The Power of Women a topos in Medieval Art and Literature
In Memory of Susan Fifty. Smith
Professor Emerita
It is with heavy hearts that the Department of Visual Arts announces the passing of dearest friend and valued colleague Professor Emerita Susan Fifty. Smith. Professor Smith died on April 5 at UC San Diego Wellness Jacobs Medical Center of complications arising from her long and brave battle with cancer.
Smith is best known for her pioneering work in feminist art history and the excellence of her administrative contributions to UC San Diego, both as a chair of the Department of Visual Arts and Provost of John Muir College.
Smith was among the commencement art historians to written report medieval art from a feminist perspective. Her groundbreaking dissertation "'To Women's Wiles I Fell': The Power of Women 'Topos' and the Development of Medieval Secular Fine art" (University of Pennsylvania, 1978) was one of the most widely cited and influential art history dissertations of the period and became a standard foundational text in the so newly established field of women's studies. The work shows how a theme invented by patristic fathers to advocate for male person celibacy and promulgated by theologians, preachers and moralists to warn almost women — and thereby denigrate and command them — became a vehicle in secular art to explore the ways "feminine wiles" were deployed by women to triumph over men.
Smith'due south writing is distinguished past its intelligent and sensitive attention to images, not only in painting, sculpture and manuscript illustration, but besides on textiles, mirrors, jewelry, trinket boxes and prints, genres then all too often considered on the periphery of art.
Her book "The Power of Women: A 'Topos' in Medieval Art and Literature" expands the range of works (texts as well as images) into a comprehensive report and, more chiefly, provides a theoretical and conceptual context which explicates how it is that fine art promotes values and ideas that contest, and sometimes fifty-fifty transgress, the credo of the dominant social groups who commission information technology, and are its primary viewers. Her later articles extend this exploration of the confusing power of fine art through a treatment of female person nudity and the female gaze.
Smith received a bachelor'southward degree with honors (1968) from Swarthmore College where she studied history and philosophy, and and then pursued a year of graduate work in Medieval Studies at Yale University. These were the years that the showtime women's studies programs were established in the The states, so when Smith completed her master'southward (1971) and Ph.D. degrees in art history (1978) at the University of Pennsylvania, she worked on topics of importance to this emerging field.
After graduating from the Academy of Pennsylvania, Smith taught several classes as a lecturer at UC San Diego, and so relocated to the Bay Area where she worked equally a labor arbitrator and co-authored two books and an educational motion-picture show on labor relations. In 1987, she was recruited for a total-time faculty position in the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego.
Equally a Visual Arts kinesthesia member, Smith developed the department'south offset curriculum in medieval fine art history. An undergraduate student specializing in medieval art whom she taught and mentored at this time was Elina Gertsman, now a chaired professor of fine art history and director of graduate studies at Case Western Reserve and author of two laurels-winning books on medieval fine art.
From 1999 to 2003, Smith served as chair of the Section of Visual Arts. This was a period of considerable tension occasioned by rapidly ascent enrollments beyond all programs and explosive growth in the recently established Visual Arts major in Interdisciplinary Calculating and the Arts Major (ICAM). Smith steered the department through these difficult times with dandy aplomb, and created out of the excitement and disharmonize a new sense of community and shared purpose among faculty and staff.
As chair, she also brought to fruition the section'south long stated objective of instituting a Ph.D. program in Art History, Theory and Criticism aslope its renowned MFA plan. The Ph.D. programme rapidly rose to prominence due in no small part to the productive environment of collaboration between artists and scholars.
As provost, Smith had no less profound an touch on John Muir Higher and the UC San Diego campus. She insured the survival of the Modernist circuitous of buildings at Muir Higher past securing a major Campus Heritage Grant from the Getty Foundation, which initiated the starting time architectural preservation of these exemplary buildings and drew up plans for their continued maintenance and use.
Smith was a stiff advocate for students, and as provost collaborated with the Role of Housing, Dining and Hospitality on the completion of Tamarack Apartments, the get-go building to exist synthetic at Muir College since the early on 1970s, to enhance the experience of students living there. For university assistants, she oversaw the consolidation of the 6 college business offices, and the establishment of a new campus-wide writing center, which opened in 2011.
In the spirit of college namesake John Muir, she established programs in support of local, national and global efforts to preserve the natural environs, and to promote environmental sustainability in energy and water use, waste disposal, food production and other practices. Prominent among these are the Muir Environmental Fellows awards, which each twelvemonth honors UC San Diego kinesthesia, staff and alumni for work in the crusade of sustainability and environmental preservation.
She also revived the Muir College signature form Wilderness and Human Values on the ethical, scientific, economic and political implications of environmental preservation. This form that included wilderness trips in the Sierras and elsewhere, likewise as outings in San Diego's local natural habitats. To further enhance student feel, Smith established an honors order, named for Muir's founding provost John Stewart, to recognize the academic achievements of Muir College seniors who had come to UC San Diego as transfer students.
She was beloved past Muir students and staff for the respect, care and business she showed them, and the svelte equanimity with which she dealt with the stressful situations and conflicts that inevitably arose at a vibrant and diverse institution.
In addition to these professional person achievements, Smith will long be remembered for the gracious warmth, intelligence, hospitality and compassion that she displayed to colleagues and friends. Upon learning of her death, Visual Arts faculty old and new recounted how Susan made them experience welcome and included when they arrived at UC San Diego. She was a gourmet cook and gorging collector of cookbooks whose Solana Embankment home was a site for many lovely dinners and receptions for new kinesthesia and friends. She loved cats and the Bay Area, entertaining, gardening and reading, and was a loyal and caring friend. Smith will be sorely missed by the many people whose lives she touched.
She is survived by her husband Visual Arts Professor Emeritus Sheldon Nodelman and step-son Daniel Terdimann.
Source: https://visarts.ucsd.edu/people/in-memoriam/susan-smith.html
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