Syracuse University Art Museum Names Coral Silver as the 2024-25 Palitz Art Scholar

The Syracuse University Art Museum is pleased to announce Coral Silver as the 2024-2025 Louise ‘44 and Bernard Palitz Art Scholar. The Palitz Graduate Art Scholar Endowed Fund was established in 2011 by longtime museum advocates Louise Beringer Palitz and Bernard Palitz to support outstanding Syracuse University graduate students in Art History and/or Museum Studies. Awardees are known as Palitz Art Scholars in recognition of their achievements and potential in the fields of Art History and/or Museum Studies.

Silver is a second-year graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in art history and works as a graduate student associate in the Special Collections Research Center with Syracuse University Libraries. Their research often revolves around sculpture across several periods and locations, including the Ancient Mediterranean, the European Middle Ages and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and the United States. In addition, they are interested in the relationship between archaeology and art history, an interest which resulted from their summer spent in southern Turkey at the Antiochia ad Cragum Archaeological Research Project.

As the Palitz Art Scholar, Silver will study two works by Italian artist Ferdinando Vichi in the Syracuse University Art Museum collection. They will mainly concentrate their research on Vichi’s “Bust of Venus” to investigate the reason for its titling and the point during Vichi’s career when the sculpture was created to situate it within his oeuvre (body of work). This research will be included in their larger capstone research project, advised by Art History Associate Professor Romita Ray, investigating Antonio Canova’s “Funerary Monument to Maria Christina of Austria” from 1805.