Meet the Curators

Elizabeth Denholm graduated from CUA in January 2015 with a major in art history and a passion for modern art, collaborative community art initiatives, and above all service to others in need. Her thesis focused on a selection of post-WWI drawings and lithographs of mothers and children by the German Expressionist Käthe Kollwitz that express grief, suffering, and a longing for peace and social justice. Denholm examined the ways in which Mary’s enduring example was employed by the feminist and pacifist Kollwitz to empower her images of sympathy, solace, and maternal courage in the face of war and devastating loss. View Selected Works >

Katelyn Grabski, an art history Junior, used her fluency in French to investigate a print of The Holy Family at Table by the baroque printmaker Jacques Callot, a native of Lorraine (then an independent Duchy closely allied with Rome). In her thesis, Grabski traced the impact of Callot’s close association with the staunchly Catholic Court of Lorraine; she also articulated the significance of the Council of Trent on both the religious art of the artist’s day and, more personally, on the religious life of the Callot family. With these findings, Grabski determined the artistic and theological sources that inspired a print that is equally unusual and beautiful. View Selected Works >

Charles Lavallee, an art history senior with a minor in theology, became interested in the association between Mary and the Woman Clothed with the Sun (a figure described in the Book of Revelation) during a pilgrimage he made years ago to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Lavallee’s thesis considered both the confluence and the divergence of Mary and the Woman from the Apocalypse in theology and art by focusing on a selection of innovative early and late nineteenth century images of Woman Clothed with the Sun by William Blake and Odilon Redon in comparison to earlier iconic portrayals of this subject from the Renaissance. View Selected Works >

Lucas Matheson, a junior double-major in philosophy and art history, investigated Paul Gauguin’s prints featuring Mary and Eve in relation to the words and work of the artist in the last years of his life. His thesis focused on expressions of anxiety in Gauguin’s images of Tahitian women from the early-1890s, especially those that feature western and Polynesian religious themes and symbols, such as Gauguin’s Ia Orana Maria (We Greet Thee, Mary) and Eve. Matheson argues that they reflect a complex set of concerns, including the artist’s efforts to give form to a paradise that Gauguin sought but failed to find in an already westernized Polynesian culture. View Selected Works >

Rachel Tanzi is a Junior art history major with a minor in marketing and an interest in the art market, avant-garde art, and the Italian language and culture. In her thesis, Tanzi endeavored to contextualize the work of the vanguard Norwegian artist Edvard Munch in relation to both the artist’s complicated biography and to the art and ideas of his most innovative and unorthodox peers in Oslo (then called Kristiania) and Berlin. Tanzi focused in particular on Munch’s unconventional portrayal of the Madonna as a haloed nude in one of a series of woodblock prints produced between 1895 and 1902; and she applied the scholarship of prominent Munch scholars to assert that this work reflects the artist’s fear of love and loss derived from the early death of his mother and his sister, as well as his desire to create a new form of artistic and spiritual expression. View Selected Works >