C. Richard Johnson, Jr. received the first PhD minor in Art History granted by Stanford University along with a PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1977. Forty years later, he is the Jacobs Fellow in Computational Arts and Humanities at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech (New York, NY) and the Geoffrey S. M. Hedrick Senior Professor of Engineering at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY). He is also currently a Visiting Research Scholar in the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, a Scientific Researcher of the Rijksmuseum, and Computational Art History Advisor to the RKD (Netherlands Institute for Art History). Professor Johnson has founded four projects with cooperating research teams with the goal of characterizing and matching manufactured patterns in art supports: canvas thread count automation (in 2007), historic photographic paper classification (in 2010), laid paper chain line pattern marking and matching (in 2012), and watermark identification in Rembrandt’s etchings according to Hinterding’s taxonomy (in 2015).
This event is sponsored by the Center for Science and Society.