Georgia O'Keeffe Museum - Scholars

Scholars Current & Past

2009 - 2010 Scholars

2008 - 2009 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

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