Research Profiles
Susan Earle, Curator of European and American Art
Research Interests
- artist-led inquiry
- constructions of race and gender and African American art
- European art, particularly 19th-century
- contemporary site-specific and community-based public art
Significant & Ongoing Projects
Susan Earle has served as curator of European and American art at the Spencer since 1996, overseeing the collection of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts from those regions. Earle earned a bachelor’s degree in English and art history with distinction at Williams College, and a doctorate in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She has curated or organized more than fifty exhibitions and works to promote artistic research among students, colleagues, and community members. She has commissioned major works of art from both local and international artists, including, most recently, the exhibition and book An Errant Line: Ann Hamilton & Cynthia Schira (2013). She also organized the first nationally touring retrospective of Aaron Douglas and edited the accompanying book, Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist (Yale, 2007). Additional recent publications include a current essay on the Spencer’s Le Discret by Joseph Ducreux for the exhibition and book America Collects Eighteenth-Century French Painting organized by the National Gallery of Art. Future projects include two exhibitions featuring African American narrative histories through quilts (summer 2017), an interdisciplinary re-imagination/re-installation of the Spencer’s 20/21 Gallery, and recreation of the community mural Pollinators in downtown Lawrence. Earle serves as affiliate faculty in the Kress Foundation Department of Art History and the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, both at the University of Kansas. She held a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Getty Foundation in 2006 and received an Outstanding Educator Award from the Kansas Torch Chapter of Mortar Board Senior Honor Society in 2004.
Kris Imants Ercums, Curator of Global Contemporary and Asian Art
Research Interests
- pan-Asian visual modernity
- Asian contemporary artistic practice
- postcolonial science fiction
- queer studies
Significant & Ongoing Projects
Since joining the Spencer in 2007, Kris Ercums spearheaded Project Redefine, which reconceived the Spencer’s permanent collection galleries into longterm thematic exhibitions that included: Nature/Natural (2010), Corpus (2011), Empire of Things (2012), and Forms of Thought (2014). Ercums has also organized international artist-in-residence projects at the Spencer with artists from China, Japan, Korea, and Mexico including: Up/Down: A Project by Wang Tiande (2009); Mobile Landscape: Kim Jongku (2010); Jin Shan: It Came from the Sky (2011); Prepared: Strategies for Activists with Chen Shaoxiong (2012); I Love Xijing–Xijing School (2013) at the H&R Block Art Space, Kansas City Art Institute; and most recently Comanche is Dead: A Project by Diego Teo (2013). His recent exhibitions include Extra/Ordinary: Video Art from Asia (2010), which investigated new ways of transforming familiar experiences and daily routines into moments of expanded meaning, and xy (2009), an examination of the social construction of masculinity through objects drawn from the Spencer’s permanent collection. Ercums also organized the 2016 exhibition, Temporal Turn: Art and Speculation in Contemporary Asia, exploring a rich mosaic of ideas about time and history from a generation of artists embedded in what has been dubbed “the Asian Century.”
Saralyn Reece Hardy, Marilyn Stokstad Director
Research Interests
- interdisciplinary inquiry
- commissions of new creative work in and beyond museums
- sustainability, ecology, and the environment
- artistic freedom
Recent & Ongoing Projects
Saralyn Reece Hardy, the first Marilyn Stokstad Director of the Spencer Museum of Art, has led the Museum since 2005. Prior to her arrival at the Spencer, Reece Hardy served as director of Museums and Visual Arts at the National Endowment for the Arts and director of the Salina Art Center in Salina, Kansas. Reece Hardy spearheaded the Spencer’s Phase I and ongoing Phase II renovation projects, which included transforming the Museum’s galleries, introducing multi-use object study rooms, expanding the teaching gallery, as well as updating storage and research facilities. She currently supervises a team in support of the Integrated Arts Research Initiative, and serves on various public art advisory boards, including art at the KU Medical Center campuses in Kansas City and Salina, as well as the KU School of Business. Reece Hardy recently led the Spencer’s initiative to highlight the work of renowned light and space artist James Turrell and pioneering conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. Among her ongoing projects is a series of interviews exploring aging and legacy with artists represented in the Museum’s permanent collection who are 70 years old or older.
Kate Meyer, Curator, Works on Paper
Research Interests
- American art and material culture
- environmental Studies
- Kansas
Significant & Ongoing Projects
Kate Meyer joined the professional staff of the Spencer Museum of Art in 2004 as a curatorial assistant. In 2011 she became part of the University’s academic staff as an assistant curator of works on paper. Meyer collaborates with faculty, staff, students, and the public across disciplines to integrate the visual arts into the teaching and research mission of the University by facilitating educational access to the Study Room. Her responsibilities include managing the Walk-ins Welcome Fridays program and overseeing the Museum’s Teaching Gallery. In 2011, Meyer completed her doctorate at the University of Kansas in American art history with her dissertation, Broken Ground: Plowing and America’s Cultural Landscape in the 1930s. This study of art related to the Dust Bowl evinces Meyer’s research interests in art and its intersections with environmental and agricultural themes—interests that have manifested themselves in the form of exhibitions such as 1 Kansas Farmer (2013), Climate Change at the Poles (2009), and Claimed: Land Use in Western America (2007). Meyer’s exploration of environmental art history led to her participate as an academic fellow in the National Science Foundation’s project, Biofuels and Climate Change: Farmer’s Land Use Decisions. She served as the logistical coordinator to project leader Kris Ercums on Project Redefine, a reinstallation of the Spencer’s permanent collection galleries resulting in long-term, thematic exhibitions: Empire of Things (2012), Forms of Thought (2014), and This Land (2014). Meyer recently collaborated with Cassandra Mesick and Celka Straughn to curate the thematic exhibition The Object Speaks.
Joey Orr, Mellon Curator for Research
Research Interests
- hybrid methods
- public scholarship
- social practice
Significant & Ongoing Projects
Joey Orr is the Mellon Curator for Research, who directs the Museum's Arts Research Integration (ARI) program, and is affiliate faculty in Museum Studies and Visual Art. Previously he served as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where his major project aligned three exhibitions around artistic research. Recent writing has been published in Art Papers, Art Journal Open, BOMB, Hyperallergic, Journal for Artistic Research (Network Reflections), and Sculpture. Juried writing has been published by Antennae: Journal of Art and Nature, Art & the Public Sphere, Images: Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, Journal of American Studies, QED: Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Visual Methodologies, and the chapter “Collecting Social Things” in the volume Rhetoric, Social Value, and the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan). He has worked in various capacities as advisor or associate or guest editor for Art Papers, Ground Works (Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities), Journal for Artistic Research, Journal of American Studies (Cambridge University Press), and Visual Methodologies. He is also a founding member of the idea collective John Q. He holds an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD from Emory University's Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts.
Sydney Pursel, Curator for Public Practice
Research Interests
- collaborative, community-based, public, and socially engaged art
- Indigenous art, culture, identity, and representation
- disability art, accessibility, and multisensory learning
- activism and social justice in contemporary art
Significant & Ongoing Projects
Sydney Pursel returned to the Spencer Museum as the first Curator for Public Practice in 2022 after previously serving as the Global Indigenous Art graduate intern from 2016–2017. In this new role, Pursel is initiating ways to involve community in research and curatorial processes and incorporate community feedback in exhibitions, programs, and events. Pursel is the co-PI for the In ‘zhúje ‘waxóbe/Sacred Red Rock project funded by the Mellon Foundation, which will facilitate the return of a 28-ton boulder to the Kaw Nation and re-envision what is now known as Robinson Park in Lawrence, Kansas. She serves on the Native Faculty and Staff Council, the FNSA Powwow and Indigenous Cultures Festival Committee, and the Indigenous Arts Initiative program. She is an enrolled member of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska (ITKN), chair of the ITKN Arts and Culture Committee, and vice-chair of the ITKN Powwow Committee. She also oversees the Spencer Museum’s graduate intern program, providing a unique perspective as a former participant. As an intern, Pursel served as a project leader co-curating The Object Feels, a tactile exhibition utilizing replicas of work from the Spencer’s collection made by KU students focusing on accessibility through multisensory learning. She assisted with curation and wrote labels for Separate and Not Equal: A History of Race and Education in America and served as the project coordinator for Native American and African American Education in Kansas, 1830-1960, an NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture workshop for K–12 teachers. Pursel also served as the Graduate Research Consultant for a Critical Perspectives on Museums course where she advised students on a collaborative grant-writing project.
Celka Straughn, Mellon Director of Public Practice, Education, and Research
Research Interests
- modern European art and artist networks
- exhibition and collecting histories and practices
- global museum discourses
- social justice in museums
- eco-critical art history
Significant & Ongoing Projects
Since joining the Spencer Museum of Art in 2009, Celka Straughn has worked to integrate the Museum into the mission of the University, while integrating university teaching, learning, research and other activities into the Museum's practices. She also teaches courses for KU’s Honors Program and Undergraduate Studies, and is affiliate faculty in German Studies and Museum Studies. Her doctoral dissertation (University of Chicago, 2007) and related publications examine Jewish art and Expressionism in early twentieth-century Germany. To commemorate the centenary of the Museum’s founding collection and to reconsider collecting practices and motivations, she organized the exhibition Civic Leader and Art Collector: Sallie Casey Thayer and an Art Museum for KU (2017). An edited volume, Perspectives on a Legacy Collection: Sallie Casey Thayer's Gift to the University of Kansas (2020), builds on research and ideas generated by the exhibition. Additional Spencer exhibition projects include American Dream, a student-generated exhibition with Ellen Raimond in conjunction with the 2016 KU Common Book (2017); Politics as Symbol/Symbol as Politics (2012) with Burdett Loomis, professor of political science; and Media Memes: Images, Technology & Making the News (2010) with Michael Williams, associate professor of journalism, and Luke Jordan, lecturer in visual art. She also organized the artist residency and exhibition by Dan Perjovschi (2010).
Mary M Dusenbury, Affiliate Research Curator
Research Interests
- East and Central Asian textiles
Significant & Ongoing Projects
Dusenbury documented and oversaw the conservation and rehousing of the Asian textile collection in the Spencer, wrote a catalogue raisonné of the collection, Flowers, Dragons and Pine Trees: Asian Textiles in the Spencer Museum of Art (New York and Manchester: Hudson Hills Press, 2004), and curated an exhibition of the same title. Dusenbury organized a colloquium in 2010 and a major international symposium in 2013 for an interdisciplinary study of color in ancient and medieval East Asia. These collaborations resulted in the publication Color in Ancient and Medieval East Asia, which was edited by Dusenbury and published by the Spencer and Yale University Press in 2015.
Stephen Goddard, Associate Director and Senior Curator Emeritus
Research Interests
- printmaking in northern Europe (1450–present)
- graphic arts during World War I
- art and the biological sciences
Significant & Ongoing Projects
Goddard joined the staff of the Spencer Museum of Art in 1984, following the completion of this PhD at the University of Iowa and a year in a post-doctoral position at the Yale University Art Gallery. His major projects at the Spencer Museum throughout his career have included: The World in Miniature: Engravings by the German Little Masters, 1500–1550; Les XX and the Belgian Avant-Garde: Prints, Drawings, and Books, ca. 1890; An Eye on Flanders: The Graphic Art of Jules De Bruycker; Ubu's Almanac: Alfred Jarry and the Graphic Arts; Remembering the Family Farm: 150 years of American Prints; Brion Gysin: A Selection of Books and Works on Paper; Book from the Sky to Book from the Ground: Xu Bing’ Book Works; A Greenland Glacier: The Scale of Climate Change, Photographs by Terry Evans; Trees & Other Ramifications: Branches in Nature & Culture; Machine in a Void: World War I & the Graphic Arts; Cryptograph: An Exhibition for Alan Turing; and Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World.