JENNIFER SLIWKA

Keeper of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum

Staff photo of Jennifer Sliwka, Keeper of Western Art at the Ashmolean from September 2023

Contact
Email: jennifer.sliwka@ashmus.ox.ac.uk
ORCID: 0009-0001-1142-6301
University of Oxford webpages
Balliol College

Biography

Jennifer Sliwka, PhD is the Keeper of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum and Professorial Fellow at Balliol College at the University of Oxford. Before joining the Museum in September 2023, she worked at The National Gallery, The Victoria & Albert Museum and The British Museum. For over 10 years, she also taught a collaborative MA in Theology & the Arts between the National Gallery and King’s College London.

Jennifer is an art historian and curator specialising in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art but is also interested in transhistorical and interdisciplinary projects. Her research draws on both art-historical and anthropological models to consider the ways space, architecture, memory, and tradition might condition our experience and understanding of works of art, especially in sacred contexts. She is particularly interested in the ways in which historic artworks have been relocated and repurposed over time, accruing new meanings and possibilities for interpretation. This approach has led to exhibitions exploring themes and techniques across many centuries and collaborations and creative conversations with contemporary artists including Michael Landy, Olafur Eliasson, Danh Võ, Michael Simpson, Jeff Wall, Darren Almond and Mary Stephenson.

She has curated a range of exhibitions using thematic, monographic and transhistorical approaches including Devotion by Design: Italian Altarpieces before 1500 (The National Gallery, 2011), Visions of Paradise: Botticini’s Palmieri Altarpiece (The National Gallery, 2015–16), Monochrome: Painting in Black and White (The National Gallery; Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, 2017–18) and Reframed: The Woman at the Window (Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2022).

My research is largely focused on Italian art of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, but I am also interested in transhistorical and interdisciplinary projects.

My research draws on both art-historical and anthropological models to consider the ways space, architecture, memory, and tradition might condition our experience and understanding of works of art, especially in sacred contexts. I am particularly interested in the ways in which historic artworks have been relocated and repurposed over time, accruing new meanings and possibilities for interpretation. This approach has led to exhibitions exploring themes and techniques across many centuries and joint projects with several contemporary artists.

My exhibitions (listed below) have taken a range of approaches including the thematic, monographic and transhistorical. In addition to authoring the associated exhibition catalogues, I have published in a variety of academic journals and books.

A forthcoming book, co-written with the theologian Professor Ben Quash, will explore the visual and theological legacy of John the Baptist from Early Christianity to the present day (Brepols).

My current research is centred on two book projects for Yale University Press. One, supported by a fellowship from the Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, focuses on the 16th-century Sienese artist Domenico Beccafumi. The second, aimed at a broader non-specialist audience, aims to reframe the way the ‘Renaissance’ period has traditionally been defined, reconsidering notions of chronology, geography, cultural exchange, race and gender among other critical issues.

I have 20 years teaching experience and both undergraduate and graduate levels at universities in Canada, the US, the UK and Italy.

My teaching has primarily focussed on the art and architecture of the Italian Renaissance but I have also taught on Baroque art and architecture, art and theology and curatorial studies. 

I have co-supervised one doctoral thesis at King's College London (KCL) and continue to co-supervise two doctoral candidates at KC. I have sat on a number of doctoral thesis examination panels, most recently at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

I have supervised almost 200 MA theses for the collaborative MA in Art & Theology between KCL and the National Gallery and have co-supervised a number of theses for the Warburg Institute and Sotheby's Institute of Art in London. 

PhDs supervised or co-supervised: 

Jonathan Anderson, The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, King's College London, completed 2021

Joaquin Cruz Lamas, The Spiritual Counter-Conquest of Mexico: Baroque Architecture and Religious Identity in Puebla, King's College London (ongoing, expected 2026)

Emma Lowe, Visual Exegesis: the artistic hermeneutics of Exum, Berdini, Gadamer (working title), King's College London (ongoing, expected 2027).

Other roles or appointments

Art Criticism; Art History; Art Theory; Curatorial and Related Studies; European History (excl. British, Classical Greek and Roman); Italy; Museum Studies; Religion and Religious Studies

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