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Lunder Institute Research Fellows

Deadline February 28, 2020

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The Lunder Institute for American Art seeks to appoint in 2020-21 a group of Research Fellows to pursue original scholarship on artistic modernisms of the Southwest, a region with unstable and contested boundaries shaped by sovereign Indigenous communities, settler colonialism, and ecological flux. Motivating this focus are the Colby Museum of Art’s collection of work by the Taos Society of Artists, the Museum’s recent collaborations with Indigenous artists, and an exhibition planned for 2022 that will put Native and non-Native art into conversation. 

Research Fellows will attend two meetings: September 23-26, 2020, at Colby College in Waterville, Maine; and January 20-23, 2021, in Taos, New Mexico. Jessica L. Horton (Associate Professor of Art History, University of Delaware), 2020-21 Lunder Institute Distinguished Scholar, will lead the Research Fellows in their critical reflections on art in the context of the westward expansion of the United States, a vast and unfinished project centered on the appropriation of Indigenous homelands, assimilation of Native bodies, and establishment of industries dedicated to art, tourism, and resource extraction. The group will be joined by guest speakers at each site, including Dr. Cynthia Chavez Lamar (Assistant Director for Collections, National Museum of the American Indian). They will convene in Taos at the Couse-Sharp Historic Site. Among the questions the Research Fellows will explore through the Colby Museum’s collections and their ongoing research are: How have the social and environmental upheavals of western expansion been registered—or suppressed—in artistic modernisms by makers of diverse heritages? How might our analyses of historical materials be read through the lens of Indigenous and environmental justice? What methodological tools are most needed today to address the legacies of colonialism and its contestation in Southwest modernisms and American art history more broadly?