The global turn in art history seems to be intensifying a rapprochement with anthropology, leading to a more deliberate inclusion of untraditional, vernacular, and indigenous arts. This process challenges both the canons of art and the methodologies in the different fields of art history, as these two disciplines adapt to the analysis of the cultural production of art and material culture from around the world. These developments build on the legacy of structural anthropology, which has had a significant impact, particularly on contemporary art, since the 1960s, and the profound exchanges that have occurred in the prehistoric, pre-Columbian, African, Oceanic, and Asian fields, which have combined archaeological and ethnographic data to analyze their objects of research.
Applications might address both past and present relationships among the disciplines of art history and anthropology as well as archaeology. What might a more anthropological history of art, or a more art-historical anthropology, offer? What can the disciplines learn from one another? How might a collaboration of art-historical, anthropological, and archaeological methodologies help us understand and rewrite the histories of art, material objects, and artisanal practices? The Getty Research Institute invites proposals from scholars and fellows on these and other issues addressing the relationship between art and anthropology.
Getty Scholars
Susan Dackerman (Consortium Scholar) is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She specializes in Northern Renaissance art.
Early Modern Print Culture and the Islamic World
(September–June)
Carolyn Dean is Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a scholar of pre-Columbian art and culture.
The Non-Image Challenge to Art History and Anthropology
(September–June)
Aaron Glass is Associate Professor at Bard Graduate Center, New York. His research focuses on the anthropology of art, museums, and Indigenous peoples of North America.
Franz Boas’s 1897 Monograph and the Anthropology of Art
(April–June)
Patrick Thomas Hajovsky is Associate Professor in the Sarofim School of Fine Arts at Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas. He specializes in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, particularly Postclassic Central Mexico.
Currencies of Wealth and Fame: The Social Lives of Luxury Objects in Aztec Mexico
(April–June)
Joseph Imorde is Professor of Art History at Universität Siegen, Germany. His research centers on the historiography of art history, archaeology, anthropology, and ethnography.
Boundary Work: Towards a Global Dimension of Art History (after 1900)
(January–March)
Howard Morphy is Distinguished Professor in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University, Canberra. His research concerns the anthropology of art, museum anthropology, world art history, the relative autonomy of form, and Australian Aboriginal art.
The Dialogic Nature of the Relationship Between Figuration and Abstraction – Perspectives from Indigenous Australia
(January–June)
Susan A. Phillips is Associate Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pitzer College, Claremont, California. She is a scholar of anthropology, critical ethnography, community-based research, criminal justice, gangs, prisons, violence, drug trade, law, urban environments, visual culture, graffiti, and urban history.
Graffiti, Vernacular Art, and Expression
(September–December)
Peter Probst is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts. His research concerns African art, historiography, anthropology, and art history.
Shifting Subjects: The Making of African Art History
(January–March)
Katie Scott is Professor in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, United Kingdom. Her research centers on art history and material culture.
Artists’ Things: Lost Property from Eighteenth-Century France
(September–December)
Carlo Severi is Professor and Director of Studies at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), and Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, France. He is a scholar of Native American cultures, social anthropology, and the anthropology of art and memory.
Transmuting Images: New Horizons for the Anthropology of Art
(January–June)
Ruti Talmor is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College, Claremont, California. Her main research interests are the anthropology of art, anthropology of media, visual anthropology, and visual studies.
I and I: Transnational Art Practice in Ghana
(September–December)
Lyneise Williams is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research concentrates on early 20th-century Latin American art and visual culture, Black Atlantic visual studies, and French Atlantic studies.
The Glamorous One-Two Punch: Alfonso Teofilo Brown, Sports, and the Making of Black Male Beauty in Interwar Paris
(September–December)
