The Artist in Residence will be Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist Gala Porras-Kim.
Because of the ongoing need to reduce the spread of COVID-19, many of the scholars will work remotely, while others will defer their residency to 2021/2022. Porras-Kim’s residency will extend through 2022.
“The Scholars Program has always been about supporting research and giving scholars the freedom to drive their own explorations with and in Getty resources,” said Mary Miller, director of the Getty Research Institute. “The limitations caused by the current crisis do not change that philosophy for us. Getty Research Institute continues to support a broad range of scholars as they pursue their investigations at the highest level. Nor does it lessen the extraordinary accomplishments of these scholars, who were selected from hundreds of applicants.”
The theme for the 2020/2021 scholar year, which has been extended to the following year as well, is The Fragment. Issues regarding the fragment have been present since the beginning of art history and archaeology. Many objects of study survive in physically fragmented forms, and any object, artwork, or structure may be conceived of as a fragment of a broader cultural context. As such, fragments catalyze the investigative process of scholarship and the fundamental acts of the historian: conservation, reconstruction, and interpretation. The evolution of an object can offer insights into the ethics and technologies of restoration, tastes, politics of collection and display, and production of art historical knowledge. Applicants were invited to address both the creation and reception of fragments, their mutability, and mobility, and their valuation and consequence throughout history.
“The incoming scholars, chosen from a highly competitive pool of applicants, bring a range of expertise and interesting topics—from 7th-century Japanese Buddhist calligraphy to contemporary art in Argentina to colonial engagement with Zulu art,” said Alexa Sekyra, head of the Scholars Program at GRI. “The scholars are a vibrant part of the Getty Research Institute community and even though that will look different this year, we still eagerly anticipate their insights and ideas and look forward to sharing our resources and expertise with them.”
The Scholars Program also includes a group of scholars invited to the Getty Villa. For the 2020–21 term, they will focus on the ancient cultures of the Levant and their relations with the classical world. Lying on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean, the Levant was a crucial crossroads between the classical world of Greece and Rome and the kingdoms of the Near East. Home to the ancient peoples of Phoenicia, Ugarit, Canaan, Philistia, Jordan, Israel, and Judah, this region participated in a vibrant Bronze-Age network of trade that flourished for many centuries until a combination of warfare, migration, and famine around 1200 BCE destroyed these palace societies.
Grants awarded for the 2020–21 Call for Applications were:
Getty Scholars
Sabine Breitwieser is an independent scholar and curator based in Vienna, Austria. Her research focuses on contemporary art and museum management. The Afterlives of Time-and Performance-Based Works of Art
C. Ondine Chavoya is Professor of Art at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. His research focuses on Latinx visual culture, specifically the interactions between art, social space, and the urban environment. Correspondences: Mail Art, Queer Networks, and Latinx Conceptualism
Lawrence Chua is Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at Syracuse University, New York. His research focuses on transregional histories of utopia, and the architecture and urban culture of Southeast Asia. Siam Broken: Fragmentation, Relics, and Modern Architecture in the Theravada Buddhist Ecumene, 1898–1998
Danièle Cohn is Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France. Her research focuses on critical theory and the history of art. French Theory Confronted with Contemporary History Painting
María José Herrera is Professor of Social Sciences at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art, particularly from Argentina. Critical Expography: Texts and Fragments for the Interpretation of Art on Exhibition
Michael Kramer is Assistant Professor of History at the College at Brockport, State University of New York. His research focuses on the modern cultural history of the United States, music, and the history of technology. “Programming the Mind”: Harry Smith’s Computational Imagination
Wei-Cheng Lin is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, Illinois. His research centers on the history of Chinese art and architecture during the medieval period. Necessarily Incomplete: Fragments of Chinese Artifacts
Mia Yinxing Liu is Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Her research focuses on the history and critical theory of Asian photography and modern Asian art. Fragments and Phantasmagoria: Landscape Photography of Lang Jingshan (1895–1998)
Keelan Overton is Visiting Scholar in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research centers on art history and architecture of the Islamic world. Persian Architecture Fragmented: The Biographies, Trails, and Economies of Iran’s Tiled Surfaces, c. 1820–2020
Eleonora Pistis is Assistant Professor of Art History at Columbia University, New York. Her research focuses on European urbanism and architecture of the 17th and 18th centuries. Antiquarian Fragments, Making of Knowledge, and Missing Architecture
Jenni Sorkin (Consortium Scholar) is Associate Professor in the History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research centers on contemporary art, gender, and material culture. Skin-Grid-Sin: Cloth at the Body’s Margins
Akiko Walley is the Maude I. Kerns Associate Professor of Japanese Art at the University of Oregon, Eugene. Her research focuses on Japanese Buddhist art from the 7th and 8th centuries. A Single Drop of Water Is the Entire Ocean: Fragmentation and Assemblage in a Tekagami Calligraphy Album
Dagmara Zuzanna Wielgosz-Rondolino is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Warsaw, Poland. Her research centers on the Eastern Mediterranean during the Greco-Roman Period. Fragments of a Fragment. Reconstructing the Early Sculptural Decoration of the Sanctuary of Allat in Palmyra
Postdoctoral Fellows
Tiffany Barber is Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Delaware, Newark. Her research focuses on African American art and visual culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women’s Visual Work
Theresa Sims is a postdoctoral fellow at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Her research focuses on African art. Bodies in Pieces: Zulu Figurative Art and Colonial Engagement, 1860–1920
David Zagoury is Scientific Assistant at the Bibliotheca Hertziana—Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome, Italy. His research centers on early modern European art and art theory. Art at Breaking Point: Kinetic Images and their Fragmentation in the Early Modern Period
GRI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellows
Cicek Beeby (Getty Center) is Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University. Her research focuses on funerary practices and spatial analysis in Greece during the early Iron Age and Archaic Period. Divisible Objects, Bodies, and Spaces within Ancient Greek Mortuary Landscapes
Alice Mandell (Villa) is Assistant Professor and William Foxwell Albright Chair in Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. Her research focuses on language and religion in the ancient Levant. Writing, Identity, and Power: The Origins and Spread of the Alphabet in the Levant and Mediterranean
Predoctoral Fellows
Yong Cho is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Reading against the Fragmentary Archive: A Mongol Perspective of Chinese Art History, 1271–1368
Mary Learner is a PhD candidate in the English and Comparative Literature Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Material Sampling and Patterns of Thought in Early Modern England
Lisl Schoepflin is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Inca History in Fragments: Physical and Cultural Traces of Andean Voices in the Murúa Manuscripts
Guest Scholars
Gala Porras-Kim (Artist in Residence) is an interdisciplinary, independent artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores the process of learning and knowledge formation and the social and political contexts that influence how language and history intersect with art.
Getty Rothschild Fellow
Diana Davis is an independent scholar based in London. Her main area of research is the market for French decorative art in early 19th-century Britain and the role of the dealer in this system. Davis is the fifth recipient of the Getty Rothschild fellowship, which she plans to use to investigate the evolution of the art market in Britain from 1870 to 1930, continuing the history that she began to chart in The Tastemakers: British Dealers and the Making of the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785–1865 (Getty Publications, 2020).
President’s International Council Scholars
Andreas Scholl is Director of the Collection of Classical Antiquities for the Berlin State Museums. Ancient Greek Relief Sculpture and Its Reception in European Art
Connecting Art Histories Scholars
Maria Berbara is Professor of Art History at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her research focuses on Italian and Iberian art produced between the 15th and 17th centuries. Tupinambás, the Antarctic France and the Wars of Religion: Representing Violence and Perceiving Cruelty in the Early Modern Period
Simon Soon is Senior Lecturer at the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His research focuses on the art and visual culture of Southeast Asia during the 19th and 20th centuries. The Procession of Semar and His Cavalcade: Terminologies, Genealogies, Cosmologies and Their Mobilities in the 19th and Early 20th Century Malay Archipelago
Museum Scholars
Mark Abbe is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Georgia. His research focuses on Greek and Roman art, particularly marble statuary and polychromy. Host Department: Antiquities Conservation Hidden Color: Polychromy on Ancient Marble Sculpture at the Getty
Kathleen Bickford Berzock is Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Illinois. Her research focuses primarily on African art. Host Department: Manuscripts African Peoples, Material Culture, and the Medieval World
Agnès Bos is Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Her research focuses on French decorative arts, especially furniture, tapestries, and textiles. Host Department: Sculpture and Decorative Arts The French Royal Order of the Holy Spirit (1578–1830): Art and Materiality
Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée is an independent scholar and an expert on the drawings of Simon Vouet. Host Department: Drawings Monograph on Simon Vouet (1590–1649)
Thomas Galifot is a curator at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. His research focuses on 19th-century photography and photographers. Host Department: Photographs Charles Nègre, French 19th-Century Photographer
Erin Murphy is the James Needham Chief Conservator at the Weissman Preservation Center and Collections Care, Harvard Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her research focuses on the preservation of photographs. Host Department: Paper Conservation Preservation and Conservation of 20th-Century Stabilized Photographs
Tim Murray is the Charles La Trobe Professor of Archaeology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. His research focuses on historical archaeology, urban archaeology, and the history of Australia. Host Department: Director’s Office A New Global History of Archaeology
Guido Rebecchini is a lecturer in 16th-century southern European art and Associate Dean for Students at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, England. His research focuses on 16th-century Italian art, politics, and urbanism, as well as courtly art and culture in Mantua. Host Department: Paintings Parmigianino’s Brushstrokes and Sixteenth-Century Art Theory
Villa Scholars
Aaron Burke is Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and the Kershaw Chair of Ancient Eastern Mediterranean Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on the archaeology of Ancient Israel and the Levant. Foreign Fighters in the Levant during the Late Iron Age: Mercenaries and Cultural Exchange
Eric Cline is Professor of Classics, Anthropology, and History at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. His research focuses on the archaeology and ancient history of the ancient Near East during the Late Bronze and early Iron Age. After 1177: The Rebirth of Civilization
Denise Demetriou is Associate Professor and the Gerry and Jeannie Ranglas Chair in Ancient Greek History at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on cross-cultural interactions within the ancient Greek world. Phoenicians among Others: How Migration and Mobility Transformed the Ancient Mediterranean
Tamar Hodos is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Bristol, England. Her research focuses on the archaeology of the Mediterranean during the Iron Age. Globalizing Luxuries during the Mediterranean’s Iron Age
Brett Kaufman is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on cultural history and anthropological archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Iron Age Phoenician Political Economy: Democracy, Diplomacy, and Destruction at Tyre and Carthage
Susan ‘Becky’ Martin is Associate Professor of Archaeology and of History of Art and Architecture at Boston University, Massachusetts. Her research focuses on Greek and Phoenician art and archaeology. The Forging of Dōros: Greek Myth and Coin Imagery from a Phoenician Port
Adriano Orsingher is a postdoctoral researcher at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany. His research focuses on Phoenician and Punic archaeology. Beyond Theatre. Performance, Age and Gender in Phoenician and Punic Masks
Benjamin Porter is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the archaeology of the Middle East and Mediterranean in the Bronze Age and Iron Age. A Mediterranean Bricolage: Rethinking the ‘Long’ First Millennium BCE Levant
Gary Rendsburg is the Blanche and Irving Laurie Chair in Jewish History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. His research focuses on Semitic languages and ancient Near Eastern literature. The Spread of Phoenician Writing Culture to Ancient Greece