"The Sanctification of Museum Spaces through the Display of Religious Art"

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University is pleased to present Dr. Kristen Collins, curator of Manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles!

Join us March 13th at 2:30pm in person at the Bennett Library, SFU Burnaby, Room 7200, or online ( https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87960016612), for her talk “The Sanctification of Museum Spaces through the Display of Religious Art: Reflections on Icons from Sinai After Twenty Years ”.
This talk will be moderated by Dr. Evan Freeman, Assistant Professor, Department of Global Humanities.

Attendance is free. The event is open to the public and will be recorded.

This programming is made possible thanks to the generous support of the
Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).

PRESENTER BIOGRAPHY

Kristen Collins is curator of manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum. She earned her BA from Mount Holyoke College, MA from Williams College, and PhD from the University of Texas, Austin, all in art history. Recurring themes in her scholarship are transcultural exchange and resonance and reuse in the material culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

She has co-curated several international loan exhibitions: Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai (2006), Canterbury and St. Albans: Treasures from Church and Cloister (2013), and Lumen: The Art and Science of Light (2024). Lumen explored the intertwined histories of science and spirituality in premodern art and used contemporary light installations to emphasize the themes of movement, time, and active engagement as they relate to vision and perception.

Since 2002 she has curated and supervised more than 20 exhibitions from the Getty’s permanent collection. A manuscripts specialist, Collins is interested in premodern representations of race and ethnicity across media. Dedicated to mobilizing historical collections to teach an inclusive and diverse past, she co-curated Outcasts: Prejudice and Persecution in the Middle Ages (2018) and Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art (2019).

She co-edited and contributed to the publications Lumen: The Art and Science of Light 800-1600 (2024), Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art (2022), St. Albans and the Markyate Psalter: Seeing and Reading in Twelfth-Century England (2017), The St. Albans Psalter: Painting and Prayer in Medieval England (2013), and Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai (2006). Other essays appear in British Art Studies (2017) and Teaching the Global Middle Ages (2022).

MODERATOR BIOGRAPHY

Evan Freeman studies art and ritual of the Byzantine Empire and cross-cultural interactions in the wider medieval world. He completed his PhD in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University and has held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Smarthistory, the Center for Public Art History, and an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Regensburg in Germany. Before joining the Department of Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University, he taught at Queens College, City University of New York, and Portland State University. He has produced videos, essays, an edited volume, and other open educational resources for Smarthistory, Khan Academy, and other digital and public humanities projects. His research focuses on Byzantine ritual objects, mobility, monumental church art, and materiality.

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