When Julian Tash ’18 approached Constantine Vaporis, history professor and former director of UMBC’s Asian studies program, after an art history class one day, he expected a helpful conversation about his career goals. He came away with a game-changing connection to Robert Mintz, the curator of Japanese art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
Tash, a Humanities Scholar, had noticed Asian art was given less attention than Western art in his high school courses. His further exposure at UMBC to the rich traditions found in Asian art, however, inspired him to pursue a double major in Asian studies and history. With Vaporis’s support, he began an internship at the Walters.
Cataloguing Buddhist statuary at the Walters got Tash “interested in the question of how to connect museum visitors with these statues, when they don’t have a background in the culture in which the objects were produced,” he shares. That interest led to a project he pursued with guidance from Vaporis and visual arts professor Preminda Jacob.
Tash received funding from a UMBC Undergraduate Research Award and a Bridging Scholarship from the American Association of Teachers of Japanese to travel throughout Japan and in the U.S. to explore how Buddhist statues are displayed in their native context compared to in American museums. His resulting research paper, which has been selected for publication in the UMBC Review, recommends that U.S. museums use technology to help visitors see more clearly how the statues appear in their original contexts, in Japanese temples.
Tash has already shared his research with curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, British Museum, and Freer and Sackler Galleries. He has also presented other work at the Bard Conference on Asia and the Environment, with research partner Jennifer Christhilf ’19, geography and environmental systems. That project was a new direction for Tash, exploring the impacts of dam construction projects in China and downstream countries such as Vietnam and Cambodia.
“Working with someone in the sciences is really emblematic of UMBC, because we’re bringing it all together, in a way that’s vitally important to this region,” says Tash. “That was a great experience and it got me thinking about the intersection of the humanities and policy.”
Although he’s graduating, collaborations Tash has helped build will continue at UMBC, including a Perspectives on Asia conference that will be co-sponsored by Johns Hopkins University.
Tash has applied for a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research in Taiwan as well as graduate programs.
Like Konkel, Cruz, and Waller, when Tash reflects on his UMBC experience, it all comes back to mentorship and support. “Even though these professors all have really busy schedules, I would go to them with an idea, and even if it wasn’t in their immediate area of study, they all made such phenomenal efforts to support me,” he shares.
“UMBC put the resources in front of me,” Tash says. “I just thought, I could do all these things—I just have to try to pursue them.”
Read the full article at https://news.umbc.edu/from-lab-to-museum-new-umbc-grads-show-the-powerful-impact-of-original-research/