Georgia O'Keeffe Museum - Scholars

Scholars Current & Past

2010 - 2011 Scholars

2009 - 2010 Scholars

Elizabeth West Hutchinson
Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Barnard College, Columbia University

Ph.D.: Stanford University
Project: "The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in America, 1890-1914"
Dates: November-June 2005

Elizabeth Hutchinson’s project examines the "Indian Craze": a passion for collecting, displaying, and emulating Native American art that lasted from the late 19th century through the years of World War I. During this time, Native handicrafts were exhibited by museums, art societies, department stores, and International Expositions and used extensively in mainstream art schools and design manuals. Examining the contributions of both Anglo and Native artists, critics and theorists, Hutchinson argues that the "Indian Craze" was a transcultural phenomenon that allowed members of both groups to develop modern approaches to art and cultural identity; while Anglo artists saw Native art as the basis of a national school of modernism, Indian people used this interest to agitate for greater acceptance of their culture.

Carrie Lambert
Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Northwestern University

Ph.D.: Stanford University
Project: "The Seeing Difficulty": Yvonne Rainer and American Art in the 1960’s
Dates: July-August 2005

Carrie Lambert will be working on "The Seeing Difficulty": Yvonne Rainer and American Art in the 1960s, which will be the first book on the performance career of the influential choreographer, artist, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. By tracing through the 1960s Rainer's use of the human body to revise conventions of spectatorship--from the early days of Judson Dance Theater, through Minimalism, to the political and feminist art of the early 1970s--the book will offer a new history of American art’s orientation toward the viewer in this watershed period.

Emily Ballew Neff
Curator American Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Ph.D.: University of Texas at Austin
Project: "The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950"
Dates: November 1-19, July 5-August 12

Emily Ballew Neff is curator of American painting and sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. At the O'Keeffe Museum and Research Center, Neff will continue to develop, conduct research, and continue writing the catalogue for an exhibition project titled "The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950." This exhibition will explore the role played by the West in the development of American modernism through 110 paintings, watercolors, photographs and, where thematically and aesthetically relevant, American Indian art.

Kristin Ann Schwain
Assistant Professor, Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Missouri-Columbia

Ph.D.: Stanford University
Project: "Signs of Grace: Religious Experience, Visual Practice, and Modernist American Art"
Dates: September 2004-July 2005

"Signs of Grace: Religious Experience, Visual Practice, and Modernist American Art" examines the early history of modern art to excavate the central role religion played in its development. It shows the manifold ways four American artists - Henry Ossawa Tanner, F. Holland Day. Abbott Handerson Thayer, and Thomas Eakins - turned to religious beliefs and practices to construct modern aesthetic experience. Moreover, it explores the social implications of modernist ways of seeing on strategies of African-American uplift, new formulations of gender and sexuality, models of cultural authority, and on social relations in turn-of-the-century America more generally.

Isabelle Loring Wallace
Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Department of the History of Art, Bryn Mawr College

Ph.D.: Bryn Mawr College
Project: "Signification and Subject: The Art of Jasper Johns"
Dates: June-August 2005

This project will consider work produced by contemporary American painter Jasper Johns, linking his work to broader philosophical questions concerning the nature of authorship, signification and the relationship between representation and mortality. An attempt is also made to situate Johns' work within its proper historical and cultural context, bearing in mind that the artist’s career begins at a moment that witnesses the emergence of postmodernism, as well as the not unrelated discovery of DNA in 1953.

2003 - 2004 Scholars

Bill Anthes
Assistant Professor, Art Department, University of Memphis

Project: "Native Moderns"
Dates: September 2003 – May 2004

Anthes is preparing a book, "Native Moderns" in which he will explore the work of a small group of Native American painters and sculptors who were working after World War II and broke from the "art traditions" of their own culture to embrace and develop individual modernist styles. He will demonstrate how issues of identity, citizenship, cultural property, and sovereignty shape and are fundamental to an understanding of postwar American modernist culture.

Alan C. Braddock
Assistant Professor, Department of Fine Arts, Syracuse University

Project: "Displacing Orientalism: Thomas Eakins and Ethnographic Modernity"
Dates: January 2004 – May 2004

Braddock will be examining the art of Thomas Eakins in relation to evolving anthropological conceptions of race and culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Special focus is on Eakins's 1895 portrait of, and friendship with, anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, whose unprecedented fieldwork at Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico laid the foundation for modern cultural anthropology.

Greg Forter
Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of South Carolina

Project: "Melancholy Manhood: Gender Loss, and the Inability to Mourn in American Literacy Modernism"
Dates: September 2003 – August 2004

Forter’s project investigates gender, capitalism, and strategies of grieving in American literary modernism. The study concentrates on how the spread of monopoly capitalism between 1890 and 1920 gave rise to changes in the sex/gender system; how several male modernist writers experienced these changes as a profound loss; and how what they wrote reveals and seeks to resolve their conflicted responses to this issue.

Theresa Leininger-Miller
Associate Professor, Art History/School of Art, University of Cincinnati

Project: "Sculpting the New Negro: The Life and Work of Augusta Savage (1892-1962)"
Dates: June 2004 – August 2004

Theresa Leininger-Miller will be working on a book, "Sculpting the New Negro: The Life and Work of Augusta Savage (1892-1962)," which will be the first monograph on one of the key leaders in the visual arts of the New Negro Movement, and it will establish Savage’s place within and significance to the history of American Modernism.

Linda Kim
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History of Art, University of California, Berkeley

Project: "Somatotypes: Race and Materiality in Early Twentieth-Century Sculpture and Photography"
Dates: September 2003 – May 2004

In her dissertation, Kim investigates Malvina Hoffman’s "Races of Mankind," an American sculpture series representing racial types for a natural history museum in the 1930s, and the particular qualities that made sculpture more apt at embodying race than either plaster mannequins or photography.

Mark Andrew White
Assistant Professor, Art Department, Oklahoma State University

Project: "Selling Abstraction: American Non-Objectivity in the 1930’s"
Dates: September 2003 – August 2004

White's research examines non-objective American art of the 1930s and the strategies abstractionists used to court the attention of indifferent critics and a hostile public. Areas of investigation include the American Abstract Artists, the Transcendental Painting Group, and the Williamsburg Housing Project.

2002 - 2003 Scholars

Christina Grace Cogdell
Assistant Professor, Liberal Studies, California State University, Fullerton

Project: "Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s"
Dates: Jan - Aug 2003
Guest curator of exhibition (title above)
Cogdell's work explores the interactions between ideology and visual culture in the rise of U.S. industrial design during the 1920s and 1930s, examining multiple correlations between eugenic thought and the streamline style.

Audrey Goodman
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Georgia State University

Project: "Exploring Culture from the Modernist Southwest"
Dates: Sept 2002 - June 2003
Goodman's project investigates how the production and circulation of art and folklore in New Mexico reveal the central paradox of a period and place caught between enforced migration and willed regionalism.

Heather Elizabeth Hole
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art, Princeton University

Project: "(Re)Constructing American Art: Marsden Hartley and the New Mexico Landscape, 1918-1925"
Dates: June - Aug 2003
Hole's dissertation will investigate Hartley's New Mexico art and writings. She will argue that Hartley's New Mexico works and their internal contradictions reveal a rich, complex, and hitherto underestimated attempt to construct a personal and national identity in the face of private loss and cultural upheaval.

Carol S. Merrill (Honorary Recipient)
Librarian, Santo Domingo Pueblo School, N.M.

Project: O’Keeffe Journals
Date: July 2003
With O’Keeffe’s knowledge and approval, Carol Merrill wrote in a journal from 1973 through 1979, when she was working for Georgia O’Keeffe, that recorded their conversations. Merrill stated, "Miss O’Keeffe knew that I kept a journal. She often prepared a place for me to write poetry or write in my journal when I was not busy as her librarian, secretary, reader, or cook." While at the Research Center, Merrill will transcribe, make corrections to, and edit her journals for possible future publication.

Carolyn Winnifred Butler Palmer
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art History, University of Pittsburgh

Project: "Interfaces: The Pop, Politics and Portraiture of David Neel and Andy Warhol"
Dates: Sept 2002 - April 2003
Palmer centers her discussion on explaining the following paradox: the art of Neel and Warhol shares formal properties, methodological techniques, and excerpts from the other's culture, and yet, each still expresses culturally distinct ideas.

Bett Kristine Schumacher
Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art Department, Johns Hopkins University

Project: "Helen Frankenthaler's Modernism: Embodiment and Pictorial Ambiguity, 1950-1965"
Dates: Sept 2002 - Aug 2003
Through analyses of American painter Helen Frankenthaler's training, artistic practice, critical reception, and intellectual circle, Schumacher's dissertation will provide a fully articulated and sustained explanation of Frankenthaler's aesthetic enterprise.

Ann Prentice Wagner
Ph.D. Candidate, Art History & Archeology, University of Maryland

Project: "Living on Paper: The Culture of Drawing in the Stieglitz Circle, 1903-1925"
Dates: Jan - March 2003
In her dissertation, Wagner will study the new culture of drawing that arose in the Alfred Stieglitz Circle in the early twentieth century. Ms. Wagner will focus her inquiry on the critical impact of works by Georgia O'Keeffe and John Marin, the most important graphic artists Stieglitz exhibited.

Mary N. Woods
Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, Cornell University

Project: "Learning to See the 'New' New York: Place and Photography in New York City: 1890-1950"
Dates: May - July 2003
Woods's project will demonstrate how artists, amateurs, journalists, and documentarians contributed to the visual canon of architectural histories of seeing the "new" New York from 1890 until 1950 and thus expanded them to include things other than the usual and conventional photographs of buildings.

2001 - 2002 Scholars

Kathleen Pyne
Associate Professor, Art History, University of Notre Dame

Project: "Modernism and the Feminine Voice: The Search for Woman in Art"
Dates: Sept 2001 - July 2002

The study concentrates on six women artists during their years working in New York, 1900-1930, in order to understand how these women artists of the Stieglitz circle each differently engaged the practices and beliefs of artistic Modernism. Women artists to be included in this research are: Georgia O'Keeffe, Pamela Colman Smith, Gertrude Kasebier, Anne Brigman, Katharine Rhoades, Rebecca Salsbury Strand.

Mike Weaver
Co-Editor, History of Photography (Taylor & Francis, London)

Project: "Theory and Practice of the Equivalent in the Stieglitz-O'Keeffe Circle"
Dates: Sept 2001 - Jan 2002

Dr. Weaver's project attempts to pursue the development of the theory of "Equivalence" in American Modernism, with special reference to Stieglitz and O'Keeffe, but also in the context of Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley. He will trace in detail Stieglitz's understanding of the Equivalent in relation to the theories of G. Albert Aurier and Maurice Denis, as reflected in Gaugin and Van Gogh and mediated in the Stieglitz circle by Marius de Zayas.

Terri Weissman
Ph.D. Candidate, Art & Humanities, Columbia University

Project: "SuperSight: The Photography of Berenice Abbott"
Dates: Sept 2001 - March 2002

Ms. Weissman's dissertation is about the complexity of Abbot's deceptively simple belief that photography should provide the general public with realistic images of a changing world. It is about understanding Abbott's idea of realism, of analyzing why she made some very unfashionable artistic choices, and about exploring how her commitment to a realistic aesthetic led her to photograph science-based subject matter.

Anne Hammond (Honorary Recipient)
Co-Editor, History of Photography (Taylor & Francis, London)

Dr. Hammond is accompanying Dr. Weaver.
Dates: Sept 2001 - Jan 2002

Dr. Hammond will write about Ansel Adams, commemorating his trip to Yosemite with O'Keeffe in 1938. Her book on Ansel Adams will be published by Yale University Press in Spring 2002.

Daniel H. Peck (Honorary Recipient)
John Guy Vassar Professor of English and Director of Environmental Studies, Vassar College

Project: "Changing Conceptions of Landscape in American Literature and Painting, 1830-1930"
Dates: Feb 2002 - August 2002

The book proceeds through a set of paintings of American writers and landscape painters with deep commitments to "beauty" (as an idea and a value) embodied in landscape. While much of the study is devoted to the nineteenth century (it begins with James Fenimore Cooper and Thomas Cole), it arrives finally at the dawning of the twentieth century by representing this era as one in which-under the influence of early pragmatist philosophers such as George Santayana and William James-beauty undergoes a transformation, and shedding certain aspects of its conservatism, finds new avenues for its expression. Exemplifying this transformation are Georgia O'Keeffe and the writer and art critic John C. Van Dyke. Like O'Keeffe, Van Dyke came early in the new century to celebrate two new American landscapes, that of the west and that of the modern city.