College Art Association honors UO museum exhibition catalog

‘Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome’ is a finalist for the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award.

The catalog that accompanied the “Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome: Lasting Impressions from the Age of the Grand Tour” exhibit at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art is one of two finalists for the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award.

The Barr award is “presented to the author or authors of an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art, published in the English language under the auspices of a museum, library, or collection.” The Vasi catalog is up against the catalog for “The Gernsheim Collection” by Roy Flukinger of the University of Texas. The final decision will be announced February 22.

The nomination is an honor for the University of Oregon’s architecture and art history programs as well as for the JSMA.

Above: Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome, co-authored by James Harper and James Tice, is one of two finalists in a national competition.

"The College Art Association is the definitive organization of art historians, teaching artists and museum professionals in North America, and it's a real thrill to be recognized by them in this way,” says co-curator and art history Professor James Harper. "The other nominees are all from bigger, richer institutions than ours, but our museum clearly knows how to leverage the academic riches that we have here on campus."

The Vasi catalog is 200 pages and contains reproductions of pieces in the exhibition, but the highlight is the body of writing done by an international team of distinguished scholars and University of Oregon students. Harper and UO architecture Professor James Tice, the curators of the exhibition, each contributed essays to the catalog. University of Oregon students Adrianne Hamilton and Read McFaddin, former graduate students in art history, contributed essays on the “Itinerario Istruttivo,” Vasi’s 1763 guidebook of Rome. Six other art history graduate students wrote catalog entries or commentaries on each of the objects in the exhibition.

Harper and Tice looked outside the UO for the rest of the essays and recruited Allan Ceen, professor of art history at Penn State's Rome Program; Mario Bevilacqua, professor of architectural history at the University of Florence; John Pinto, professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University; and John Moore, professor of art history at Smith College.

The exhibition ran at the JSMA from September 24, 2010, to January 2, 2011, before moving on to the Princeton Museum of Art from March 5 to June 12, 2011. The centerpiece of the exhibition was the collection of Giuseppe Vasi’s prints depicting the sights of 18th Century Rome. The show also included prints, paintings and sculpture by other artists to provide context and draw comparison to Vasi’s work.

Above: James Harper (left) and James Tice contributed essays to the catalog for the Vasi exhibit, which they co-curated.