UIC Art History Symposium

The Department of Art History will be hosting a symposium in honor of Prof. Martha Pollak on the occasion of her retirement and in celebration of the department. Six alumni from our BA, MA, and PhD programs have been invited to give presentation of their current research. The event will take place on the afternoon of Saturday, April 11th, beginning at 1 pm, and will be followed by a wine and cheese reception. Paper abstracts and speaker bios can be found below the schedule.

1:00 pm     Opening Remarks
1:10 pm     Jennifer Gray (Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation), “ ‘Unchangeably changing Change’: Frank Lloyd Wright and Ocatilla”
1:55 pm     Anna Mascorella (Syracuse University), “Nationalism, Restoration, and the Baroque: The Case of Santa Maria degli Angeli and the 1911 International Exposition in Rome"
2:40 pm     BREAK
2:50 pm     Caroline Fernald (Harvard Museums of Science and Culture), “Apocryphal Images: The Invention of a Distinctly American Art”
3:35 pm     Savannah Esquivel (UC Riverside), “The Liquid Landscape of the Monastery of San Miguel at Huejotzingo, Mexico”
4:20 pm     BREAK
4:30 pm     SimHinman Wan (Texas Tech University), “Cities Unseen: Reconstructing a Decentralized Urban Formation in the Zhujiang Delta”
5:15 pm     Deepthi Murali (George Mason University), “Connecting Threads: Textiles, Data, and the Making of a Global South Art History”
6:00 pm     Reception

Jennifer Gray

“Unchangeably changing Change”: Frank Lloyd Wright and Ocatilla

In 1929, Frank Lloyd Wright and a handful of draftsmen constructed one of Wright’s most singular yet elusive projects, a temporary camp he named Ocatilla (sic) after the desert cactus. Located in the San Tan Mountains of Chandler, Arizona, the camp consisted of an interconnected group of cabins made of board and batten walls and operable stretched canvas roofs—effectively designer tents. Ocatilla was interwoven into the desert landscape, its geometry echoing the surrounding mountains and rock formations and its sparkling fabric roofs diffusing the sun and providing ventilation. Wright only occupied Ocatilla for one winter season before it caught fire and was abandoned, but the temporary camp signaled a new direction in Wright’s career and thinking about architecture.  

In her current research project, an exhibition and related conference, Jennifer Gray is exploring the ramifications of Ocatilla for Wright’s practice and its relevance today. Wright was enamored with the tectonic desert landscape, but its hostile climate—what he called the elemental forces of sun, wind, and heat—forced him to reconsider notions of permanence, mobility, and sustainability. Wright was aware of the paradoxes of inhabiting the desert and early on cautioned against over development. At the same time, the luxury of wintering in places like Arizona was made possible first by railroads and then by the endless stretches of highway that traverse the Southwestern desert and speak of other forces at work—man and machines—in this wilderness. Even the term “camp” is telling, signifying the migratory and temporary patterns of Wright’s occupation of the desert during the cooler winter months.  

Ocatilla was the first of many camps designed by Wright, including Taliesin West in Arizona and Ras El Bar in Egypt. What lessons could we take from Wright and the contradictions that come with living in these arid environments? How can we sustainably inhabit and care for fragile, desert ecologies without irrevocably transforming such magical landscapes? How might growth and sustainability find a common cause?

Jennifer Gray is the Vice President of the Taliesin Institute at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Her research focuses on modern architecture and how designers and activists used architecture, cities, and landscapes to advance social change at the turn of the 20th century. Her work has been published in journals of architectural history and critical heritage. She has curated several exhibitions and published catalogues on Wright, including Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and most recently the Imperial Hotel at 100: Frank Lloyd Wright and the World that toured three venues in Japan. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy. She has taught at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University; the school of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP) at Cornell University, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and she is the former Curator of Drawings and Archives at Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. Gray attended the University of Illinois, Chicago from 1998-2001, where she received her MA, and she subsequently received her PhD from Columbia University in 2011.

Anna Mascorella

Nationalism, Restoration, and the Baroque: The Case of Santa Maria degli Angeli and the 1911 International Exposition in Rome

Presenting a chapter from her current book project, “The Baroque and the Third Rome: Nation, Race, Empire, 1870-1943,” Anna Mascorella’s talk examines the early-twentieth century restoration of Rome’s Santa Maria degli Angeli. Created in the 1560s out of the Baths of Diocletian by Michelangelo, the church was overhauled in the mid-1700s by Neapolitan architect Luigi Vanvitelli. Among Vanvitelli’s many interventions, long targets of scathing criticisms, his greatest “artistic crime” was perhaps the addition of his late Baroque façade, which reoriented the church’s entrance to face what would become Via Nazionale and covered a previously exposed apse of the ancient Roman baths. Following Italy’s unification, the church became the crowning feature of Piazza Termini (today’s Piazza della Repubblica), framing the route from Termini Station to Rome’s historic center, thereby serving as a monumental gateway to the Eternal City. Santa Maria degli Angeli thus occupied a vital space in the cultural imaginary of the nation’s capital and, by extension, the nation itself. The removal of Vanvitelli’s façade in anticipation of the 1911 International Exposition in Rome, held in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Italian State, reveals how the government’s monument protection agencies combined questions of style, historic preservation, and urban design to negotiate the aesthetic codes of Italian nationalism during this pivotal moment. Situating the church’s restoration into the context of the Exposition and centering the legacy of the Baroque, this talk charts how the State reimagined Santa Maria degli Angeli in order to construct Italian national identity at this most potent of sites.

Anna Mascorella is an Assistant Professor of Architectural History at Syracuse University’s School of Architecture. She received her M.A. in Art History from UIC in 2010 and Ph.D. in the History of Architecture and Urban Development from Cornell University in 2019. Her research examines the intersection of politics and the built environment in modern and early modern Italy and the greater Mediterranean region. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, and PLATFORM, among other venues. Prior to joining the faculty at Syracuse Architecture, Mascorella was the 2022-2024 Fishman Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Previously, she served as the Temple Buell Curator of Architecture at the History Colorado Center in Denver, Colorado.

Caroline Fernald

Apocryphal Images: The Invention of a Distinctly American Art

What does a copy of a Spanish Baroque painting, a ceramic jar from New Mexico, and promotional railway calendars have to do with Baroque art? More than you think! Using an undergraduate research paper as a point of departure, this presentation connects the Baroque period in Europe to the turn of the twentieth century in the American Southwest through an examination of stylistic conventions in art, determinations on appropriate subject matter, and the co-opting of materials from other cultures to reinforce authority. Examples will be drawn from Pueblo ceramics, artwork by members of the Taos Society of Artists, and works by the Taos Pueblo Painters to explore how Euro-American and Indigenous artists contributed to the creation of an American mythical identity that blurred the present with the past.

Dr. Caroline Jean Fernald serves as the Executive Director of Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. In this position, she oversees a partnership of six research museums that engage public audiences with the world-class collections and groundbreaking research at Harvard through interdisciplinary exhibits and educational programs. The partnership includes the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the public face of three research institutions: Harvard University’s Herbaria, Mineralogical and Geological Museum, and Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Prior to joining Harvard, Fernald led the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley as Executive Director from 2019-2023. While finalizing her PhD dissertation on the convergence of art, anthropology, and railway tourism in the 19th century American Southwest, she led the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, New Mexico as Executive Director from 2016-2019.

Originally hailing from the cornfields of Bellflower, Illinois, Fernald transferred to the University of Illinois at Chicago from Parkland Community College in 2009 and graduated with a BA in art history in 2011. She was the recipient of an Undergraduate Annual Art History Symposium Paper Prize and the John E. Walley Memorial Scholarship. She went on to complete a Master’s and PhD in Art History from the University of Oklahoma with a focus on Native American art history. The University of Oklahoma’s Weitzenhoffer Family College of Fine Arts presented Fernald with a Luminary Award in 2024 for exceptional alumni who have made advancements in careers in the arts. In 2025, she was awarded a Cambridge Chamber of Commerce Inspire Award in recognition of “the commitment and contributions of outstanding women leaders.”

Savannah Esquivel

The Liquid Landscape of the Monastery of San Miguel at Huejotzingo, Mexico 

Traditional histories of early colonial Mexican architecture have credited charismatic friars with delivering water to the sites where monasteries were built. We know that fray Juan de Alameda was involved in the herculean effort to deliver water eighteen miles overland to Huejotzingo (present-day Puebla state) in 1528. Another Franciscan, fray Francisco de Tembleque, is credited with a nearly 30-mile long arched-masonry aqueduct built to link two monasteries in the Central Mexican Plateau (present-day Hidalgo state) in 1555. The aqueduct still stands and, according to UNESCO, it is a testament to European genius and Indigenous cooperation. These projects were lionized in missionary lore, becoming the bedrock for conventional narratives about monastic water works, from world heritage websites to history books. 


First things first, however: this is not a story about Fray Alameda or Fray Tembleque. Stories about missionary power tend to overlook or underestimate the complexity of the social relations and technical knowledges that went into monastic water distribution systems. This talk shows how Nahua liquid ecologies inflected the meanings that existed in monastic built spaces and their decoration, as well as their pictorial and textual representations. A close examination of chapels, cloisters, and cisterns suggests Nahua leaders and churchgoers used monastic hydraulic systems to consolidate control and tap into the divine, thus revealing how monastic waterworks sustained Nahua communities as well as presenting a paradoxical limit to Franciscan control. From the perspective of the pipes and fountains, Indigenous Catholic society was organized in relation to flows of water.

Savannah Esquivel is an Assistant Professor in the History of Art at the University of California, Riverside. After receiving her M.A. from UIC in 2011 and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2020, she joined UCR as a specialist in the art and material culture of the Hispanic Americas, with a particular emphasis on Mexico. In 2021 and 2023, Esquivel was the Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow in The Huntington-UC Program for the Advancement of the Humanities, an innovative partnership designed to advance the humanities at public universities. Her research has also been supported by the University of California’s Hellman Fellowship program. Her first book, Indigenous Insiders: Sights, Sounds, and Cross-Cultural Interactions in Mexico’s Early Colonial Monasteries, is under contract with the University of Texas Press. Her research has recently appeared in the Arts, the Art Bulletin and postmedieval journals, and her article “Haunted Monasteries: Troubling Indigenous Erasure in Early Colonial Mexico” received the 2024 award for best article from the Association of Latin American Art. Esquivel’s ongoing research focuses on the artistic and sociopolitical interventions made by Indigenous communities within Catholic religious spaces in Mexico.

SimHinman Wan

Cities Unseen: Reconstructing a Decentralized Urban Formation in the Zhujiang Delta

As Professor Martha Pollak argues in her richly illustrated monograph on the architectural history of military urbanism, “the fortified perimeter is not marginal, but central to the definition and identity of the early modern city.” European states during this period were not only at war with one another; they also fought on other continents for territorial claims and trade privileges to build their global empires. The introduction of European military architecture in Asia and the Americas created many colonial seaports that became sprawling metropolises of the industrialized world. Between the Portuguese founding of Macau in the mid-sixteenth century and the British establishment of Hong Kong in the mid-nineteenth century, the South China Sea’s Zhujiang (Pearl River) Delta was a stage of fierce competition for Europeans to profit from East Asia. Colonial ideas of urbanization as a concentric and hierarchical development gradually pervaded the region, eclipsing a local pattern of settlement with contrasting qualities of decentralization, amorphism, and self-organization. This presentation looks at how the Zhujiang Delta’s seafaring communities and nomadic “sea-dwellers” aggregated into a rhizomatic urban formation during the late imperial Chinese period, coinciding with the growth of Macau, Guangzhou (Canton), and Hong Kong as the European-occupied locations nearby. Through a discussion of cartographic prints, conserved sites, and other visual sources, the morphological study continues to query marginality and scrutinize boundaries with respect to the early modern city.

Sim Hinman Wan is Assistant Professor of the History of Architecture at Texas Tech University. He is a graduate of UIC Art History, earning a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 2020. While at UIC, he studied early modern art and architecture under the supervision of Professor Martha Pollak. His dissertation received the Graduate College’s Annual Outstanding Dissertation Award. The research was completed with the support of predoctoral fellowships from the Mellon Foundation. Dr Wan is currently redeveloping his dissertation into a book-length manuscript. This globally oriented project explores the architecture and urban context of philanthropic sites as a post-monastic innovation that connected the Dutch Republic, late imperial China, and Indonesian port cities in the seventeenth century.

Deepthi Murali

Connecting Threads: Textiles, Data, and the Making of a Global South Art History

What might it mean to write global art history from cloth? This lecture takes South Indian cotton textiles—particularly the checked fabrics known as “Madras”—as a point of departure for rethinking how Global South art histories are constructed. Rather than treating textiles as minor or decorative arts, the talk approaches them as materially dense archives: objects shaped by labor, caste, climate, and circulation, and deeply entangled with plantation economies and Afro-Caribbean dress practices across the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world.

Drawing from the digital humanities project Connecting Threads, the lecture considers how small-data methodologies—relational databases, thick mapping, and object-centered metadata—can extend art historical inquiry across scale. Through the case study of this DH project, this talk demonstrates how digital infrastructures make visible not only trade routes but also social worlds: weaving communities in South India, mercantile intermediaries, diasporic wearers, and the afterlives of cloth in museum collections.

At its core, this talk is as much about method as material. How can digital infrastructures produce art histories that center the Global South? What does it mean to build relational archives attentive to ethics and community knowledge while illuminating subaltern dress and the politics of labor and extraction embedded in the making and wearing of textiles? And how might a fabric—handled, worn, traded, remembered—challenge inherited geographies of art history?

Dr. Deepthi Murali received her Art History PhD from UIC in 2020 and is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Art History and affiliate faculty at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. She is an art historian of South Asia whose research examines the transcultural production and circulation of wood and ivory objects from southwestern India and cotton textiles from southeastern India, and their movement across the broader Indian Ocean world. Her work explores how material practices shaped political authority, caste formations, and social identity in early modern and colonial contexts.

Murali’s scholarship bridges object-centered art history and digital public history. She is co-Principal Investigator (co-PI) of Connecting Threads, a digital history project tracing the production and global circulation of checked cotton textiles from India and their role in constructions of fashion and identity among free and enslaved communities of color in the Greater Caribbean. She is also the PI of the HBCU History & Culture Access Consortium (HCAC), a Smithsonian–GMU collaboration developing community-engaged digital history archives for Black History. Deepthi’s scholarship has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants including the National Endowment for the Humanities, Arts & Humanities Research Council, American Institute of Indian Studies, and Yale Center for British Art.