In this interview, we visited with Janis Tomlinson, Director, University Museums, and Julie McGee, Curator of African American Art, University Museums. We talked about the exciting exhibitions on campus during the fall 2013 semester and about the University museum program in general. Each of the University Museums rotates visiting exhibitions with exhibitions that highlight the University’s holdings.
Make sure you visit the exhibitions in Old College, Mechanical, and Penny Halls on the University’s Newark campus. All of the galleries are open to the public, generally, Wednesday – Sunday.
Listen to the interview
Janis Tomlinson and Julie McGee, University of Delaware Museums
28:40
27.4 MB
About our guests
- Director of University Museums at the University of Delaware since 2003, Dr. Janis Tomlinson oversees art collections and galleries as well as the mineralogical collection and museum, and serves as curator of the Old College Gallery. Her publications include articles, exhibition reviews and books on topics in Spanish painting including Francisco Goya y Lucientes 1746-1828 (Phaidon), El Greco to Goya: Painting in Spain 1561-1828 (Abrams), and Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment (Yale University Press).
In 2002, she was the U.S. curator for the exhibition, Goya: Images of Women (Museo del Prado, 2001; National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2002) and subsequently contributed essays to exhibitions of Goya’s work at MUNAL (Mexico City) and the Museo del Prado (Madrid).
Most recently she has contributed to the catalogue of an exhibition on Goya opening at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in October 2014. Her writings have been translated into six languages, and she has lectured on her research at museums and universities throughout the U.S., and in Canada, Europe, Mexico, and South America.
Dr. Tomlinson has been a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and of the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. A graduate of McGill University, she earned her MA and Ph.D. in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. - Julie L. McGee is Curator of African American Art, University Museums, and also holds an appointment as an Associate Professor, Black American Studies. She is an art historian with specialties in African American art and contemporary African art, has published widely on contemporary African American art and South African art, with particular focus on artist and museum praxis.
She joined the University Museums of the University of Delaware as curator of African American art in 2008 after a dozen years on the faculty of Bowdoin College and a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. McGee has written and lectured extensively on African American art and contemporary art in South Africa. She has curated exhibitions for the David C. Driskell Center, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine, the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey and Guga S’Thebe Community Arts Centre in Langa (Cape Town), South Africa. With Vuyile C. Voyiya, McGee co-produced the documentary film The Luggage is Still Labeled: Blackness in South African Art.
Her current research focuses on contemporary African diaspora arts as well as South African art and art institutions. Her publications include a recent biography of artist, collector and educator David C. Driskell as well as articles addressing issues of primitivism, canon formation and colonialism in art history. In 2011-2012 she held the Dorothy Kayser Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History at the University of Memphis.
Learn more
- University Museums main Web site.
- Mechanical Hall: Current Exhibition
- Mineralogical Museum: Current Exhibition (Penny Hall)
- Old College Gallery: Current Exhibitions
- Recent UDaily stories: