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A new opportunity for art students to study abroad, the Arthur J. ’55 and Barbara S. Rothkopf Scholars program, will be launched this spring.
“A select group of the department’s most promising junior majors will go on a special overseas trip each year,” explains Robert S. Mattison, Marshall R. Metzgar Professor of Art and head of the art department. The inaugural cohort of four Rothkopf Scholars will study art and architecture in Spain for 10 days in May following final exams.
The program is funded by an endowment established through gifts made to the recent Lafayette Leadership Campaign in honor of Lafayette President Arthur J. Rothkopf ’55 and Barbara Sarnoff Rothkopf. Also established through this endowment is the Arthur J. ’55 and Barbara S. Rothkopf Professorship in Art History, which is held by Diane Cole Ahl.
“The subject of the first trip will be multiculturalism in Spain, and it will focus on the cities of Madrid, Toledo, and Granada, using the art and architecture in those locations to examine the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim components of Spanish culture,” Mattison says. “It is a very exciting topic with both historical and contemporary relevance.”
Experts from outside Lafayette will lead the annual trips. The first will be Lynette Bosch, associate professor of art at State University of New York College at Geneseo.
Participating students will be selected through a competitive process. Junior art majors will indicate their interest by submitting essays explaining how they will benefit from the trip and how they anticipate contributing to it. The deadline is Feb. 1, 2005.
A committee will examine the essays in conjunction with each applicant’s overall record within the art department and the College and will announce the winners by March 1, Mattison says.
“The purpose of this trip will be to increase the students’ knowledge of the history of art and to allow them to study in context art works and monuments, some of which might be unavailable to the public at large,” Mattison says. “We hope that such an opportunity will significantly aid these students in their studies and in their career goals.”
Bosch is author of Art, Liturgy, and Legend in Renaissance Toledo: The Mendoza and the Iglesia Primada, published in 2000 by Pennsylvania State University Press. It examines liturgical manuscripts that members of the powerful Mendoza family commissioned for the cathedral of Toledo at a time when it was the symbolic center of the Spanish nation.
Another book, Ernesto Barreda: Contemporary Chilean Painter, was published in 1996 by Morgan Press. Bosch holds an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University, an M.A. from Hunter College of the City University of New York, and a B.A. from Queens College, CUNY. In 1998-99 she was a fellow at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute.