Distinguished Alumni: Ankeney Wietz
"Learn to network and try to make friends with people you admire...I wish I had practiced networking during my student days so that it came to me more naturally later on in my career."
About
This fall, the department was pleased to welcome Ankeney Weitz back to campus as the twentieth annual Murphy Distinguished Alumni Lecturer. She delivered a lecture entitled “Reflections on a Life in Academia” on September 30, 2024, in the Stokstad Lecture Hall.
Dr. Weitz is the Ziskind Professor of East Asian Studies and chair of the East Asian Studies Department at Colby College in Waterville, ME, where she has been on the faculty since 1998, serving also in the Art Department until last year. Between 2014 and 2023, she was the Ellerton M. and Edith K. Jetté Professor of Art/East Asian Studies at Colby. Dr. Weitz holds a bachelor’s degree in Asian Studies from Cornell University and earned her MA and PhD in Art History from KU in 1987 and 1994, respectively, writing her dissertation under the direction of Dr. Chu-tsing Li.
In 2002, Dr. Weitz published a revised version of her dissertation as Zhou Mi’s “Record of Clouds and Mist Passing Before One’s Eyes”: An Annotated Translation, with Brill Academic Publishers. Her other publications include numerous articles and book chapters as well as a 2009 exhibition catalogue co-authored with De-nin Lee, Ink Tales: Chinese Paintings from the Collections of the Museums of Colby and Bowdoin Colleges. This catalogue accompanied an exhibition that Drs. Weitz and Lee curated with the participation of Colby and Bowdoin students. Between 1999 and 2014, Dr. Weitz organized over a dozen exhibitions with students at the Colby College Museum of Art in conjunction with her Art History and East Asian Studies courses, many of them including catalogues.
Over the last decade, Dr. Weitz has established herself as an authority on Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013), the Chinese French painter whose distinctive abstract style blended the visual poetry of Chinese painting and calligraphy with European pictorial traditions. Dr. Weitz was a co-author of the 2016 book, Zao Wou-Ki: No Limits, published by Yale University Press to accompany exhibitions cocurated by Dr. Weitz at the Asia Society Museum and Colby College Museum of Art. Dr. Weitz has also given numerous talks and published several articles and book chapters on Zao Wou-Ki and is continuing her research on the artist in two book manuscripts in progress.
Dr. Weitz has given dozens of invited lectures, presentations, and museum talks in the United States and abroad. Domestic venues include the annual meetings of the College Art Association, Association for Asian Studies, and New England Association for Asian Studies, as well as Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Overseas, she has presented her research in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Switzerland, and several venues in China and Taiwan, including the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, the Palace Museum in Beijing, and the National Palace Museum in Tapei.
That Dr. Weitz has accomplished so much as a scholar and curator while also teaching undergraduate Art History and East Asian Studies full-time at one of the country’s best private liberal arts colleges and doing substantial service for her institution—not to mention raising a family—testifies to her remarkable energy and dedication to her chosen profession.
Ankeney Weitz answers our questions:
I decided to pursue a teaching career because I had always enjoyed the academic environment, and I wanted to continue learning and doing research. Teaching seemed the ideal way to be the perpetual student! However, it wasn’t easy for me to find a job, and as I was filing my dissertation in early fall of 1994, I still didn’t have anything lined up. It just so happened that Dr. Lothar Ledderose of Heidelberg University was the Murphy Lecturer that year, and when he found out I was unemployed, he invited me to be a guest professor that winter semester. I was way out of my league in that position, but I had fun and learned a lot. My next job was to replace Bob Thorp (KU PhD ‘79) at Washington University while he went on sabbatical for a semester, and then I landed a tenure-track job at Denison University in Ohio. In 1998, I was offered a teaching position at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and I have been there ever since.
Dr. Chu-Tsing Li, my advisor, taught me two major lessons that have sustained me throughout my life and in my career. First, as a scholar, you have to rely on yourself: find your own passions, ask your own questions, and be open to shifts in the discipline. Second, as a teacher, enthusiasm for an individual student’s aspirations is paramount. Dr. Li consistently supported and encouraged us to pursue the topics that excited us. If you look at the dissertations he directed, you will find plenty on his own specialty of Yuan dynasty painting, but also works on Buddhist cave temple art, excavated caches of ceramics, Ming dynasty furniture, modern Chinese art, and Han dynasty mortuary architecture. “Rely on yourself” and “Support the aspirations of those you care about”: these two lessons from Dr. Li have also served me in my personal life.
Learn to network and try to make friends with people you admire. As a student, I didn’t work at the social aspects of being a scholar. Reserved and shy by nature, I thought that professors, curators, and collectors would have no interest in a lowly graduate student. Correcting this attitude later in my career was painful; I wish I had practiced networking during my student days so that it came to me more naturally later on in my career.
Now that computers can do tasks that once could only be done by human beings, we have to focus our energy on activities that computers will never be able to do, or at least that they can’t do well. The problem with text generators in writing or research, and especially in education, is not whether people will “cheat” by misrepresenting artificially intelligent, machine-generated work as their own. Rather, the real challenge is to figure out how to strengthen our true human intelligence, especially in the realms of emotion and compassion. In my opinion, art will be at the center of this human-generated work. This is a problem that we all need to address, but it is especially pressing for today’s students.
As a student, you have a lot of freedom to decide how you will use your time. That is not the case when you work as a full-time professional, and the transition can be difficult.
What hasn’t changed? In 1985, when I came to KU, Chinese art historians were still arguing about which artists were worth our attention and, especially in painting studies, which paintings could be genuinely attributed to a particular artist or time period. Every year we had a semester-long “connoisseurship seminar” at the Nelson-Atkins Museum to train us in the skills of discrimination. At the same time, we were watching the growth of the New Art History all around us, and so over the next several decades, we began to chase new theoretical models, work on problems like patronage studies, feminism, and so forth. Another major change is the explosion of interest in contemporary Chinese art.
Balancing a teaching career with having children was tremendously challenging for me.
Number one. Since I teach at an undergraduate college and have not trained any graduate students, I’m especially proud that several of my students now work in the Asian art field. I enjoy following their career trajectories and learning from their discoveries.
Number two. Curating the exhibition of Zao Wou-Ki’s painting for the Colby College Museum of Art in little Waterville, Maine and then having the opening venue in New York City at the Asia Society Museum: that was a real highlight of my career. I did not intend to dedicate so much time and effort to this project, but the rewards have been tremendous.
You might have asked: Are you a yes-person or a no-person? By this I mean: Do you readily say “yes” when invited to work on a new project with another person, or do you have the discipline to turn down those invitations so that you can focus on your own agenda?
My answer: I’m a yes-person. I didn’t really consider this problem until about halfway through my career when people started telling me: “you need to learn to say ‘no’.” Indeed, we all have to say “no” some of the time, but I can’t stop being a yes-person. To navigate life without tremendous regrets one needs to know and embrace their identity as a yes-person or a no-person.