From Armenian monasteries to campus neo-Gothic architecture
Whitney Adana Kite, Mount Holyoke College’s newest assistant professor of art history, loves teaching her students to decode everyday visual information.
Looking out across Armenia’s Vorotan River valley from Tat’ev, a ninth-century monastery, most visitors focus on the big picture: an expansive view of mountains and valleys as far as the eye can see. While Whitney Adana Kite looks out and sees that same beauty, she also sees smaller clues that help decode this ancient site’s untold history.
Due to Armenia’s modern political turbulence and long history of brutal conquests, it has few well-preserved historical sites and even less documentation of the history of those sites. Kite, an art historian, is helping Armenia historians document ancient monasteries, which often means looking beyond traditional sources, such as manuscripts or archives. “One way I’m trying to get at the history of these sites and how they were used is by looking at the land itself as kind of an archive,” she said.
If you consider the expansive view from Tat’ev, you notice that the monastery faces north, when almost all the other religious sites in this part of the world face east. The monastery’s northward view signals to Kite an awareness among Tat’ev’s founders of how critical the Vorotan River valley would be to sustaining it. By examining the clues written into the built environment, Kite discovered that over the centuries, Tat’ev became an agricultural economic powerhouse, controlling much of the land in that panorama.
Kite’s research focuses on three monasteries throughout the region. Two — Tat’ev and Geghard — are still widely visited. Horomos, located on the border of Armenia and Turkey, was closed by the Turkish government. Kite had to arrange special permission from five different Turkish ministries to conduct fieldwork at Horomos, where she navigates areas with potential land mines and is supervised by 12 armed Turkish soldiers.
Kite’s journey to her research started like so many others: with the encouragement of a professor. While working on her master’s at Tufts, Kite was mentored by Christina Maranci, one of the foremost experts on Armenian art history. Hearing about Maranci’s fieldwork in Eastern Turkey piqued Kite’s curiosity for the region. Now, Kite is looking forward to helping a new generation of curious Mount Holyoke students discover art history — and Armenia.
“I’m excited to take students with me to Armenia for summer fieldwork and give them first-hand training in reading the landscape, studying architecture on-site and traveling in a new part of the world,” she said.
She prioritized teaching in a liberal arts environment because of the potential to form relationships with her students and because liberal arts curricula encourage students to dive into the minutiae. In art history, that’s where discoveries are often made. And, giving engaged students time and space to explore small details often helps them discover their passions.
Kite came to art history via a nontraditional route. She received her bachelor’s degree in biological anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and then took a job as a malaria geneticist at the National Institutes of Health. “I had minored in art history, but I was a first-generation college student, so I didn’t think of art history as a career path,” she said. Surprisingly, her scientist colleagues supported her wholeheartedly when Tufts offered her a spot in its prestigious art history master’s program, and she chose art over epidemiology.
This fall, she joins Mount Holyoke College as an assistant professor of art history. She looks forward to teaching a medieval Mediterranean architecture course, in part because it’s her specialty, but even more so because she only needs to take the class outside to find examples of neo-Gothic architecture.
“I think seeing the architecture in person helps students to recognize how much art history has already infiltrated their lives. And I think that’s really a moment where they’re like, ‘Oh, wait, maybe I should think more critically about this. Maybe there is value in understanding the visual information I’m taking in all day, every day,’” she said.
