Catherine Lusheck

Catherine Lusheck is Chair of the Department of Art + Architecture and Professor of Art History & Museum Studies. She holds a doctorate in History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley, and is a specialist in early modern European art and curatorial practice. Her research interests include Renaissance drawings culture, early modern visual rhetoric and the classical tradition, and artistic emulation and self-representation in the art of Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577-1640). Over the past decade, she has curated numerous exhibitions in USF's Thacher Gallery, Donohue Rare Book Room, and Manresa Gallery, and prior to that, at the Crocker Art Museum where she was Associate Curator from 2003-04.

Her recent publications include her 2017 monograph, Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing, published in Routledge's Visual Culture in Early Modernity series, and two chapter-long articles in edited volumes: "Laboring Bodies, Laboring Artist: Rubens and the Virtues of Intellectual and Painterly Work," published in Rubens and Italian Culture, 1600-1608 by Viella Press (Rome) in 2020, and "Leonardo's Brambles and their Afterlife in Rubens's Studies of Nature" that appears in volume two of Brill’s Leonardo Studies series. Her current book project examines Leonardo's da Vinci's artistic and theoretical afterlife in Rubens's art. At various junctures, her research has been supported by the Jesuit Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), the Belgian-American Educational Foundation (BAEF), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and most recently, the Rubenianum archive in Antwerp where she will be a scholar-in-residence in spring 2022.

Lusheck received the University's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2013. She served as the first arts Faculty Chair of the new Honors College (2018-2021) and as Director of the Art History/Arts Management Program (2014-19). She regularly teaches a mix of engaging interdisciplinary, humanities-based seminars and collaborative curatorial practica in the University's Art History & Museum Studies programs, the University's Honors College, and the St. Ignatius Institute.

• Chair, Department of Art + Architecture
• Steering Committee, Center for Research & Scholarly Excellence
• Steering Committee, Saint Ignatius Institute
• Faculty Chair (Arts), USF Honors College, 2018-2021
• College Curriculum Committee, 2016 - 2019
• Director, Art History/Arts Management Program, 2014 - 2019

• PhD, History of Art, University of California, Berkeley (December 2000)
• MA, History of Art, University of California, Berkeley (May 1992)
• BA, Political Science, magna cum laude, DePauw University (May 1987)

• Term/Adjunct Faculty, Art History, Santa Clara University
• Associate Curator, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento
• Fine Art Specialist, Bonham's auction house, San Francisco
• Private Curatorial Consultant

• Rubenianum (Antwerp, Belgium), Scholar-in-Residence, 2022
• Jesuit Foundation Grant, 2016, 2021
• USF Lane Center Faculty Fellowship, 2020-21
• Ignatian Faculty Forum (invited), 2016 - 2017
• USF Distinguished Teaching Award, 2013
• National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute Scholar (Leonardo da Vinci: Between Art & Science), Florence, Italy, 2012
• Pre-Doctoral Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
• Pre-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Prints and Drawings, Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Provost's Faculty Innovation Award, USF, 2011-12
• Dean's Dissertation Fellow, University of California, Berkeley, 1997-98
• Smith Dissertation Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), 1996-97
• Belgian-American Educational Foundation (BAEF), Brussels, Pre-Doctoral Fellow, 1995-96
• Chester Dale and Theodore Rousseau Pre-Doctoral Fellow (in residence), Department of Prints and Drawings, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994-95
• Graduate Curatorial Intern, Department of European Drawings, J. Paul Getty Museum, 1992-93
• Walter Horn Fellow, Department of History of Art, University of California, Berkeley, 1991-92

• Lusheck, C. (2020). “Laboring Bodies, Laboring Artist: Rubens and the Virtues of Intellectual and Painterly Work.” In Rubens in Italian Culture 1600-1608, eds. Raffaella Morselli and Cecilia Paolini. Rome: Viella: 247-271.
• Lusheck, C. (2020). Book Review. The Jesuit Church of Antwerp, by Ria Fabri and Piet Lombaerde, based on a manuscript by Frans Baudouin. Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard. London: Harvey Miller, 2017. Renaissance Quarterly LXXIII, no. 1 (March 2020): 221-222.
• Lusheck, C. (2019). “Leonardo’s Brambles and their Afterlife in Rubens’s Studies of Nature.” In Leonardo Studies, vol. 2: Leonardo da Vinci - Nature and Architecture. Eds. Constance Moffatt and Sara Taglialagamba. Leiden: Brill: 123-167.
• Lusheck, C. (2019). Book and Exhibition Review. Early Rubens. Eds. Sasha Suda and Kirk Nickel. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and FAMSF, San Francisco. Munich/London/New York: DelMonico Books, Prestel, 2019; CAA.reviews.
• Lusheck, C. (2018). Book Review. Life of Christ Before the Passion, The Ministry of Christ by Koeln Bulckens, with introduction by Paul Huvenne. Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, V, 2. London: Harvey Miller. Historians of Netherlandish Art online.
• Lusheck, C. (2017). Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing. Visual Culture in Early Modernity series, ed. Kelley Helmstutler di Dio. Aldershot/New York: Routledge/Ashgate.
• Lusheck, C. (2017). Book Review. St. Jacob’s Antwerp Art and Counter Reformation in Rubens’s Parish Church, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 253; Brill’s Studies on Art, History, and Intellectual History 13. Leiden: Brill, 2016, by Jeffrey Muller. Renaissance Quarterly LXX/4 (Winter 2017): 1514-15.

• Stitching Communities & the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Thacher Gallery, University of San Francisco, December 1, 2022 - February 17, 2023
• Quiet Spaces: Picturing Sanctuary in the Illustrated Book. Thacher Gallery, University of San Francisco. November 29, 2018 – February 10, 2019.
• The Depravities of War: Sandow Birk and the Art of Social Critique. Thacher Gallery, University of San Francisco. November 10, 2016 – February 29, 2017.
• Mapping ‘The East’: Envisioning Asia in the Age of Exploration. Manresa Gallery (in conjunction with the Ricci Institute for East-West Studies), San Francisco, March 30 – May 22, 2016 (co-curated with Madeline E. Warner, Art History, B.A. ‘15).
• Reformations: Dürer & the New Age of Print. Thacher Gallery and the Donohue Rare Book Room, University of San Francisco, January 26 – February 22, 2015.
• Bookends: Illustrated Works Spanning 500 Years from the Donohue Rare Book Room. Gleeson Library, University of San Francisco, April 29– June 17, 2010 (led undergraduate curators in ART 200: Museum Studies).