The Block is thrilled to host Stephanie S. E. Lee as the museum’s 2024-2025 graduate curatorial fellow. Stephanie is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Northwestern. We took a moment to ask Stephanie about her background, research, and work at The Block this year.

Can you tell us a bit about your background and your field of study?

My family immigrated to Canada in the late 90s. I grew up watching Korean costume dramas on satellite TV and—as soon as I could read English—began devouring the Royal Diaries series. I had no idea art history was a discipline until I went to college and took an art history class to fulfill a distribution requirement. It was a magical Intro to Buddhist Art History class and I ended up becoming a major. Many years of coursework across the Midwest, multilingual archival research trips, and four exhibitions later, I’m finishing up my dissertation. It’s tentatively titled “Asiatic femininity: Gendered Labor, Reprographic Technologies, and Print in Modern East Asia.”  It’s about the making of Yellowness (as racial-ethnic signifier, marker of hygiene, and as colorant) and I’m super excited to write the remaining two chapters with the support of the Block fellowship.

What interests you about working within an art museum?

I’m drawn to collaborative work. It’s more fun working with as a team! Putting an exhibition together requires a multi-pronged approach: brainstorming and solving problems across departments—installation, conservation, exhibition design, programming, education, engagement, and donors. Working with different teams is such a treat, because I’m learning their vernacular and how to achieve a shared goal. I also learn more about the show I’m working on—the main argument, or the “point” so to speak—through seeing the thesis refracted through the eyes of different departments.

What projects will you be focusing on during your fellowship?

In the fall, I worked on the acquisition of experimental photographs by Chicago’s own Tadao Takano. Throughout the year, I’ll be co-curating a Helen Frankenthaler works-on-paper exhibition with Academic Curator Corinne Granof. The show is centered around the 34 prints the Block received from the Foundation in 2023. This gift includes artist proofs and working proofs for her 1983 piece, Divertimento. While Frankenthaler’s best known for her paintings, she took up printmaking with vigor and an acute awareness of learning this new skill set and materials—a new visual and material language so to speak. And we see this education happening in the literal margins of the working proofs and artist proofs that came in with the gift. So I’m super excited to think more about how to exhibit this at the Block. It’s not just the work, but showing the work, if that makes sense. I’m also thinking through a longer term project around the early 2000s prints made by Chinese-American artist Dan S. Wang. For me, being a curator means engaging with the artists in your city and community; I learned of Dan’s work while learning about the Block’s collection and his work was introduced to me, again, while moderating an artist conversation at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago.

How did you find your way to museum work?

Through resourcefulness and persistence! I sent many cold emails in my late teens and early 20s. I’m here because more established art historians and curators were generous with their knowledge and mentorship. I also have a very supportive network of Asian and Asian American culture workers that have shared opportunities and provided a space to workshop ideas, which have led to past and present museum work.

What museum exhibitions or programs (outside The Block) have inspired you lately?

This summer, I’ll be going to Seoul as part of The Clark’s Origins of Afro-Eurasian Print traveling seminar. The goal of the project is to rethink the dominant  narrative of printmaking; not as a European invention but as an interconnected and intercontinental series of technological events that’s inclusive of Afro-Eurasian artworks, materials, and practices.

Last summer, thanks to the generosity of the Art History Department’s Warnock Research Grant and the University of Michigan’s Forsyth Fellowship, I was able to see several exhibitions and do dissertation work in Japan. I’m still thinking about Trio: Modern Art Collections from Paris, Tokyo, and Osaka at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (東京国立近代美術館); the exhibition was a huge multi-institution tour de force, with major loans across Japan and France.

Is there anything upcoming at the Block Museum or Northwestern that you are particularly excited about?

 The Block is acquiring two ukiyo-e prints: one by Yoshitoshi and another by Utagawa Hiroshige. These prints will be great for expanding the breadth of teaching materials beyond Euro-America at the Block, while simultaneously expanding the geographic scope of 18^th-century artworks on paper in the collection.