Author Archives: Madeleine Cody

Madeleine Cody

About Madeleine Cody

Madeleine Cody is a Research Associate for Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Middle Eastern Art. She has a B.A. in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College, an MA in Egyptology from Brown University, and is currently completing her Ph.D. in Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She has worked on excavations in Italy, Yemen and Egypt. Since coming to the Museum in 1997, she has been involved with numerous projects and assisted the late James F. Romano, Project Director, with the second phase of the reinstallation of the Egyptian Galleries, which opened in 2003. With Jim and Richard A. Fazzini, she is a co-author of Art for Eternity: Masterworks from Ancient Egypt (Brooklyn, 1999) and has written about other Egyptian objects from the Museum’s collection. Currently, she is working with the ancient Middle Eastern Art collection, her other area of expertise. She is co-curator of the Herstory Gallery exhibition, The Fertile Goddess, (December 19, 2008 – May 31, 2009).

Name That Bronx Zoo Cobra? “Wadjet” Of Course!

Last Friday, my husband came home with a New York Post article announcing that the young female cobra who escaped from the Bronx zoo, thus becoming probably the most famous snake in the New York area, if not the whole … Continue reading

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The Fertile Goddess: Endings and Beginnings, Part III: Creation

An installation view of The Fertile Goddess intro panel and title taken for archival purposes by our ECAMEA Curatorial Assistant, Kathy Zurek-Doule. All this time, I had been researching each figurine type intensively in order to understand their original appearance, … Continue reading

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The Fertile Goddess: Endings and Beginnings, Part II: Planning

Last summer we met in storage for a “bonding” session with the figures we selected from the collection for the show, where Maura, Ellen Belcher (our consultant), and I talked at length about each individual object. Much of what came … Continue reading

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HBO’s True Blood team kindly answers our “Bird Lady” questions!

Many thanks are due to our faithful community. Their tweets helped us get in touch with @TrueBloodHBO, the official True Blood twitter feed and they set up a coast-to-coast conference call Tuesday evening between Suzuki Ingerslev, Production Designer for the … Continue reading

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“Bird Lady” on HBO’s True Blood

     We were first notified of this surprise appearance from a comment in our online collection by Marlene F. Emmett, who spotted a statue that sure looks like our “Bird Lady” in the first episode of the second season of … Continue reading

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The Fertile Goddess: Endings and Beginnings, Part I: Conception

An installation view of The Fertile Goddess in the Herstory Gallery. Photograph by Christine Gant. As we deinstall The Fertile Goddess exhibition, it seems appropriate to reflect on a very good question that numerous visitors have asked me: how do … Continue reading

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The Fertile Goddess Comes to a Close

Excavated examples of figurines such as this one from northern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and Syria, made during the Late Halaf Period in the late fifth millennium B.C.E., have been found, often in groups, among domestic refuse. We were thrilled to … Continue reading

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The Fertile Goddess: Consultants and Colleagues

Co-curator Maura Reilly, consultant Ellen Belcher, and the Halaf figurine. During the planning stages of special exhibitions or permanent installations, it is a common practice in museums to involve consultants; scholars with specialized knowledge who assist the curators in researching … Continue reading

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Happy New Year from “The Fertile Goddess”

The latest exhibition in the Herstory Gallery, The Fertile Goddess, just opened on December 19, 2008. Imagine how delighted Sarah Giovanniello, Research Assistant, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and I were to see this decoration, which Museum art … Continue reading

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