Deborah Lewittes’s peer-reviewed essay, “Tectonics: Berthold Lubetkin and Formalism in Mid-Century London,” will be published in Iolanda Plescia and Emilia Di Rocco, eds., Rethinking Modernism (Rome: TAB Edizioni, forthcoming, Spring 2025). She has been awarded two new research grants as well. To support travel to France and St. Thomas, Dr. Lewittes received funding from the PSC-CUNY Research Foundation for her project “The Blue Light of the Open Sea: Pissarro, Paris, Plein Air Painting, and the ‘Port Jews’ of the Caribbean.” The Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture has also awarded her a Fellowship Grant to support travel to Israel for her project “Bauhaus, Haifa, Kibbutz: The Modernism of Munio Gitai Weinraub.”

Continuing her research on Black dolls as seen through the European eyes, Rhoda Terry-Seidenberg, presented a paper on coconut-head dolls at the National Museum of Toys and Miniatures in Kansas City. The event brought together scholars from different disciplines tackling the difficult discussion of slavery through the lens of Black dolls. The symposium accompanied the museum’s current exhibition, Portraits of Childhood: Black Dolls from the Collection of Deborah Neff, on view until March 3, 2025.

Noëlle King exhibited her work in two 2024 exhibitions –– Anthropology of Motherhood: Kinship and Othermothering at the Byham Theatre, Pittsburgh, PA, and Little Luxuries at the Main Line Art Center in Haverford, PA. She recently had another work, “The Frost that Touches the Bark and Goes,” published in Plant Perspectives 1: 219–220. Noëlle is also responsible for securing Bronx Community College’s very own Moon Tree. She applied to NASA to receive the American Sycamore seedling, which flew around the Moon on the Artemis I mission in 2022. The tree was planted on May 7, 2024, and can be seen on Ohio Field.

Image caption: Stephanie Beck, Bough, 2024. Photo: Stefan Hagen, courtesy of Wave Hill.

Stephanie Beck presented Bough, a solo exhibition at Wave Hill’s Sunroom Project Space from October 19 through December 1, 2024. Beck’s exhibition spoke to our complicated relationship with the natural world, specifically plants and birds. The display included abstract sculptural “drawings” created from hinged lines of wood connected to natural material collected at Wave Hill. The pieces explored the manipulation of plants through grafting, tying, and cutting –– practices that can both destroy ecosystems and rejuvenate threatened species. The exhibition also included an interactive sound piece of the songs of eight endangered regional migratory birds. The birdsongs were connected to a motion detector that stopped the sound once a visitor entered the exhibition space. Visitors had to remain still to hear all eight birdsongs, reflecting the need for humans to stop our destructive actions in order for the natural world to survive.