The research projects selected vary widely and include such topics as Pueblo architecture, luxury objects in Aztec Mexico, Ghanaian art, graffiti, early Islamic print culture and more.
“The theme ‘Art and Anthropology’ addresses the global turn in art history toward an intensifying rapprochement with anthropology,” says Thomas W. Gaehtgens, director of the GRI, “leading to a more deliberate inclusion of vernacular, and indigenous arts. The topic addresses the fascinating encounter of cultures in art history from the earliest times to Modernism and Contemporary art.”
The theme “Art and Anthropology” is designed to challenge 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. Applicants were invited to address both past and present relationships among the disciplines of art history and anthropology, as well as archaeology. In addition, scholars working in the classics and antiquities proposed research projects under the theme “The Classical World in Context: Egypt.”
“Since 1985, the GRI has put scholarship first, making it possible for arts professionals at different stages in their careers to immerse themselves in a particular research project, giving them a space and time dedicated to intellectual and creative freedom,” said Alexa Sekyra, head of the GRI Scholars Program. “In asking scholars open-ended questions about their disciplines, methodologies, and their relationships to other fields of research, we received top-tier proposals that span continents and eras. I’m excited to see the great work that will come out of this incoming group of exceptional researchers.”
The Scholars Program has become exceptionally competitive, with the number of applicants breaking records year after year. For the 2016/2017 scholar year, the GRI, received more than 350 applications from scholars and other cultural figures. The 47 scholars that were invited to work in residence in Los Angeles will pursue their own research projects, make use of Getty collections, and participate in the intellectual life of the Getty Center and the Getty Villa. They will each present their research to their peers, and often new projects arise from their time at the Getty.
Getty Scholars
The 2016/2017 Getty Scholars Program awardees are:
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)
Predoctoral Fellows
Grace T. Harpster is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Carlo Borromeo’s Itineraries (September–June)
Julia Christine Lum is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. A Traveling Art: Cross-Cultural Landscapes of the Pacific, 1788–1848 (September–June)
Giulia S. Smith is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at University College London, United Kingdom. An Anthropology of Ourselves: The Independent Group from Urban Fieldwork to Global Ecology, 1929–1973 (September–June)
Daniel M. Zolli is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Voices in the Workshop: Donatello and Theories of Making in Fifteenth-Century Oral Culture (September–June)
Postdoctoral Fellows
Anneka Lenssen is Assistant Professor of Global Modern Art in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Being Mobilized: The Vitality of Arab Art, 1930–1960 (September–June)
Albert Narath is Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Modernism in Mud: Imagining Pueblo Architecture Between Art History and Anthropology (September–June)
Guest Scholars
George H. Okello Abungu is Founding Director and Lead Consultant of Okello Abungu Heritage Consultants based in Nairobi, Kenya. His research focuses on archaeology, museology, and the historical preservation and sustainable cultural management of African heritage. Museumizing and De-Museumizing the Sacred Carved Wooden Vigongos of the Miji Kenda People of Coastal Kenya: Contested Identities, Contested Meanings (September–December)
Naman Ahuja is Professor of Indian Art and Architecture at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He is a scholar of Indian iconography, sculpture, temple architecture, Sultanate period painting and issues around transculturalism in antiquity. Art in the Private Domain. Terracotta, Ivory and Wooden Small-Finds in India: 2nd Century BC to 2nd Century AD (January–June)
María Isabel Baldassare is Professor and Director of the MA Program in the History of Art of Argentina and Latin America at the Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales, Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her research centers on art collecting, art markets, and late 19th-and early 20th-century European, Latin American, and Argentinean art. America Latina and the Idea of a “Global” Modernity (January–March)
Hans Belting is Advisor of the Global Art and the Museum project at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, and Professor Emeritus in the Institut für Kunstwissenschaft und Medientheorie at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, Germany. He is a scholar of medieval and early modern European art, as well as of contemporary art and theory. Anthropology and Contemporary Art in the Global Age (September–December)
Andrea Buddensieg is Curator, Researcher, and Project Manager of the Global Art and the Museum project at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany. Her main research interests are 20th-century design and contemporary art. Anthropology and Contemporary Art in the Global Age (September–December)
Hugo Djikstal is an independent sound artist and designer based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The Art of Sound Across Cultural Spaces and Divides (September–June)
Baiding Fan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China. His main research interests are the artistic theory of the Renaissance, historiography of art history, and the history of iconology. Shifting Frameworks: Kulturwissenschaft and Kunstwissenschaft in the Context of World Art Studies (April–June)
Michael Ann Holly is Consulting Director and Starr Director Emeritus of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Her research concerns the historiography and theory of art history. At the Back of the Painted Beyond / At the Still Point of the Painted World (January–March)
Keith Moxey is Barbara Novak Professor in the Department of Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University, New York. His research centers on the historiography and philosophy of art history, as well as on Northern Renaissance art, social history, and critical theory. Temporalities of Art History (September–December)
Fiona Tan (Artist in Residence) is an independent artist born in Indonesia and raised in Australia, and currently lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Deeply embedded in all of Tan’s work is her fascination with the mutability of identity, the deceptive nature of representation and the play of memory across time and space. Fiona Tan’s film and video practice explores notions of individual and collective identity in a world increasingly shaped by global culture and the histories and journeys that form it. An Anthropology of Art, Questions and Challenges (September–June)
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellows
Priyanka Basu is CFD Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History at Scripps College, Claremont, California. “Everywhere on Earth the Same Beginnings”: German Art History in a Globalizing World, 1880–1915 (September–April)
Zirwat Chowdhury is Visiting Faculty Member in Art History at Bennington College, Vermont. The Vociferant Image: Sound and the Ethics of Empire in 18th-Century British Art and Visual Culture (September–April)
Museum Guest Scholars
Paloma Alarcó is Chief Curator of Modern Painting at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain. Host Department: Collections (September–December)
Pascal-François Bertrand is Professor of Art History at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France. Host Department: Sculpture and Decorative Arts (July–September)
Jane Fejfer is Associate Professor in the Department of Classical Archaeology at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Host Department: Antiquities (April–June)
Mary Flanagan is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. Host Department: Education (January–March)
Alastair Laing is Curator Emeritus of Pictures and Sculpture at the National Trust (for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland). Host Department: Drawings (January–March)
Bertrand Lavédrine is Director of the Centre de recherche sur la conservation des collections at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris, France. Host Department: Paper Conservation (July–September)
Lawrence Nees is Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware, Newark. Host Department: Manuscripts (April–June)
Nicholas Penny is the former Director of the National Gallery, London, United Kingdom. Host Department: Paintings (January–March)
Thomas Weski is Curator at the Stiftung für Fotografie und Medienkunst mit Archiv Michael Schmidt, Berlin, Germany. Host Department: Photographs (April–June)
The Classical World in Context: Egypt (Villa) 2016/2017
For a second year, the Getty Scholars Program at the Villa will focus on relations between the cultures of the classical world and Egypt, which had a crucial, and often reciprocal, impact on cultural trajectories in both spheres from the Bronze Age through the coming of Islam. Priority will be given to research topics that are cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, utilizing a wide range of archaeological, textual, anthropological, and other evidence. This forms the first in a series of research projects that will investigate the ways in which the classical world interacted with the surrounding civilizations of the Mediterranean, Near East, and beyond through trade, warfare, diplomacy, cultural influence, and other forms of contact from the Bronze Age to late antiquity.
Getty Scholars (classical world and Egypt)
Martin Bommas is Reader in Egyptology at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. His research focuses on Egyptology, Roman Archaeology, Isis Studies, and memory studies. Re-membering Egypt: The Art of Creating Nature within Temples of Isis in the Roman World (September–March)
Olaf E. Kaper is Professor of Egyptology at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He specializes in Egyptian religious iconography. The Kellis Mammisi at the Crossroads Between Egypt and West in the Roman Empire (April–June)
Martina Minas-Nerpel is Professor of Egyptology in the Department of History and Classics at Swansea University, United Kingdom. Her research concerns Egyptology with an emphasis on the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. The Ptolemaic Queens in the Egyptian Temples: Intercultural ‘Portraits’ of Power (September–March)
Branko Fredde van Oppen de Ruiter is Visiting Scholar and Curator at the Allard Pierson Museum, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His research interests include Hellenistic Egypt, iconography, royal ideology, art history, archaeology, and ancient history. Ptolemaic Seals from Edfu (April–June)
Richard Veymiers is Teaching and Research Assistant in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Liège, Belgium, and Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow in the Faculty of Archaeology at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. He is a scholar of the cultural history of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, archaeology of religion in the Greek and Roman cities, historical anthropology of images in ancient societies, and the diffusion and reception of the Egyptian gods in the classical world. Sarapis from Memphis to Rome: A Cultural Biography (September–December)
Postdoctoral Fellows (classical world and Egypt)
Stephanie Pearson is Research Associate in the Institut für Archäologie at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Collecting Culture: Luxury Goods and Roman Perceptions of Egypt (September–June)
Bethany L. Simpson is Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Images and Identity: The Contextual Significance of Domestic Paintings in Roman Egypt (September–June)
Guest Scholar
Manfred Bietak is Professor Emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Vienna, and Principal Investigator for the ERC Advanced Grant project “The Hyksos Enigma,” based at the Institut für Orientalische und Europäische Archäologie at the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. His research focuses on the archaeology and history of Egypt and Nubia, and of the Levant and Cyprus in the Bronze Age. The Hyksos Enigma (January–March)
Learn more about the Scholars Program and Research Projects.