The exhibition Reason and Fantasy is the result of a Fall 2001 graduate art history seminar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Through the guidance of Professor Mary D. Sheriff, each student was encouraged to work with several objects from the collections of the Ackland Art Museum and UNC-CH's Rare Book Collection. Students used these objects to develop more specific themes that fit within the more general rubrich of reason and fantasy.

Graduate student contributors include:

• Natacha Dockery Libertinage and its Representation in the Eighteenth Century
• Cathy Dorin Physiognomics and Pathognomics
• Cathy Keller-Brown Artists and Actors, Masters of Illusion
• Kee-Lee Lee The Ambivalence of Colonial Representation: Images of the Black in
  Eighteenth-Century Europe
• Art McLendon Architectural Canons and the Picturesque: Imaging Antiquity
  in the Eighteenth Century
• Ann Millett Fashion in the Eighteenth Century
• Chandra Mosley British Comic Art: The Lines Are Never Straight
• Masumi Ninomiya Chinoiserie in the Eighteenth-Century: China, an Imaginary Empire
  and Chinese Export Porcelain
• Leisa Rundquist Imaginary Monsters
• Deb Selinger Antiquity and the Eighteenth Century: Arabesque and Grotesque
  and Eighteenth Century Portrait Landscapes
• Camille Calvin Tewell Women in Eighteenth-Century Art
• Lindsay Twa Order and Upheaval: From the Rational to the Fictional
  in French Revolutionary Images
• Pamela Whedon The Back View of the Human Figure: Humanity Revealed
• Brooke Williams Text/ Image Mixtures

Our thanks to Mary Sheriff for her leadership and infectious enthusiasm for eighteenth-century art. Thanks also to Timothy Riggs, Ackland Art Museum's Assistant Director for Collections, for meeting with the seminar on a weekly basis and lending his excellent eye to the selection process. Other important individuals to thank include: Lois Staton of the North Carolina Museum of Art, Cathy Keller-Brown, and Chandra Mosley. Lois added to our classroom discussions with her marvelous insight and intelligence. She also generously arranged a special visit to the NCMA for the seminar. Cathy coordinated print room visits and much of the written material for the exhibit. Chandra put countless hours into the design and implementation of this website. Finally, we are most grateful to the staff of the Ackland Art Museum and UNC-CH's Rare Book Collection for sharing your treasures, wisdom, and time with us.