Faculty News - Associate Professor Angela Ho

Angela Ho, who was promoted to associate professor this year, published her first book, Creating Distinctions in Dutch Genre Painting: Repetition and Invention, over the summer with Amsterdam University Press. Taking a material culture approach to Dutch Golden Age paintings of the 17^th century, Professor Ho considers paintings not merely as aesthetics objects but also as tools in a game of social one-upmanship practiced by affluent Dutch collectors in an expanding multilayered art market.

Focusing on a well-known group of Dutch genre painters, Ho examines strategies of repetition that artists used to refine their compositions, appeal to knowing collectors, and cultivate audiences for their works. Far from lacking originality, works that repeated known motifs were a means of advertising an authorial personality to clients who were training themselves as collector-connoisseurs. Many of the classes Ho has taught at Mason contain material taken directly from her research for the book.

“Students often think that the two parts of our jobs as professors – research and teaching – are not related,” says Ho. “But the two strands actually reinforce and energize one another.”

Those students who have taken Ho's courses may not have realized that they were the beneficiaries of her research. Courses such as ARTH 345 Northern Baroque Art and ARTH 440/599 Creating Value: Making and Selling Art in Early Modern Europe were directly related to the research she conducted for her book. In the Creative Value course, which covered not only the Dutch Republic but Europe more broadly, students studied patronage and used game theory to attain more nuanced thinking about how art functions in society.