating a teleportation time-machine. Every slide I scan and color-correct transports me to another time and place—ancient art, the rolling hills of holy lands, or breathtaking mosques and churches. Through my work at the VRC,…
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A Glimpse of China in the 1990s
By Zhuocheng Jiang ’26 After a forty-year rapid development, China’s urban landscape has transformed dramatically, becoming completely alienated from its past. This urbanization has impacted not only the material but also the spiritual level of the country, leaving the minds of the previous generation alienated to the new generation. As someone born in the 2000s,…
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A Jewel in the Ocean of Art — Contemporary Chinese Art
By Yifan Shang ’25 In the summer of 2022, I encountered an intriguing work named “The Sinking Blue and White Scheme” by a Contemporary Chinese artist, Xu Lei, in the Nanchizi Art Museum in Beijing, China. Hanging on a gray brick wall, this painting portrays a white horse standing in profile in a flowing body…
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My Experience with Byzantine Coins in the Blick-Harris Study Collection
By Sonia E. Suben ’25 Over summer of 2024 and the 2024–2025 academic year, I have been providing collection management services for the Byzantine and Roman coins housed in the Blick-Harris Study Collection. This began with a research project completed as part of the Summer Scholars program in summer of 2024, under the direction of…
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A Modern Forgery of an Ancient Scarab
By Ellie Westfall ’27 I took a gap year before entering Kenyon, and found myself in Giza, conducting archaeological research at the base of the pyramids through an internship with the Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA). The site is called “Heit el-Ghurab,” or the Town of the Pyramid-Builders. The internship consisted of data entry, social…
