This year, 44 scholars, including artist Tacita Dean, will come to the Getty for projects within the theme “Object–Value –Canon,” which explores the way that traditional art historical methodologies can be challenged and reinvented.
“This talented group comes to us from a wide range of disciplines and approaches,” explained Alexa Sekyra, Head of the Getty Research Institute’s Scholars Program. “Our goal is to give them the resources to be bold, creative and intensive. We look forward to work they will create while part of the Getty’s vibrant intellectual community.”
The visiting scholars, working at both the Getty Center in Brentwood and the Getty Villa in Malibu, will use the significant resources of the Getty to conduct their research, including the GRI’s library and special collections; the collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum; the laboratories at the Getty Conservation Institute; and the expertise of the many curators, scientists, scholars and other experts who are part of the Getty, as well as the local academic community.
“Object–Value –Canon” refers to the traditional trajectory of art-historical interpretation: from the description of an object; to discussions about its artistic, cultural, or commercial value; and then to attempts to place the object in a canon with other works. This interpretive process comes into question as art history moves from a Western-oriented discipline to a global one because the concepts object, value and canon have different significances in other social and historical contexts. Moreover, the rapidly changing technologies that researchers have access to presents new opportunities and challenges to traditional art historical methods. In inviting the 2014-15 scholars to work under this theme, the GRI is encouraging an interdisciplinary approach that allows for new possibilities and methods in cultural research.
In addition to the scholars receiving Getty residential grants, the GRI Scholars Program also awarded four Postdoctoral Fellowship opportunities: two 10-month fellowships made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), as well as a 9-month Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at Universities and Research Institutes in the U.S. made possible through the VolkswagenStiftung based in Hannover, Germany. And, having recently acquired the massive archive of independent curator Harald Szeemann (Swiss, 1933-2005), this year the GRI has initiated the Harald Szeemann Research Project Postdoctoral Fellow. The first recipient of this fellowship is art historian Doris Chon.
The 2014 incoming scholars are: Getty Scholars:
Adolf Heinrich Borbein (at the Getty Villa) is Professor emeritus at the Institut für Klassische Archäologie at the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany. His research focuses on classical archaeology, and Greek and Roman sculpture. (September–December) Project title: Canon Petra Brouwer is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Theory of Modern Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. She is a scholar of nineteenth-century architectural historiography. (September–December) Project title: Constructing the Architectural Canon. Architectural History Books in the Nineteenth-Century Gabriella Cirucci (at the Getty Villa) is Research Assistant in the Faculty of Art at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy. Her research concerns Greek and Roman sculpture, and Roman art and visual culture. (September–December) Project title: Challenging the Canon of nobilia opera: Ancient Greek sculpture in Roman contexts
Beatriz Colomina is the Professor of Architecture and Director of the Ph.D. Program in the School of Architecture, and the Director of the Media and Modernity Program, Princeton University, New Jersey. She specializes in modern and contemporary architecture and media studies. (January–March) Project title: X-Ray Architecture: Illness as Metaphor
Steven Fine (at the Getty Villa) is Professor of Jewish History in the Bernard Revel Graduate School at the Yeshiva University, New York. His research centers on cultural history, visual culture, roman history, and Jewish history. (January–March) Project title: The Arch of Titus: From Roman Triumphal Arch to Lieu de Mémoire and Post-Colonial Icon
Uwe Fleckner is Professor, Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar at the Universität Hamburg, Germany. Her research concerns African art. (April–June) Project title: The Loss of Anthropology: African Art and its Western Canon
Christopher H. Hallett (at the Getty Villa) is Professor and Chair in the Department of History of Art at University of California, Berkeley. He is a scholar of Greek and Roman art. (September–December) Project title: The “Archaic Revival” of Augustan Rome: Primitivism in the Art and Monuments of Rome, 30-20 BCE
Monica Juneja is Professor and Chair of Global Art History in the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” at the Karl Jaspers Center for Advanced Transcultural Studies at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Her research concerns South Asian art in a global perspective and critical theory. (April–June) Project title: Can Art History be made Global? A Discipline in Transition
Friederike Maria Kitschen is Scientific Project Coordinator and Research Assistant in the Hermann-von-Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Her research centers on nineteenth and twentieth-century art history. (September–March) Project title: “Visibility” — The Role of Reproductions in Canonization Processes
Jeanette Kohl is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Riverside. She is a scholar of the Italian Renaissance in a global context. (September–December) Project title: Global Faces: Heteronomies and the Afterlife of Renaissance Portraiture
Maria Emilia Masci (at the Getty Villa) is Research Fellow in Classe di Lettere at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy. Her research concentrates on the history of archaeology, the history of collections, museum history, classical archaeology, Greek and south Italian painted vases, and the intellectual history of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. (April–June) Project title: From Antiquarianism to Archaeology: Evolution of Aesthetic and Systematic Canons and History of Knowledge of Ancient Painted Pottery from late 17th to Early 19th Centuries
Eric Michaud is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He specializes in critical theory. (April–June) Project title: Inventing the ’Greek Profile’, between Art and Nature: Enquiry into an Aesthetic Paradigm Marie-Louise Bech Nosch (at the Getty Villa) is Professor in the Center for Textile Research, Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research focuses on the Aegean Bronze Age, classical Greece, ancient history, and classical archaeology. (September–December) Project title: Textiles as Object -- Textiles as Value. The Normative and Formative Roles of Textiles, with Aegean Textiles at the Turn of the 1st Millennium BCE as a Case Study
Matthew H. Robb is Curator of the Arts of America at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco | de Young, California. His research concerns pre-Columbian cultures and history. (April–June) Project title: The Stone Masks of Teotihuacan: Defining the Corpus
Joanna S. Smith (at the Getty Villa) is an Associate Professional Specialist in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, New Jersey. She is a scholar of Eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern art history and archaeology. (April-June) Project title: Seal Stratigraphies from Enkomi, Cyprus
Kevin Terraciano is Professor in the History Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on early modern Latin America and Iberia, and postclassic (ancient) Mesoamerica. (September–March) Project title: Images of the Conquest of Mexico
Shigebumi Tsuji is Professor Emeritus in the Studies of Arts Department at Osaka, Toyonaka, Japan. He specializes in the history of Roman, Byzantine, and Japanese art. (September–December) Project title: Study of Narrative Landscape in the East and the West
Predoctoral Fellows
Subhashini Kaligotla is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, New York. (September–June) Project title: Shiva’s Waterfront Temples: Reimagining the Sacred Architecture of India’s Deccan Region Nancy Lin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago, Illinois. (September–June) Project title: The Quest for a Modern East Asian Canon Allison Nicole Stielau is a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art at Yale University, New Haven. (September–June) Project title: The Unmaking of Metalwork in Early Modern Europe
Postdoctoral Fellows
Sean Villareal Leatherbury (Villa) received his doctorate from the University of Oxford. He specializes in Roman, Late Antique, and Byzantine art and archaeology. (September–June) Project Title: The Arts of Votive Dedication from Rome to Byzantium
Julia Orell is Assistant in the Department of Art History, Section for East Asian Art History at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her research focuses on Chinese art and historiography. (September–June) Project title: Shifting the Boundaries of Art History: East Asian Art History in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland ca. 1840-1940
Kristin E. Romberg is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. (September–June) Project title: Radical Constructivism: Aleksei Gan’s Grass-Roots Modernism
Lynn Rother will receive her doctorate from the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. (September–June) Art as Collateral - The Berlin Museums and their Acquisitions from the Dresdner Bank Guest Scholars
Lynne Cooke is an independent scholar and curator based in New York. She specializes in contemporary art. (April–June) Project title: The Kingdom of the Referentials Tacita Dean is an independent artist based in London and Berlin. She is internationally renowned for her film installation, as well as for other closely related works including photogravures, drawings on alabaster, overpainted photographs, sound recordings on magnetic tape, and objets trouvés. (September-June) Project title: The Importance of Objective Chance as a Tool of Reseach
David Freedberg is Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, New York. He specializes in 16th and 17th-century Dutch and Flemish Art, 17th-century Italian art, and the relations between art, history, and cognitive neuroscience. (January–June) Project title: The Origins of Art: How the problem stands in the light of the latest archaeological discoveries of middle to late stone age manufacture in Southern Africa
John K. Papadopoulos (Consortium Professor) is Professor and Chair of the Archaeology Interdepartmental Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on Aegean prehistory and Greek and Italian archaeology, as well as the history and culture of the Classical and later periods. (January–June) Project title: The Archaeological Context of Value
Piotr Piotrowski is Professor in the Department of Art History at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Pozna?, Poland. His research concerns the social and political history of modern and contemporary art in Central and Eastern Europe, theory of global art history, and museum studies. (February–June) Project title: Do We Need a Global System of Artistic Values?
Larry Arnold Silver is Farquhar Professor of Art History in the Department of the History of Art at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. He is a scholar of painting and graphics of Northern Europe, particularly Germany and the Netherlands, during the era of Renaissance and Reformation. (January–June) Project title: Jewish Art as Marked Harald Szeemann Research Project Postdoctoral Fellow Doris Chon is Lecturer in the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. She specializes in modern and contemporary art and visual culture, history of photography, and critical theory. (September 2014–June 2016) "Museum Mythologies: Harald Szeemann’s Museums by Artists, the Museum of Obsessions, and the Legacy of Institutional Critique"
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellows Michelle H. Craig is an independent scholar based in Mansfield Center, Connecticut. Her research concerns African and Islamic art. (September–July) Project title: Across Desert Sands: Trans-Saharan Visual Culture
Jessica L. Horton is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C. (September–July) Project title: Global Histories of Native American Art
Volkswagen Foundation Fellow
Katja Müller-Helle is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the BildEvidenz: Geschichte und Ästhetik project at the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft located at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. (September–June) Project title: The Anti-Canon Objects of Transgression in 20th Century Avant?Garde Culture
Museum Guest Scholars
Marie-Anne Dupuy-Vachey is an independent scholar based in Paris, France. (January–March) Host Department: Drawings
Peggy McCracken is Professor of French, Women’s Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. (April–June) Host Department: Manuscripts
Michael Roaf is Emeritus Professor for Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Munich, Germany. (April–June) Host Department: Director’s Office
Clotilde Roth-Meyer is Lecturer and an independent art historian based in Paris, France. (July–September) Host Department: Paintings Conservation
V. Armando Solé is a Scientific Software Developer at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), Grenoble, France. (July–September) Host Department: Decorative Arts Conservation
Carol Squiers is Curator at the International Center of Photography, New York. (July–September) Host Department: Photographs
Jean Vittet is Conservateur en chef in charge of Furniture and Decorative Arts before 1815 at the Château de Fontainebleu, France. (July–September) Host Department: Sculpture and Decorative Arts
Clara von Waldthausen is Photograph Conservator at the Fotorestauratie Atelier VOF, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. (January–March) Host Department: Paper Conservation
Susan Walker is Sackler Keeper of Antiquities in the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford, England. (April–June) Host Department: Antiquities
Kris Wetterlund is Editor of Museum-Ed and is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (January–March) Host Department: Education