Elizabeth Hutchinson
Elizabeth Hutchinson is Associate
Professor of North American art history at Barnard College/Columbia
University in New York City where she teaches undergraduate and graduate
courses on U.S. and indigenous North American art and visual culture
and supervises BA and MA students in American Studies. She is the author
of The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890-1915,
which addresses the production and promotion of Native American art at
institutions supported by government and social reform agencies who
presented it as both modernist and anti-modern. The book uses objects,
photographs and contemporary publications to plumb both the
Anglo-American and the Native American experience of this “craze.” As
Hutchinson asserts, because of the way it was valued by mainstream
viewers, Native art was one of the only aspects of “traditional” Native
culture that was tolerated by a federal government committed to solving
the “Indian problem” through assimilation.
Hutchinson is currently
working on a book about Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of the Pacific
Coast of North America that examines pictures made for the United
States government from a perspective that links the critical commitments
of indigenous studies and ecocriticism. A piece of this project has
recently appeared in Picturing, volume one of the Terra
Foundation Essays series. She has also produced a number of shorter
studies of late nineteenth-century landscape painting and photography
that have appeared in the journals October, and American Art as well as
in several exhibition catalogs.
In addition, Hutchinson is the
author of several studies of portraits of Native diplomats made in the
Early Republic that have sought to give legibility to the critical work
done by indigenous artists to assert tribal identity and sovereignty
within the historical frameworks of intercultural exchange. This work
can be found in Winterthur Portfolio,British Journal of American Studies and the volume Global Trade and the Visual Arts in Federal New England, edited by Patricia Johnston and Caroline Frank.
Professor
Hutchinson has enjoyed working closely with museums. She has
contributed to exhibitions at the BYU Art Museum, the Iris and B. Gerald
Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art and the Terra Foundation. In 2016, she curated an
exhibition “Messages Across Time and Space: Inupiat Drawings from the
1890s at Columbia University,” that was on view at the gallery at the
Center for the Study for Ethnicity and Race. Hutchinson’s research has
been supported by several institutions including the National Endowment
for the Humanities, the Clark Art Institute, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
and the American Council for Learned Societies.
