Spotlight on...Kirsten Hoving

Author: Maddie Oatman

Charles A. Dana Professor of History of Art & Architecture Kirsten Hoving has been an important Art History scholar at Middlebury ever since she joined the faculty in 1983. Originally from Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, Hoving received her undergraduate degree at Ohio Wesleyan University and her Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University. Adding to her reputation as one of Middlebury's "most prolific scholars," as History of Art & Architecture Professor and Department Chair Cynthia Atherton describes her, Hoving recently completed a detailed book on the influence of astronomy on renowned artist Joseph Cornell. Working in the early and mid-twentieth century, Cornell was known for his playful yet extremely complex boxes and collages. His profound interest in astronomy and metaphysics is shown in many of his assemblages. The Campus caught up with Hoving to learn more about her relationship to Cornell's artwork.



The Middlebury Campus: Tell us about your beginnings as an art historian and when you knew it was something you wanted to pursue professionally.

Kirsten Hoving: I majored in Studio Art in college but I took all the art history courses I could and loved them. I had a sense then that that's what I wanted to do, but it took me awhile to figure it out. I got a BFA in studio art and then a masters in education thinking that I wanted to do art therapy. I soon realized what I really liked was researching art and writing papers about it, and that I wanted to immerse myself in those sorts of activities. I decided to go back to get my masters and then my doctorate in art history.

TC: What drew you initially to Joseph Cornell?

KH: I've always loved Cornell's work. I think I encountered it as an undergraduate in my very first art history course, which was supposed to be a survey of art history but ended up only being modern art. At that point, Cornell was a cutting-edge contemporary artist and he was sort of where the course ended. I just ended up loving his work. I always thought I would like to do something with his work but I never could really figure out what. I saw a call for papers for a symposium in Sicily that was going to begin New Year's Eve of the millennium and I thought, "Well that would be a cool place to be for New Year's Eve." It was a conference on Astronomy and the Humanities so I thought I could do something about Cornell and astronomy. So that's basically how I got into it, because I wanted to go to an exotic place for New Year's! It got me connected to a whole network of people who were looking at Astronomy and the Humanities from lots of different directions: language, literature, Renaissance art or modern art.

TC: In terms of writing your book, what has been the most exciting or unexpected thing you've found out about Cornell?

KH: Well, the book started out as a short article on Cornell and the history of astronomy and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. I started working on it and 350 pages later I realized how rich the material was, especially when I started working in the Joseph Cornell study center down in Washington D.C. and the archives at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. I also realized that nobody had gone through the material carefully or had the luxury of time to go through it as meticulously as I was able to do, and that was really enlightening for me.

TC: Can you talk about some of the challenges you've encountered while researching the book?

KH: With Cornell, the challenge has been the huge quantity of archival material. Going through those 118 boxes of source material and then 22 roles of microfilms and diaries and other clipping files has been really daunting. Cornell was interested in everything! You really sense a mind that was voraciously curious about all sorts of things, but also that tended to layer associations in his works. There's never a clear explanation for anything so you have to learn how to take off each of the layers like the skin of an onion to be able to figure out what's inside.

TC: In conjunction with the question of challenges, do you find it difficult to be in such a rural environment researching art?

KH: I had a faculty study in the library, which is the most wonderful thing on the planet because I could just surround myself with my books and articles and clippings and I covered the walls with photographs of works of art. It was the perfect place to just drench myself in this project. At the same time, I did a lot of traveling­­ - down to Washington to work in the archives, which I could only stand for about a week at a time before I became a screaming lunatic, and around to visit actual works. His works are so detailed; he often worked on the backs of them so you have to see them to be able to look at the back and the bottoms and tops. I looked at a lot of things in storage and museums. I'd go to these big vaults and climb up on ladders and get to touch his works. I worked with some dealers and galleries and private collectors and got to look at as much of the actual work as I could. That's been really important in understanding all that archival material.

TC: What's Cornell's appeal to an average college student?

KH: I think he's really complex. He's not an artist who makes works you can take a glance at and understand immediately. He demands your attention over a long period of time, so I think that's a really interesting thing for students to realize. There is art out there that's not the sort of thing you can take in a single gulp, but that you have to allow to wash over you during a period of time in order to get it. And also the fact that he's such an important precursor to so much contemporary art that came after him. He was anticipating what people like Andy Warhol would do, or Robert Rauschenberg or even the Minimalists. He was predicting some of what came out in subsequent years and that makes him intriguing.