MILLERSVILLE, PA, June 03, 2020 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles is proud to present Tara Leigh Tappert, Ph.D., with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. An accomplished listee, Dr. Tappert celebrates many years' experience in her professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and success she has accrued in her field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled and selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Tara Leigh Tappert is a cultural historian who has specialized in the arts of the United States, particularly late 19th and early 20th c. portraiture, biography, and women and art, and 20th c. craft, with a macro long view across the century and a micro emphasis on use of the crafts as rehabilitation tools for war and conflict-induced trauma. Trained as a religious educator (A.R.E., Grace Bible College, 1970), as an historian and art historian (B.A., Hope College, 1973), as a librarian and archivist (M.S.L.S., Wayne State University, 1976), and as an Americanist (Ph.D., George Washington University, 1990), Dr. Tappert has put together a career encompassing traditional employment in libraries, archives, and museums, and the management of a woman-owned, small business – Tappert & Associates, d/b/a The Arts & The Military (founded 1990 and 2010) – focusing on arts, exhibitions, archives, collections management, and publications projects, as well as occasional adjunct teaching.
Setting the course for her career was Dr. Tappert's high school history teacher, Seymour Kavesky, who demonstrated what it meant to have a passion for both history and the arts. As a grad student, Professor Barbara Carson introduced her to American decorative arts, thus solidifying an interest in all forms of artistic expression – from folk to fine art, craft to design, and everything in between. Her dissertation advisor, Dr. Lillian B. Miller, not only taught her how to write, but affirmed her arts path, as much of her academic training had been in associated disciplines. Dr. Tappert began her career setting up and managing the libraries of the U.S. District Court in Detroit, and the Washington, D.C. office of the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. As she matriculated through her Ph.D. program, Dr. Tappert spent a summer on the Cumberland plateau in Tennessee re-organizing the Hughes Public Library, which was established in the 1880s at Rugby, an American communal group organized for the younger sons of British aristocrats. A few years later she spent the summer in the Massachusetts Berkshires completing a preliminary archival arrangement and producing an inventory finding aid for the extensive 19th and early 20th century family collection of "Century Magazine" editor Richard Watson Gilder (1844-1909) and his artist wife Helena de Kay Gilder (1846-1916). A part of this collection is now housed in the Lily Library, at Indiana University – http://webapp1.indiana,edu/findingaids/view?doc.view=entire_text&docld=inU-Li-VAB7834. During the academic year, Dr. Tappert worked in the library at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and as a student editor for the U.S.I.A. funded journal American Studies International, then managed by the American Studies department at George Washington University.
A year of coursework at the Library of Congress, focused on the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era, was inspiration for Dr. Tappert's dissertation topic on American high style portrait painter, Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942), whose breathtaking paintings she first encountered in 1974 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Pre-doctoral fellowships from the George Washington University, American Studies department, and at the Smithsonian Institution, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., and the Winterthur Museum and Gardens (Beverly R. Robinson Doctoral Fellowship), Winterthur, Delaware, facilitated the completion of her dissertation manuscript. From these experiences, Dr. Tappert began a curatorial career, first as a staff member at the National Portrait Gallery, and then in Roanoke, Virginia, at what is now the Taubman Museum of Art.
In 1990, Dr. Tappert founded Tappert & Associates, taking as her first assignment an archives project for the Robert Pollard Fetter family and the Duke University library organizing the papers and creating a finding aid for the collection of American economist, university professor, and government advisor, Frank Whitson Fetter (1899-1991), a corpus now housed at Duke University – http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingaids/fetter/. Curatorial projects soon followed. An exhibition – "The Emmets: A Generation of Gifted Women" – featured the late 19th and early 20th c. careers of four sisters and cousins, for Borghi & Co., a New York City art gallery. Resource Lists for four exhibition catalogues, documenting craft in the 20th century, for what is now the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. These show catalogues include "The Ideal Home: 1900-1920" (1993), "Revivals! Diverse Traditions: 1920-1945" (1994), "Craft in the Machine Age: 1920-1945" (1995), and "Crafting Modernism: Mid-Century American Art and Design" (2011). She also curated a landmark Cecilia Beaux exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution, National Portrait Gallery, for which a biography had been written – http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/9aa/9aa211.htm. The craft exhibits and the Cecilia Beaux exhibition were milestones that significantly advanced the field of American craft and craft studies, and contributed to the scholarship of a Gilded Age high style female portrait painter whose stunning paintings offer a brilliant complement to the exquisite portraits executed by John Singer Sargent.
Over the next two decades, Dr. Tappert completed myriad projects that drew upon the work completed for these two museums. A sampling includes – teaching craft and women and art courses in the Master's Program in the History of Decorative Arts at Smithsonian Resident Associates and Parsons School of Design, in Washington, D.C. Teaching a Gilded Age to the Progressive Era art history course for the Washington, D.C. semester program of Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon. Lecturing on craft research methodologies at an American Contemporary Crafts symposium at Sotheby's in New York City. Guest co-editing, with the archivist at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a special focus issue on Cecilia Beaux for "The Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography." Offering research services to the firm of Alexandria, Virginia decorative arts dealer Sumpter Priddy III. And lecturing about Cecilia Beaux's life and career at myriad cultural venues throughout the United States. Other notable projects drew upon Dr. Tappert's collections management and research and writing skills. She offered consulting services on the arts collections of pharmaceutical lawyer Gordon W. Hueschen (1923-2001) to the Scheurer Hospital Foundation, Pigeon, Michigan, and through the grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Society for the Arts in Healthcare that she secured on behalf of the hospital, she gained an awareness of the intersection of arts, healthcare, and healing. She also completed an archives project organizing and preparing a finding aid for the manuscript texts and extensive art work generated for eleven children's books, early unpublished books, and other materials written and illustrated by award-winning Baltimore author, illustrator, and artist Nancy Patz (b. 1930), for the Special Collections and Archives, in the Library at Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland – http://cdm16235.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16235coll9/id/390.
In 2010, a new direction emerged from Dr. Tappert's previous professional accomplishments, an amalgamation of her curatorial, collections management, and research skills, and her awareness of the history of American craft, and the significance of the arts as a tool for healthcare and healing. Under the umbrella of Tappert & Associates, Dr. Tappert founded The Arts & The Military in response to and in recognition of the trauma experienced by American service members who had seen combat during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The work of The Arts & The Military primarily grew in two directions. The first charge was the management of a 500-piece arts collection for traveling exhibitions – consisting of prints, sculpture, and artwork on handmade paper from military uniforms produced by veterans at papermaking workshops led by Combat Paper Project, Peace Paper Project, ART-illery Workshops, and Button Field Paper. The second objective was researching, writing, and lecturing on the history of the arts and the military, particularly the use of arts and crafts through occupational, recreational, and art therapy, for the rehabilitation, well-being, and vocational training of disabled military service members during and after the First and Second World Wars, as well as the most current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A 2010 funding grant from the Center for Craft in Asheville, North Carolina launched Dr. Tappert's research, and also contributed to a six-day community arts event in 2012 – "Arts, Military + Healing: A Collaborative Initiative" – that Dr. Tappert envisioned for veterans and military family members at seven cultural, educational, and medical institutions throughout the Washington, D.C. area. Loans of artwork from The Arts & The Military's arts collection began in 2011, and since then Dr. Tappert has facilitated or curated nearly 50 shows at cultural, educational, and medical institutions throughout the U.S., Australia, and the Netherlands. A sampling of curated shows includes: "MOVING Through MEMORIES of Service and Conflict," Hylton Performing Arts Center, George Mason University, Manassas, Virginia, 2016 – https://drive.google.com/drive/search?q=moving%20through%20memories%2 ... 0conflict; "Healing Threads / Cathartic Clay: War, Trauma, and Art," Salina Art Center, Salina, Kansas, 2014 – https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_kSDRcnEZFNN3U1WmR6TTFVUHc; and "Citizen/Soldier/Citizen," Lubeznik Center for the Arts, Michigan City, Indiana, 2013 – http://www.lubeznikcenter.org/pdf/CSC-online-catalogue.pdf.
In 2012, Dr. Tappert attended the Military Experience and the Arts conference at Eastern Kentucky University, and shortly thereafter was invited to serve as arts editor for "Journal of Military Experience," v. 3, 2013 – http://militaryexperience.org/the-journal-of-military-experience-vol-3/. She also taught an arts and military public history class at the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2013, and then continued her research work as the David B. Larson Fellow in Health and Spirituality at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in 2014/15 – http://www.c-span.org/video/?323952-1/discussion-world-war-veterans-art-therapy. While on her fellowship, Dr. Tappert noticed other fellows working on topics that intersected with hers, an awareness that has led to a multi-author publication project currently in development that will include essays by former Kluge fellows around the topic of war, conflict, and the arts – creative responses to trauma. Dr. Tappert also participated in two National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institutes – "World War I and the Arts: Sound, Vision, Psyche" at University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2014, and "Veterans in Society – Ambiguities & Representations" at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, 2016, experiences that have enhanced her research on the history of the arts and the military.
Dr. Tappert has been a member of several industry-related organizations, including the American Studies Association, Pennsylvania Historical Association, College Art Association, American Alliance of Museums, National Coalition of Independent Scholars, MARAC (Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference), and Art Libraries Society of North America, where she was the recipient of the John Benjamins Award in 1999. In addition to her professional work, Dr. Tappert has also given community service as an advisory board member for Art Therapy Without Borders, Living Labyrinths for Peace, Inc., and DC Murals, and has served as a board member and president of Women's Caucus for Art of Greater Washington, D.C. She is also a devout member of the Religious Society of Friends, known as the Quakers.
A celebrated Marquis listee, Dr. Tappert has been featured in Who's Who in the South and Southwest and Who's Who of American Women. In recognition of outstanding contributions to her profession and the Marquis Who's Who community, Tara Leigh Tappert, Ph.D., has been featured on the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement website. Please visit www.ltachievers.com for more information about this honor.
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