[image_frame style=”framed” link_to=”false” prettyphoto=”false” align=”right” title=”‘Benjamin Zix, Removal of Sculptures from the Museum in Kassel, with Dominique Vivant-Denon at Center’ (1806).
Pen with black ink and brown wash. Musée du Louvre, Paris, RFML.AG.2019.33.7.”]https://daheshmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Zix-315×201.jpg[/image_frame]Nancy Karrels is completing her doctoral dissertation “Visual Provenance: The Iconography of Cultural Conquest in France, 1796-1830,” at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In her presentation, “Documenting Plunder: The Dessins Denon as a Vision of Museum-Building in the Modern Era,” she proposed that the illustrated acts of art pillage contained in the Dessins Denon, a print recueil project pursued by Musée Napoléon director Dominique-Vivant Denon in the early 1800s, outlined a systematic methodology of national museum-building for France, while shrewdly attaching Denon’s feats to those of Napoléon and the Grande Armée for posterity.
Karrels curated the 2017 exhibition “Provenance: A Forensic History of Art” at the Krannert Art Museum and has published articles and given papers internationally on the history of collecting. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Doctoral Award (France) and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral fellowship. She holds degrees in Common Law and Civil Law from McGill University.
[image_frame style=”framed” link_to=”false” prettyphoto=”false” align=”right” title=”Owen Jones (designer), Francis Bedford (lithographer), Persian No. 4,1856. Chromolithograph.
From ‘The Grammar of Ornament’ (London: Day and Son, 1856), pl. XLVII.”]https://daheshmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Jones-230×352.jpg[/image_frame]Christine Olson is completing her doctoral dissertation “Owen Jones and the Epistemologies of Nineteenth-Century Design,” at Yale University. In her presentation, “The Grammar of Ornament and the Design of Nineteenth-Century Design,” she charted the processes of thinking, drawing, composing, and printing that led to the publication of Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament (1856). Arguing that it was a staggeringly complex design project in its own right—and not only a work about design—she traced the multiple registers of meaning embodied by the book’s visual rhetoric and material makeup.
Olson is a former Tiffany and Company Curatorial Intern in American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where her research culminated in a co-authored article in the Metropolitan Museum Journal (2016) on design drawings for Tiffany Mosaics. She holds an MA in Humanities and Social Thought from New York University, where she also completed an Advanced Certificate in Museum Studies, and a BA in Religion from Oberlin College.