2003 - 2004 Scholars

Bill Anthes
As sistant Professor, Art Department, University of Memphis
“Native Moderns”
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
“Displacing Orientalism: Thomas Eakins and Ethnographic Modernity”
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
“Melancholy Manhood: Gender Loss, and the Inability to Mourn in American Literacy Modernism”
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
“Sculpting the New Negro: The Life and Work of Augusta Savage (1892-1962)”
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
“Somatotypes: Race and Materiality in Early Twentieth-Century Sculpture and Photography”
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
“Selling Abstraction: American Non-Objectivity in the 1930’s”
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.