Ross Barrett, Warren G. Adelson Curatorial Fellow in American Art, Art History Department, Boston University

Ross Barrett is a Ph.D. student in Art History at Boston University and was the 2002-2003 Warren G. Adelson Curatorial Fellow in American Art.   He received a B.A. in Art History from the University of Notre Dame in 1999 and an M.A. in Art History from Syracuse University in 2002. He studies nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art, architecture, and visual culture, with a specific interest in the interrelationships of visual culture, ideology, violence, and power in the production of a modern American social order.   His paper "On Forgetting: Thomas Nast, the Middle class, and the Visual Culture of the Draft Riots," will appear in the Fall 2004 issue of Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies .   Barrett has taught courses in American, modern, and contemporary art at Syracuse and in Boston.

Widely published in the field of photography, A.D. Coleman has been a columnist for the Village Voice, The New York Times, and The New York Observer. He also regularly contributes to ARTNews, Art on Paper and Technology Review. Since 1995 Coleman has served as Publisher and Executive Director of The Nearby Café (www.nearbycafe.com) a multi-subject electronic magazine where his widely read internet newsletter on photography, “C: The SPEED of Light” appears at www.photocritic.com. He also founded and directs the Photography Criticism Cyber Archive. American Photo named Coleman one of “the 100 most important people in photography in 1998.” His books include The Grotesque in Photography; Light Readings: A Photography Critic’s Writings, 1968-1978 and Critical Focus: Photography in the International Image Community.

Merry A. Foresta , Director of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative and Senior Curator of Photography, Smithsonian Institution

Merry A. Foresta is Director of the Smithsonian Photography Initiative and serves as Senior Curator for Photography for the Art Museums Division of the Smithsonian Institution. Foresta joined the Smithsonian in 1977 as Assistant Curator for 20th Century Art at the National Collection of Fine Arts (now named the Smithsonian American Art Museum) and became the museum's first Curator of Photography in 1983.  She has curated over 50 exhibitions on art and photography, including Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray ; Photography of Invention: Pictures of the 1980s ; Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography ; Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype ; and American Photographs: The First Century .  She is the author of numerous catalogue essays and articles on twentieth-century American art and photography, and lectures frequently on these subjects. Her most recent publication, At First Sight: Photography and the Smithsonian , was published by Smithsonian Books in 2004.

Bernard L. Herman, the Edward & Elizabeth Rosenberg Professor of Art History and Director of the Center for American Material Culture Studies is also the co-founder and senior research fellow in the Center for Historical Architecture and Design at the University of Delaware and a member of the faculty of the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. A past co-editor of the Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture series, Herman is the author of Architecture and Rural Life in Central Delaware, 1700-1900 and The Stolen House, both winners of the Abbott Lowell Cummings Award for the best published work on the traditional architecture of North America. The Stolen House received additional recognition as a New York Times Book Review notable book for 1992. His current book project is Town House, a study of architecture and material life in the early American city written with the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. He is currently completing the manuscript for a book and exhibition Bricklayers and Housetops: The Architecture of Gee's Bend Quilts.