Metropolitan Museum of Art selects UTSA professor Julie Johnson for fellowship

"I am grateful for the generous support of Dean Glenn Martinez and his team in the College of Liberal and Fine Arts (COLFA)," Johnson said. "I am the second of two senior fellows at the Lauder Center, which provides a writing community with workshop and presentation opportunities. It's an honor and privilege to be part of the fellowship program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has an unsurpassed art collection and impressive library holdings."

Johnson's current research project, exploring the artistic innovations of the Vienna Secession, will be the foundation of her work during the fellowship. She is focused on understanding the movement's experiments with framing, polyfocality and space, and is revisiting the 10th exhibition of the Vienna Secession, a pivotal moment in art history.

Johnson's work will delve into the ways these experiments with space impacted modernist aesthetics by examining the interconnectedness between art and humor evident in Vienna's diverse media landscape.

"While at the Met, I'll be writing a book manuscript," Johnson explained. "It will take the form of a microhistory about a single exhibition of art at the center of the famous ceiling painting scandal involving Gustav Klimt, the university medical faculty, and the Vienna parliament."

Her project will explore the stories behind the exhibition makers, critics, artists, and their patron Szerena Lederer, whose portrait now hangs at the Met.

"Julie Johnson's fellowship with The Met's Lauder Research Center is an extraordinary achievement that highlights both her expertise and the caliber of research emerging from the UTSA School of Art and COLFA as a whole," said Martinez. "Her work on Viennese modernism promises to enrich our understanding of this pivotal period in art history, and her commitment to bringing these insights back into the classroom is an invaluable asset to our art history students and academic community."

Johnson is the author of "The Memory Factory: The Forgotten Women Artists of Vienna 1900," a book that recovers the history of women's participation in Viennese exhibitions and tracks the historically specific erasure of this past under National Socialism.