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Julie Sasse's fellowship from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute will allow her to prepare for an exhibit that will be held next year at the Tucson Museum of Art.

By La Monica Everett-Haynes, University Communications
March 26, 2008

Julie Sasse, a doctoral student studying history and theory of art at The University of Arizona, has earned a prestigious fellowship that usually goes to curators and museum directors at major art institutions around the world.

The summer fellowship comes from the Massachusetts-based Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

Often, fewer than 20 fellows – mostly university professors, historians, international visual art scholars and museum curators – are named each year.

In recent years, the pool of fellows has included individuals working at some of the best and most powerful art institutions across the United States and in Canada, China, France, Germany and the Netherlands, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Musée du Louvre.

The fellowship goes to individuals who are working on projects “that extend and enhance the understanding of the visual arts and their role in culture,” according to The Clark, a major public museum and art history library that contains a collection of 200,000 books and nearly 1,000 periodicals. “Any proposal that contributes to understanding the nature of artistic activity and the intellectual, social, and cultural worlds with which it is connected will be welcome.”

While at The Clark, Sasse will be provided an office and have access to The Clark’s art collections library and other resources, including access to library collections in the vicinity of the institute.

“Sometimes we can get myopic and avoid challenging ourselves,” said Sasse, who once worked at the UA and is now the chief curator and curator of modern and contemporary art at the Tucson Museum of Art and Historic Block.

“I wanted to answer the calling of my program. They say students should be engaged in scholarship and scholarly excellence. So, I started looking for curator fellowships,” she said.

Sasse already has an accomplished past.

She was a UA galleries curator for five years prior to joining the Tucson Museum of Art in 2000. While at the UA, she was the curator for nearly 30 exhibits each year at the Joseph Gross Gallery, the Lionel Rombach Gallery and several galleries at the Student Union Memorial Center. She was also an adjunct professor at the UA up to 2002, and taught numerous courses in art.

Since her move in 2000, Sasse has overseen a number of significant exhibitions at the Tucson Museum of Art.

Last summer, she earned a fellowship in the Smithsonian Latino Center’s Latino Museum Studies Program in Washington, D.C. While there, Sasse learned how to better connect with Hispanic museum-goers while figuring out better ways engage them as an audience.

“I came away so much more experienced that I felt I want to do this again,” she said. “Just having designated time to do the work and be in that type of atmosphere is thrilling.”

During her new fellowship, Sasse will use the time to prepare for an exhibition that will be held at the Tucson Museum of Art next year titled "Trouble in Paradise: Examining Discord Between Nature and Society,” which will feature contemporary art with an environmental theme.

She is interested in a shift in artistic thinking that began occuring during the 1970s but has become more relevant today.

An increasing number of artists are focusing on environmental art, but not in the traditional sense. A growing body of work focuses less on the aesthetic beauty of the physical land and more on the power of nature in motion – portraits of lightning, volcanoes and other natural happenings – as well as environmental disasters, both natural and human-caused, Sasse said.

“It’s not always art for art’s sake anymore,” she said. "Many artists have become advocates for awareness and change in dealing with the environment."

She has been scanning the globe in search of paintings, photographs, sculptures, and works on paper and in video that depict natural and human-caused disasters.

“Some are changing how we think about the environment. Others are responding in an aesthetic way.

“I want to use the exhibition to show that art is not isolated. I want to deal with the aesthetics with disaster and the role of art, both philosophical and conceptual, and the role of art in this incredible shift in how we see our environment today.” she said.

When all is done, Sasse said “I hope it will bring honor and distinction to the university."