Heidi Kastenholz has a passion for lasers and for art, a combo that made for the perfect candidacy for a Bonk Fellowship! The Bonk Graduate Fellowship, named in honor of beloved former Chemical Education Professor Jim Bonk, awards funding to PhD candidates with pedagogically related projects that supplement their ongoing research projects. The Bonk Fellowship allows for the enrichment of the intense research experience obtained in their Ph.D. program while exploring opportunities of interest outside of the lab.
Heidi's passion for Conservation Science was stoked at the Indianapolis Museum of Art where she gained knowledge in the field as an Intern for more than a year as an undergraduate before beginning her graduate career at Duke. Her desire to pursue a career as a cultural heritage scientist brought her to Duke Chemistry and her affiliation with Professor Warren Warren. Heidi parlayed her investigation in to the photophysics of carbon-based pigments and multi-layered three-dimensional structures using pump-probe microscopy in to participation in an art course. This seminar class was taught in Fall 2024 by Drs. Julia McHugh and Katherine Werwie at the Nasher Museum of Art. The course provides a unique opportunity that generally focuses on the conceptualization and execution of creating a museum exhibition and culminates with an exhibition in the Nasher’s Incubator Gallery. The theme of this year’s course and exhibition is technical art history - an interdisciplinary field that can utilize chemical instrumentation to better understand the processes and components to create works of art. The weekly course meetings included discussions on curatorial practice, art conservation ethics and issues surrounding art, and the scientific techniques that were used by the students enrolled in the course to prepare their case studies for the end-of-semester exhibition.
Chemistry's Bonk Fellowship provided support for Heidi to put the “technical” in technical art history. She taught a unit of the course that covered chemical techniques, giving traditional lectures and in-person demonstrations in conjunction with testing done at the Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility (SMIF) for the course. Heidi took the lead for much of the testing and guided the students in their understanding and evaluation of the data.
Heidi has her own case study for the co-curated exhibition, On the Same Wavelength: Art, Science & Conservation, in the Nasher Incubator Gallery. Working with Drs. McHugh and Werwie for the curatorial aspects, Heidi's case study not only relies on the techniques covered in the course, but also features analysis done with pump-probe microscopy that is central to her dissertation work.
Technical art history, the focus of the exhibition, brings together art historians, conservators, and scientists in the scientific study of works of art. On the Same Wavelength presents the discoveries made about Nasher objects’ materials, original uses, the techniques used to create them, and their evolutions over time due to aging and conservation. The exhibition opens Thursday, January 30th at 6pm.