Who We Are
Caroline Fowler
Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program
Caroline Fowler is Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute and a lecturer in Art History at Williams College. She received her PhD from Princeton University, and is a scholar of early-modern art. She is particularly interested in histories of the body and the formation of selves, tracing the failures, conversion, and translation of personhood, bodies, and selves across the early-modern world. Her most recent book Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art: Black Life, Hidden Finance, and the Bourgeoisie (Duke University Press, 2024) demonstrates the fundamental role of the transatlantic slave trade in the production of seventeenth-century Dutch art, arguing that the transformation of a life into property introduced a crisis of the image. Her other books include The Art of Paper: From the Holy Land to the Americas (Yale University Press, 2020), and Drawing and the Senses: An Early Modern History (Brepols, 2018). She is also co-editor of the series Art/Work with Princeton University Press, which presents thought-provoking essays on intersections between the practice of conservation and art history. She has hosted the podcast In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing, and she is also currently Chair of ARIAH (Association of Research Institutes in Art History). She is also co-director with Susan Dackerman of the travelling seminar Afro-Eurasian Histories of Print, which brings together historians of print across geographic and temporal specializations with the aim of recentering the early-history of print away from Europe and towards North Africa and Asia. Currently, she is working on a book about the seventeenth-century Dutch communities in Albany, New York, examining a history of land deeds, land use, and land transformation, considering how current visual concepts of the agrarian and the pastoral emerged from violent early-modern economies of settlement. Her work has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study, the Getty Research Institute, the Renaissance Society of America, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Historians of Netherlandish Art.
Curriculum Vitae
Caitlin Woolsey
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF THE RESEARCH AND ACADEMIC PROGRAM
Caitlin Woolsey is an art historian who focuses on the historical confluence of visual art, media, and performance in the twentieth century. Her current book project examines how the integration of sound transformed intermedia artistic practices in the decades following the Second World War, focusing on the experimental sound poet Henri Chopin. Caitlin received her PhD from Yale University and holds an MA in Philosophy and the Arts from Stony Brook University. She has previously held positions at the Guggenheim Museum, National Gallery of Art, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where she helped curate the exhibition Beyond Words: Experimental Poetry & the Avant-garde (2019). Her scholarly and critical writing has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Venti, Jadaliyya, the Nasher, and Continental Philosophy Review, among others. At the Clark Caitlin produces and co-hosts the podcasts In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing and Object Studies, serves as editor of the digital publication Dialogue & New Directions, and organizes scholarly programs. She also teaches in the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art and works closely with graduate student interns.
Shawnette smalls
PROGRAM COORDINATOR in the RESEARCH AND ACADEMIC program
Shawnette Smalls is a fashion designer, independent curator, and gallerist. Smalls received her MS in Fashion Design from Drexel University, Westphal College of Media Arts and Design. Her experience includes corporate retail work with Urban Outfitters, Perry Ellis International, John Varvatos and Donna Karren. In 2019, Smalls opened the Upper Darby Art Gallery in Pennsylvania, which she continues to own and operate along with her own private design consulting practice. Smalls has consulted on exhibitions at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Williams College Museum of Art, the private collection of Danny Simmons Jr. as well as the ‘62 Center for Theatre and Dance, Corridor ‘62. Additionally, Smalls acts remotely as curator of virtual programming for Rush Arts Philadelphia where she directs a thriving virtual art program serving elementary aged students in Montego Bay, Jamaica.
Annie Jun
ASSISTANT IN THE RESEARCH AND ACADEMIC PROGRAM
Annie Jun is the assistant in the Research and Academic Program and assistant editor in the Publications Department at the Clark.