Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.

The Washington Post Sunday Arts and Style section had a very interesting article by Blake Gopnik on some of the style arbiters for the visual arts in Washington DC.  It is a group of scholars, some permanent and some are temporary at the National Gallery from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Some of what the CASVA does is a series of Sunday lectures each spring which are then published as a book.  According to Gopnik, some of the worlds most influential volumes on are began as part of the Mellon lecture series. The article is interesting as you dont normally see much devoted to these types of scholars who are also very influential in the world of find and decorative arts.

Elizabeth Cropper, a British scholar who has lived in the States for decades, is entering her 10th year as CASVA's dean. She is a petite 65-year-old and a power dresser -- crisp brown pantsuit, brown silk scarf, chunky beads. Her genteel manner is known to hide ambition and a will of iron.
"We do look for the most outstanding scholars to do the most demanding, intense work they can," Cropper says matter-of-factly. She is sitting in her corner office on the fourth floor of the gallery's East Building, with views onto the blooming trees of the Mall and the Capitol a couple of blocks off.
Cropper rattles off an impressive list of people and projects hosted by her center. She names a posse of brand-name art historians, here for six months or a year or two of distraction-free research and writing. They in turn mentor a band of younger scholars finishing their doctorates, or just moving beyond them. (CASVA doesn't do its own teaching, but it accepts and funds PhD students registered elsewhere.) And then there's the supply of visiting scholars, old and young, who show up for CASVA seminars and lectures.
Some of what gets worked on at CASVA may seem a touch obscure. Cropper touts the center's ongoing digitization of the records of the Accademia di San Luca, founded in Rome in 1593 as one of Europe's first art academies. Senior scholar Suzanne Preston Blier, a Harvard professor on research leave at CASVA, has been working on a project titled "Imaging Amazons: Dahomey Women Warriors In and Out of Africa." One of the doctoral students is bashing away at a thesis titled "Mediating the Third Culture at Tlatelolco, Mexico City." This is CASVA as a center for pure research and esoterica, on the model of an astrophysics lab.

To read the full article, click HERE.