A group of young Chinese scholars standing around a wooden table while gazing at an artwork on an easel

Participants in the “Art, Power, and Politics” research seminar hosted by the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, Paris visit the Cabinet des dessins at the Musée des Arts décoratifs

Photo: Markus Schilder © 2019 J. Paul Getty Trust

Since 2009, the Foundation has been supporting visiting faculty and research seminar projects as part of its Connecting Art Histories initiative. Starting in 2020, we began offering grants to support scholars in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Below is a list of grants awarded, starting with COVID-19 Resilience Grants and followed by groupings organized by geographic region:

Latin America
Greater Mediterranean
Asia
Central and Eastern Europe

COVID-19 RESILIENCE GRANTS

These grants are keeping scholars connected despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Funding focuses on fully or partially virtual programs of shorter duration that connect early career scholars and graduate students.

Asia Art Archive Limited

In order to strengthen a regional network of younger scholars, the Asia Art Archive (AAA) will offer the virtual seminar series Art Schools and the Writing of Art History in Asia. Participants will examine the role art schools played in modern and contemporary art histories across Asia in colonial and postcolonial contexts through a series of monthly discussions. They will also gain access to AAA's digital archives, receive customized training on how to use archival collections, present and discuss research papers, and publish their research in AAA's online journal IDEAS. AAA will engage a wider public audience through related guest lectures and a culminating public program in which the participating emerging scholars present their research beyond the seminar cohort and further grow their professional connections.
Project lead: John Tain
Grant awarded: $90,000 (2021)

Fundaçao de Desenvolvimento da UNICAMP and Tufts University

The State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil and Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts are working together to offer a year-long virtual visiting professorship program. The courses will be in areas of study developed in a previous Getty grant to UNICAMP: pre-Columbian/Indigenous, Japanese, and African art, which correspond to ethnicities with significant presence and influence on Brazilian culture. Courses will be offered to graduate students at public universities across Brazil that are in demographically diverse settings but with few resources to study non-Western art, and at Tufts University, which is emerging as a North American center for the study of Lusophone visual and material culture. A concluding virtual summit will be open to all visiting faculty and students, further developing a network of researchers interested in non-European fields in Brazil during a period of continued scholarly isolation due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Project leads: Patricia Dalcanale Meneses, Claudia Mattos
Grants awarded: $59,000 (Tufts, 2021) and $100,000 (UNICAMP, 2021)

Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP)/Fundação de Apoio á Universidade de São Paulo

A grant to the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo (MAC USP) is supporting the virtual research seminar Curatorial Practices: Critical Curating and Decolonial Studies in Arts - African Diasporas in the Americas. A cohort of Afro-descendant scholars and curators from Brazil will connect with MAC USP curators and international experts to study objects from the museum's permanent collection and contribute their voices to the ongoing global discussion about a more inclusive modern and contemporary art history. Participants will come from Brazil's northeastern, Amazonian, and southern regions, where dedicated faculty and curricula in art history and museum studies are particularly scarce. Not only is the project expected to generate a scholarly network, but the group will also produce research essays, bibliographies, and other teaching materials and make them freely accessible online to public universities throughout Brazil.
Project Lead: Ana Magalhães
Grant awarded: $76,400 (2021)

School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)

A Getty grant is supporting the virtual research seminar Medieval Eastern Mediterranean Cities as Places of Artistic Interchange, which explores medieval cities as sites of dynamic transformation. The project supports a rising generation of scholars in the region whose research recognizes the many cultural, social, political, and religious forces at play in local material culture across the modern nations of Cyprus, Greece, Israel, Syria, and Turkey. The seminar is open to past Connecting Art Histories program participants as well as advanced graduate students and recent PhDs, and will promote new scholarship that revises established paradigms and considers the development of an international style based on networks of patronage and trade. Discussions will include material that is both familiar and unknown to participants and will provide a safe space to discuss and debate ethnic and religious differences.
Project Lead: Scott Redford
Grant awarded: £67,000 (2021)

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Graduate art history students and early-career scholars in Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina united in the virtual seminar Rethinking the "Popular Arts" for 20th-Century Latin America to reevaluate artists' engagement in the 20th century with the concept of arte popular, also known as "folk art" or "popular culture" in English. Led by scholars from participating universities in the three countries, along with leading international specialists, students looked comparatively across national boundaries to reconsider the traditional divide between the fine arts and crafts. They also critically reexamined how modernist artists "borrowed" from artisans who often came from Indigenous communities, romanticizing them as authentic sources of national identity. The group met in Medellín, Colombia in May 2022 and Buenos Aires in September 2022.
Project leads: Deborah Dorotinsky Alperstein
Grant awarded: $128,000 (2021)

Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF)

To establish new scholarly connections and stimulate fresh ideas for transnational art historical research, a Getty grant is supporting the virtual research seminar Revising Art History through a Regional Network of University Museums and Archives. Graduate students from Argentina, Brazil, and Peru will work with senior scholars to explore collections devoted to modern and contemporary art at university museums and archives in the three countries. Each institution involved will digitize relevant materials in their own collections to share among the virtual seminar participants, giving graduate students the tools to develop new lines of intellectual inquiry and advance their studies. UNTREF will publish project outcomes in an edition of Relatos Curatoriales, the university's arts and culture journal.
Project leads: Diana Wechsler, Paula Hrycyk
Grant awarded: $82,500 (2021)

University of Warsaw

A series of virtual research seminars, Narrating Art and Feminism: Eastern Europe and Latin America, aims to cultivate a network of younger scholars—including regional alumni of CAH projects—in Eastern Europe and Latin America, where opportunities for research and scholarly community have been significantly diminished by COVID-19. Building on the previous CAH project _Gender Politics and the Art of European Socialist States, the series will foster the exchange of interregional and transregional perspectives on feminist art history. Over the course of ten months, participants will convene virtually with experts to discuss the role of gender and sexuality in the modern and contemporary art histories of both regions—areas where these subjects are less commonly known or studied—in order to stimulate new feminist art history and broadly move toward more inclusive researching, publishing, and teaching of feminist art.
Project leads: Agata Jakubowska, Andrea Giunta
Grant awarded: $90,500 (2021)

LATIN AMERICA

Fundação de Desenvolvimento da UNICAMP

State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), located just outside São Paulo, Brazil, received Getty grant funds for a series of visiting professorships and related workshops dedicated to the study of non-Western art. UNICAMP was the first graduate-level art history program in Brazil to offer courses in this area. The project cemented the university's leadership by supporting eight visiting faculty in Pre-Columbian, African, and Japanese art over a three-year period. A publication of articles from visiting faculty and select students is forthcoming.
Project Lead: Claudia Mattos
Grant awarded: $245,000 (2013)

Fundaçao de Apoio a Universidade Federal de São Paulo / Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V

A pair of grants is supporting the project Art and Power: Decolonizing Art History, comprised of related activities at Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP) in Brazil and the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, Italy. The organizations are collaborating to strengthen graduate teaching in Brazil by helping students engage with a wider range of scholars, approaches, archives, and works of art. UNIFESP will organize a research seminar that includes an online course for students from three Brazilian universities, field study at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, and a capstone workshop at UNIFESP. The Bibliotheca Hertziana will host a separate fellowship program for advanced students pursuing PhDs in Brazilian universities. The project will serve as an opportunity to question the role that Western cultures have played in shaping art history in South America and enable Brazilian scholars with deep awareness of local collections and traditions to contribute their knowledge to a more complete global art history.
Project Leads: Jens Baumgarten and Tristan Weddigen
Grant awarded: $210,000 (2022, UNIFESP), $30,000 (2022, Biblioteca Hertziana)

Fundación ArtNexus para la Promolgación y Divulgación del arte

Fundación ArtNexus hosted Intellectual Networks: Art and Politics in Latin America, a project that brought together scholars from across Latin America to study intellectual and artistic networks in the region during the 1920s and the 1970s. A project team of international scholars met in two research seminars—one at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá and one at the Getty Center—to address these important decades in Latin American social and artistic history. The team presented its research findings through papers at a public conference and through an exhibition of archival material at the Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero de Buenos Aires in 2013. The exhibition traveled to the Museum Leopoldo Rother at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in May 2014.
Project Leads: Maria Clara Bernal, Ivonne Pini, and William Lopez Rosas
Grant awarded: $127,500 (2011)

Max Weber Stiftung—Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland / Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte

This grant will support the 2022 and 2024 Transregional Academy, a program that launched in 2015 to foster collaboration among scholars in Latin America and with scholars primarily in Europe. Two Academies—the first in Bogotá, Colombia and the second in in Lima, Peru—will bring together graduate students and postdoctoral scholars of Latin American art history for 10-day seminars to exchange views on topical questions surfaced by local hosting institutions and perform object-based inquiry. In addition to visiting museums and monuments, participants will engage with senior scholars in research presentations and discussion sessions on such topics as the expressions of time in Latin American art and visual culture and the relationship between academic and vernacular art within art history.
Project Lead: Thomas Kirchner and Lena Bader
Grant awarded: $140,000 (2022)

Museum of Latin American Art

The Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, the only museum in the Western United States exclusively focused on contemporary Latin American art, organized two linked international symposia, Between Museum and Practice: Rethinking Latin American Art in the 21st Century. Academics, curators and museum directors from 16 countries came together to discuss new models for interpreting and presenting modern and contemporary Latin American art. The first gathering was held in Los Angeles, hosted jointly at MoLAA and the Getty Center in March 2011; the second seminar took place at the Museo de Arte de Lima in Peru in November 2011.
Project Lead: Cecilia Fajardo-Hill
Grant awarded: $160,000 (2010)

President and Fellows of Harvard College

A grant to the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard is supporting Afro-Latin American Art: Building the Field, a series of research seminars focused on the nascent field of Afro-Latin American art history. Although 95% of the Africans who were sent under duress to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade arrived in Latin America and the Caribbean, their art historical influence and that of their descendants is just beginning to be critically examined. This project brings younger scholars from across Latin America together with distinguished faculty to identify and analyze the visual production of African and Afro-descendant artists in Latin America from the colonial era to the present. Participants will consider how visual representations have participated in and shaped debates concerning race, difference, hybridity, and nationality in the region as they undertake intensive field study in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. A second grant awarded in 2023 extended the project to make up for pandemic-related delays.
Project Lead: Alejandro de la Fuente and Thomas Cummins
Grant awarded: $235,000 (2020), $30,000 (2023)

Trustees of Columbia University

Scholars based at Columbia University received Getty support for a series of international research seminars examining the cultural interactions between Spanish Italy and the Iberian Americas in the 16th century. Despite the extension of Spanish Habsburg rule to the Low Countries, southern Italy, and Latin America during that time, scholarship tends to treat the art of each region separately. Spanish Italy and the Iberian Americas brought younger scholars from Italy and Latin America together with a group of distinguished faculty to study the artistic ties that developed between these two regions during the so-called "Golden Age." Together the team identified a common corpus of key objects to be studied, developed a shared historical narrative, and explored new models for conceiving and analyzing artistic influence. A second Getty grant is supporting additional research seminars in two under-researched regions of Spanish Italy—Puglia and Sardinia. This phase is allowing senior mentors to work closely with the participating younger scholars to develop solid research projects.
Project Leads: Michael Cole and Alessandra Russo
Grants awarded: $247,000 (2015) and $280,000 (2019)

Universidad de los Andes

The Universidad de los Andes received grant support for its art history department to launch a visiting professor program in the area of non-Western art. The new courses are allowing students to access and participate fully in the discipline of art history globally as well as better understand the visual culture of South America, particularly Colombia. In the 16th century, the Manila Galleons carried art objects and cultural traditions as well as people across the Pacific, facilitating the introduction of Asian and African aesthetic forms into Colombia. With new methodologies shaping the study of African art, program organizers hope to invigorate the field of Afro-Colombian art, which has been studied largely from a European and anthropological perspective.
Project Lead: Maria Clara Bernal
Grant awarded: $85,000 (2017)

Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ)

The Amazon River basin, an intercultural space connecting Brazil, Venezuela, Guyana, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, possesses a long and varied history of cultural production. However, studies on the region’s art and architecture have focused on their early modern Spanish and Portuguese influences. To encourage a more accurate understanding of the area’s art and material culture, a Getty grant is funding Examining the Art History of the Amazon Basin, a traveling research seminar intended to expand the cannon and focus on the contributions of Indigenous populations. A group mainly comprised of graduate students from Ecuador, Columbia, and Brazil will attend online seminars and in-person convenings in Ecuador and Brazil, where they will visit rural collections and speak with local artisans about their materials and technologies. To address a lack of teacher-training within the region, the project will retain two postdocs per year to support teaching activities and project administration.
Project Lead: Carmen Fernández Salvador Ayala
Grant awarded: $235,000 (2023)

Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

In partnership with other universities across Latin America, the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro undertook a series of faculty and student exchanges and a related research project to examine the complex history of Latin American art in the long 19th century. Three intensive study courses held in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro focused on the following topics: the persistence of the classical tradition; the origins of Latin American modernism; and the appropriation of art and artifacts from indigenous cultures and trade networks with Africa and Asia. The resulting research is available in the online publication 19&20.
Project Leads: Maria Berbara, Roberto Conduru, and Vera Siqueira
Grant awarded: $310,000 (2012)

Universidade Federal de São Paulo

Forging an innovative alliance, the art history departments at Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) and the University of Zurich, Switzerland established a teaching exchange focused on the topics of The Global Baroque, The Notion of the Renaissance, and Practices in the Expanded Field of Art History. These courses featured residencies by visiting faculty from the respective programs in São Paulo and Zurich as well as field trips, allowing students first-hand study of objects and monuments in Brazil and Europe. This pedagogical project was complemented by a sequence of research seminars that focus on the challenges posed for art history by globalization, with a particular emphasis on Latin American art history. The project received a second round of Foundation grant support in 2013 for both partners to undertake additional visiting professorships and research seminars.
Project Lead: Jens Baumgarten
Grants awarded: $240,000 (2013), $185,000 (2013, to Universität Zurich), and $214,000 (2011)

Universidad Nacional de San Martín

Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Buenos Aires, home of one of the leading conservation centers in Latin America, organized a series of research seminars entitled Materiality between Art, Science and Culture in the Viceroyalties. Art historians, conservators, and conservation scientists from eight different countries across Latin America and Europe worked together to advance "technical art history" concerning colonial Latin American art. The grant supported three convenings on three different continents—including one at the Getty Center—focusing on artistic practices and materials in colonial Hispanic America from the 16th through the 18th centuries.
Project Leads: Agustina Rodriguez Romero and Gabriela Siracusano
Grant awarded: $214,000 (2010)

Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF)

This grant to UNTREF supported the final phase of the Materiality between Art, Science and Culture in the Viceroyalties project described above that originated at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín. The initial research seminars created an interdisciplinary team that examined in-depth the artistic practices and materials of colonial Latin American art. This follow-up grant expanded the intellectual network through a culminating seminar; a two-volume publication in English and Spanish that promises to have a significant impact on studies in the field is forthcoming.
Project Leads: Agustina Rodriguez Romero and Gabriela Siracusano
Grant awarded: $110,000 (2015)

University of Texas at Austin

A team led by scholars at the University of Texas at Austin organized a series of research seminars on Latin American and Latino art from 1960-1990 that brought together art historians from the region with their counterparts in the United States. The project involved senior scholars and advanced graduate students working together to analyze the history of Latin American avant-garde and neo-vanguard art. The group held their first meeting in Bogotá, Columbia and additional meetings in Sao Paulo, Brazil and Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Project Leads: George Flaherty and Andrea Giunta
Grant awarded: $224,000 (2012)

GREATER MEDITERRANEAN

American Academy in Rome

In 2013, the American Academy in Rome (AAR) organized a series of seminars on medieval art and architecture across the Mediterranean, including North Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkan coast. The project brought together leading scholars in fields ranging from museums and academia to archaeology and cultural heritage to produce a more integrated history of the medieval period and uncover the distinctive blend of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that shaped the region's art and culture. In 2022, AAR received a grant for the new Getty Global Affiliated Fellowships, a program for art and architectural historians and archaeologists of the Mediterranean Basin, particularly Turkey, Egypt, North Africa, and the Levant. The program invites two scholars from the region to participate fully in the AAR residential community for two six-month semesters over two years. The goal of the fellowships is to help participants forge connections between the Academy and their home regions and develop their own research seminars, ultimately contributing to a wider-ranging understanding of artistic exchange in the greater Mediterranean.
Project Leads: Kim Bowes and William Tronzo; Mark Robbins
Grant awarded: $222,000 (2013); $370,000 (2022)

Brown University

Distinguished scholars Susan E. Alcock and Natalie Kampen organized a research seminar exploring The Arts of Rome's Provinces. The seminar brought together twenty art historians and archaeologists from the Middle East, North Africa, the republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia, and Western, Central, and Eastern Europe to study "romanization" and material culture in these regions. Through on-site research of historical monuments and important collections in Greece and Great Britain, the seminars encouraged collaboration between art historians and archaeologists, creating a model for future interdisciplinary exchange. A final seminar held at the Getty Villa cemented the research findings, leading to a publication.
Project Leads: Susan Alcock and Natalie Kampen
Grants awarded: $235,000 (2010) and $180,000 (2009)

Charitable Foundation of Boğaziçi University

Boğaziçi University (Istanbul, Turkey), a highly regarded program in art history, architecture and visual culture in Turkey, organized a Distinguished Visiting Professorship program that brought renowned art historians from a variety of fields to the university to teach graduate courses and thereby strengthen training of its graduate students. Visiting professors taught courses in topics ranging from contemporary art to South Asian photography and Near Eastern art.
Project Lead: Cigdem Kafescioglu
Grants awarded: $200,000 (2011) and $175,000 (2010)

Courtauld Institute of Art

The Courtauld has received support for a series of research seminars examining the cultural complexity of art and artifacts of the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia from the late 12th through the 14th centuries. The first seminar, Crossing Frontiers: Christians and Muslims and their Art in Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus brought together senior experts and emerging regional scholars to uncover the history of Turkey and Armenia as a hub of dynamic artistic exchange. A second phase of the program, Connecting Art Histories in the Medieval Caucasus: Christianities, Islams and their Intersections, reconvened the original participants for a meeting in Georgia—the dominant Christian power in the Caucasus in the late Middle Ages. In 2018, the Courtauld received support for an extension to its Georgia seminar that is allowing participants to convene in Jerusalem, the key religious and spiritual center for Christians, Jews, and Muslims, as well as a center of conflict and cultural exchange.
Project Lead: Antony Eastmond
Grants awarded: $215,000 (2014), $186,000 (2017), and $47,500 (2018)

The Cyprus Institute

The Cyprus Institute, a non-profit research and education institution located in Nicosia, organized a program of research seminars that focused on the layered art histories of medieval and early modern Mediterranean cities. Mediterranean Palimpsests: Connecting the Art and Architectural Histories of Medieval and Early Modern Cities included three on-site seminars in historic cities in Greece, Spain, and Cyprus that brought together art historians and cultural heritage professionals for sustained research and intellectual exchange. Shared encounters with works of art and architecture stimulated discussion and new analyses while providing crucial insight into the day-to-day realities of custodianship in differing contexts. Mediterranean Palimpsests' emphasis on regional and international collaboration brought to light the aesthetic as well as economic and political networks that continue to link Mediterranean cities.
Project Leads: Nikolas Bakirtzis and D. Fairchild Ruggles
Grant awarded: $240,000 (2017)

Emory University

Beyond the Northern Aegean brings together early-career and senior scholars of ancient Greek architecture and archaeology in a collaborative, cross-regional investigation centered on ancient Greek architectural form as a dynamic and communicative art within the polyethnic communities of ancient Thrace and the Black Sea littoral. In two travel seminars, participants from the Black Sea region, Europe, and North America will investigate how and why the ancient communities living north of the Aegean replicated, adapted, transformed, and disseminated Greek architectural forms to meet different environmental, personal, civic, political, and spiritual aims. By privileging these regions as strategic centers rather than peripheral developers of architecture deploying Greek ideas, the collaborators aim to broaden and diversify the notion of what constitutes a history of classical architecture. The first seminar takes place in ancient Macedonia and Thrace and the second in northwestern Turkey and the Black Sea littoral.
Project Lead: Bonna Wescoat
Grant awarded: $246,000 (2018)

Johns Hopkins University

Material Entanglements in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond is a collaborative project with the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens, Greece that will bring a group of early-career art historians and archaeologists from the Mediterranean region together with senior specialists to foster new approaches to the study of the wider Mediterranean world and East/West interactions. Two research seminars will take place in Greece, where access to relevant sites will give participants first-hand exposure to the archaeological and museological contexts of a wide range of important objects from the period between 2000 BCE and 650 CE. The project includes on-site meetings, a virtual seminar, and a website to facilitate internal communication, public updates on activities, and dissemination of research.
Project Leads: Marian Feldman and Antigoni Zournatzi
Grant awarded: $236,000 (2017)

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaftern E.V. / Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz

The Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence developed a multi-year research project, Art, Space, and Mobility in the Early Ages of Globalization, to examine how the visual arts have shaped and strengthened connections among cultures in the Mediterranean, Middle East, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent from late antiquity to early modernity. The project successfully brought together almost 100 junior scholars from around the world with more than 20 distinguished senior scholars for seminars, workshops, summer programs, and research trips to important historical sites.
Project Leads: Hannah Baader, Avinoam Shalem, and Gerhard Wolf
Grants awarded: $100,000 (2012), $236,000 (2011), $200,000 (2010), and $200,000 (2009)

President and Fellows of Harvard College

Distinguished scholar Alina Payne (Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University) led a series of seminars that proposed a new intellectual direction for early modern studies by focusing on the artistic ties that developed along the complex network of waterways connecting Eastern Europe to the Dalmatian Coast, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea. This region was a critical meeting point for assimilating, translating, and linking the cultures of Central Asia with Western Europe, and Christianity with Islam. Aimed at fostering dialogue among younger scholars from the former Soviet Bloc, as well as fruitful exchange with scholars in the United States, the program included an intensive field study of regional monuments and collections, a follow-up residency at Harvard, and a final seminar in Eastern Europe.
Project Lead: Alina Payne
Grant awarded: $360,000 (2013)

President and Fellows of Harvard College / Villa I Tatti

Villa I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies received support for a 2013 research seminar in Florence for scholars from China who teach Western art and architecture to study Renaissance works firsthand. The three-week program offered Chinese art and architectural historians the unique opportunity to study major works in situ, and to share ideas about art historical scholarship with colleagues from the U.S. and Italy. Building on the success of this first program, Harvard organized similar institutes for 2014 and 2015. Entitled Understanding Space in Renaissance Italy, the intensive summer sessions studied the close integration of art and architecture that is characteristic of Renaissance Florence.
Project Leads: Chen Liu and Jonathan Nelson
Grants awarded: $215,000 (2014) and $108,000 (2012)

President and Fellows of Harvard College / Villa I Tatti and Trustees of Columbia University

A group of grants is supporting Black Mediterranean: Artistic Encounters and Counternarratives, a series of fellowships and professorships that explore African influence on European art and culture of the greater Mediterranean basin. The program aims to address the persistent need for more scholars in and from Africa to participate fully in a dialogue and collaboration with an international research community of art historians. Grant-funded postdoctoral fellowships will offer emerging scholars from Africa the opportunity to pursue their research in-residence at I Tatti and develop new professional networks. Also, visiting professorships at I Tatti will invite mid-career or senior scholars—whose work relates to increased understanding of the 'Black Mediterranean'—to contribute to masterclasses centered around objects of African origin and traveling research seminars devoted to visiting sites and archives in situ.
Project Leads: Alina Payne and Avinoam Shalem
Grants awarded: $242,000 (2021, Harvard), $125,000 (2021, Harvard), and $130,000 (2021, Columbia)

Regents of the University of California (UCLA)

The peoples along the storied Nile River, a vital link between Africa and the Mediterranean, share a rich artistic and architectural heritage. Yet regional differences and enduring conflicts have reduced opportunities for modern-day scholars to connect across borders. To encourage a new narrative, a grant to UCLA’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures is supporting The Indigenous Arts of the Ancient Nilotic Cultures in Egypt and Sudan, a traveling research seminar that will bring emerging Sudanese and Egyptian scholars together to find common ground through research and collaborative learning. A dozen early career archaeologists and Egyptologists will study the art of the ancient northeast African cultures of Nubia and Egypt, meeting first in Italy at the Museo Egizio in Turin, home to the largest and most prestigious collection of Egyptian, Sudanese, and Nubian antiquities, then later in Khartoum, Sudan, and Aswan, Egypt, crucial sites for understanding the material history of the Nile. Throughout the seminar, participants will have the chance to explore research questions shared across borders and develop a professional network that counteracts nation-state divisions.
Project Lead: Kathlyn (Kara) Cooney
Grant awarded: $245,000 (2023)

School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)

The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), an affiliate of the University of London, received support to host the research seminar, Art and Archaeology of the Crusades in the Eastern Mediterranean. While older histories characterize the Crusader States as a strict boundary between Christianity and Islam, this seminar took a fresh look at the visual legacy that resulted from the complex intersection of Judaism, Islam, and different Christian sects in the region. The project brought together senior and younger scholars from the disciplines of art history and archaeology for four workshops in historically significant cities: Istanbul, Acre, Amman, and Athens. Field work included visits to museum collections and historic sites. In 2016 SOAS received a grant for a joint convening of the original seminar and the Courtauld Institute's Christianities, Islams, and Their Intersections in the Medieval Caucasus.
Project Lead: Scott Redford
Grants Awarded: $335,000 (2014), $115,000 (2016)

University of California, Berkeley

The Many Lives of Ancient Monuments is a series of research seminars that examines the long, multifaceted histories of the art and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean. Bringing together younger art historians and archaeologists from the region with a group of distinguished scholars, the program renegotiates art history's relationship with "periodization," the tendency of modern scholarship to prioritize the meaning and function of ancient buildings and monuments when they were first constructed. Instead, the seminars explore the "many lives" of ancient buildings and sculptures, many of which have been maintained, repaired, rebuilt, modified, re-purposed, and even moved over the centuries. The first seminar was based at the newly-inscribed UNESCO world heritage site Aphrodisias and included site-visits throughout Turkey. The second phase of the project includes two seminars in southern Turkey, the first at coastal sites such as Caria, Pisidia, and Pamphylia and the second at the inland sites of Pompeiopolis and Zeugma on the Euphrates.
Project Lead: Christopher Hallett
Grant Awarded: $60,000 (2017), $193,000 (2019)

University of North Texas

University of North Texas (UNT) received a grant to conduct the first comprehensive state of the field survey of art history as a discipline in the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey. Nada Shabout, Professor of Art History at UNT, will be joined by six U.S.-based project leads with extensive expertise and scholarly networks in the region. They will compile data from specific countries and territories across the Middle East, culminating in an online mapping resource that identifies the locations, programs, and settings in which art history is taught and researched, generating a historiography that will be of great use to interested scholars both locally and internationally.
Project Lead: Nada Shabout
Grant Awarded: $88,000 (2020)

ASIA

Cornell University

The Institute of Comparative Modernities at Cornell, in partnership with the Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh) and Asia Art Archives (Hong Kong), brought together a team of international experts and emerging scholars to investigate developments in the artistic and cultural histories of modern South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Group seminars focused on how the withdrawal of colonial powers and the consolidation of nationalism following World War II affected modern art in the chosen regions. Participants gathered in Hong Kong at the Asia Art Archive, and at Dhaka during the Dhaka Art Summit, in addition to virtual sessions.
Project Leads: Diana Campbell Betancourt and Iftikhar Dadi
Grant awarded: $238,000 (2019)

Jawaharlal Nehru University

One of India's leading post-graduate universities, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi conducted a Distinguished Visiting Professorship program in the School of Art and Aesthetics to expand its range of art history graduate courses. Established in 1969, the School has become the country's premier center for interdisciplinary study in the visual arts. Headed by JNU Professor Kavita Singh, the three-year program brought distinguished scholars to the university each year to teach courses in diverse areas such as gender and identity in Roman art, contemporary art theory, and the history of art in Jerusalem.
Project Lead: Kavita Singh
Grants awarded: $145,000 (2010) and $145,000 (2009)

Kyushu University

A Getty grant is supporting Shared Coasts: The Art History of the East Asian ‘Mediterranean,’ a traveling research seminar that will apply the framework of the ‘Mediterranean’—a vital zone of contact between civilizations across the ages—to the lands touching the East China Sea. Focusing on the past 500 years, a group of early career scholars from the region will study the area's diverse identities and lifestyles, artistic production and reception, economic and cultural flows, and the complex dynamics of the Early Modern and modern periods. The project will include online reading groups, online lecture series, and visits to key sites in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Special emphases will be placed on challenging the outdated paradigms and obsolete theoretical models that have been reinforced by nationalist agendas in order to promote a more accurate and inclusive vision of the region’s common heritage.
Project Lead: Anton Schweizer
Grant awarded: $245,000 (2022)

Max Weber Stiftung—Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland / Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte

In 2017, a group of young Chinese scholars of European art convened at the German Research Center for Art History in Paris (Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte) for a three-week seminar devoted to the French avant-garde. Direct study of artworks in the Musée d'Orsay, Musée de l'Orangerie, Petit Palais, Centre Georges Pompidou, and Musée Gustave Moreau complemented lectures given by distinguished scholars of modernism. Paris itself was also a focus of study, especially the Montmartre and Montparnasse neighborhoods and the site of the 1889 and 1900s world's fairs, where the integration of art and architecture characteristic of modernism remains evident. A second site-based seminar in 2019 addressed issues of art and the French State from the ancien régime through the mid-twentieth century. Seeking to expand the nascent network established by the first seminar, this program brought over a dozen early-career Chinese scholars to Paris for three weeks to study French state patronage of art and architecture.
Project Lead: Thomas Kirchner
Grants awarded: $135,000 (2016) and $165,000 (2017)

Research Foundation for the State University of New York

The research seminars Indian Ocean Exchanges, organized by Binghamton University, are bringing together a group of younger scholars and professionals from throughout the Indian Ocean region to collaborate, learn from experts, and contribute to an art history foregrounding the interrelatedness of African, Arabian, and Asian cultures from the 16th to 20th centuries. The project crucially supports the study of academic art history in the area extending from the eastern coast of Africa into the Red Sea and around the Arabian Peninsula to South Asia. Participants are investigating three maritime locales that played critically important roles in the modern history of the region: Qatar, the Malay Peninsula, and the Swahili coast. A series of virtual meetings in 2021 prepared attendees for on-site visits once global travel was possible. A second grant is supporting a final research seminar in Kenya.
Project Lead: Nancy Um
Grant awarded: $245,000 (2021), $29,000 (2022)

Ruprecht-Karls-Universität

Two grants to Ruprecht-Karls-Universität, more commonly known as Heidelberg University, supported The Ethnographic Eye—Entangled Modernisms: Chinese Artists Trained in Europe, a series of research seminars on modern Chinese art. The first suite of seminars focused on the Republican era (1912-1949), when art-making practices shifted away from Western models of modernism towards indigenous Chinese themes and pictorial styles. A second suite of seminars addressed Chinese artists' encounters with European modernism starting in the late Qing period, from roughly 1890 until 1939. A third grant is supporting a series of dissertation workshops, to be held over the course of two years, for advanced graduate students of Chinese and Japanese art history. The workshops will connect doctoral candidates from China and Japan with one another and with outstanding international faculty, in order to bring together two fields with interwoven histories and overlapping historiographies.
Project Leads: Sarah Fraser, Lothar Ledderose, and Cao Quinghui
Grants awarded: $245,000 (2013), $225,000 (2016), and $293,000 (2019)

Seton Hall University

Seton Hall University, in collaboration with Peking University, received Getty support to organize and implement an international seminar on the subject of "Chinoiserie" and artistic encounters between China and the West during the Qing dynasty. The meeting was held in October 2012 in Beijing and brought together emerging scholars with senior specialists.
Project Leads: Petra Chu, Thomas Gaehtgens, and Ding Ning
Grants awarded: $64,500 (2012) and $23,000 (2011)

School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)

The topic of cultural restitution has risen to the forefront of Southeast Asian art history and archaeology as scholars reckon with centuries of extraction of the region’s heritage. A grant to SOAS University of London—where the Southeast Asian Art Academic Programme trains specialists of premodern Southeast Asian Hindu and Buddhist art and architecture—is supporting Circumambulating Objects: on Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art, a series of research seminars that examine what happens after looted or trafficked objects from Southeast Asia return home. The project will engage regional early career scholars and professionals who are involved with restitution issues and include visits to archaeological sites, museums, and other heritage zones in Thailand, Indonesia, and Cambodia.
Project Lead: Ashley Thompson
Grant awarded: $315,000 (2022)

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is organizing a traveling seminar and four dissertation workshops over the course of two years for advanced graduate students from East Asia and the West in the field of Chinese art history. The traveling seminar to China focuses on Buddhist art in relation to the Silk Road and provides students with a practical introduction to object-based research, on-site analysis of works of art, and collaborative study with international colleagues. The workshops—two in Chicago and two in Beijing—enable students to explore historical and methodological connections and to foster cross-period and cross-medium interests that are often limited by the set periodization shaped by Western art historiography. Combined, these scholarly programs are intended to nurture a new generation of historians of Chinese art who have the ability to cross continental, cultural, and academic boundaries.
Project Leads: Christine Mehring and Wu Hung
Grant awarded: $368,000 (2018)

University of Sydney

In 2012, the Power Institute based at the University of Sydney received a planning grant to organize a series of regional meetings, in collaboration with colleagues in Southeast Asia, to assess the current state of art history in the region. A key priority that emerged from these meetings was the need for additional training opportunities in art historical research methods and analysis for modern art, a field that historically has offered the most opportunities for professional support and advancement in the region. In 2014, the Power Institute received a second grant to support a series of seminars offering research training for emerging scholars from across Southeast Asia. Developed in collaboration with the National Gallery Singapore and Institute of Technology, Bandung, the project brought together scholars and curators to rethink histories of art in the region. Building on the success of these programs, the University of Sydney organized Site and Space in Southeast Asia, a series of site-based seminars that engaged with colonial and post-independence visual culture in key cities across Southeast Asia.
Project Leads: Thomas Berghuis, John Clark, Mark Ledbury, Adrian Vickers, and Stephen Whiteman
Grant awarded: 94,000 AUD (2012), $246,000 (2014), and $240,000 (2017)

University of Toronto

The University of Toronto (UT) and the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art (GAFA), a leading art history department in China, organized a series of faculty and student exchanges focused on the study of medieval and early modern art. Faculty from UT and GAFA participated in teaching exchanges, and students from both institutions were selected through a competitive application process to engage in field study in Dunhuang and Sicily. The two-year curricular program exposed Chinese students to Western art and art-historical methodologies and deepened North American students' understanding of Chinese art and art-historical approaches.
Project Lead: Jennifer Purtle
Grant awarded: $245,000 (2014)

CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań

Starting in 2019, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland hosted Gender Politics and the Art of European Socialist States, a traveling research seminar for advanced graduate students from universities throughout East-Central Europe. The project examined how artists in Eastern Europe from 1945–1989 negotiated the complex issues of gender, sexuality, family, and intimacy in their practices. A grant awarded in 2022 is supporting four week-long traveling research seminars aiming to generate new scholarship on Eastern Europe's modern and contemporary art leading up to and after 1989. Graduate students and emerging scholars from the region will come together with senior scholars to understand how art attempted to reclaim local authority from the Soviet-influenced communist state and how art responded to the rise of authoritarianism in former socialist states during the 1990s. Participants will visit collections, archives, studios, galleries, and museums and take part in discussion-based seminars.
Project Lead: Agata Jakubowska; Magdalena Radomska
Grant awarded: $190,000 (2019); $240,000 (2022)

Centre for Advanced Study Sofia

Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS) is organizing The Construction of Knowledge in Archaeology and Art History in Southeastern Europe, a series of research seminars that are bringing early-career archaeologists and art historians from southeastern Europe together with international experts to discuss questions surrounding the art historical interpretation of classical archaeology, especially within the context of nationalist narratives. The first seminar will focus on the history of political influence on archaeological interpretation and the second will explore models of interdisciplinary practice from other parts of the world. A third gathering in Athens will approach questions of archaeological preservation and interpretation, and will include a study visit to the Acropolis and Eleusis.
Project Leads: Diana Mishkova, Gheorghe Alexandru Niculescu, Dimitris Plantzos
Grant awarded: $240,000 (2019)

Leibniz-Institut für Geschichte und Kultur des östlichen Europa

The traveling seminar Linking Art Worlds: American and Eastern European Art after 1945 will bring together young scholars from central and eastern Europe to study the influence of Cold War-era modern and contemporary American art movements on their region. For decades American art was held up as the alternative to the creative freedom that East-Central Europe painfully lacked, however a rising generation of scholars is questioning this divide, seeking to write a more balanced history about how modern art served political ideology on both sides of the Iron Curtain. First, the seminar participants are visiting important sites in East-Central Europe, including Prague, Berlin, Leipzig, and Budapest, where American art impacted postwar intellectual life. They will subsequently travel to New York City to hold discussions with American art specialists, while visiting museums, libraries, and archives. These activities will encourage cross-cultural exchange and contribute to a more inclusive and international understanding of American art history. This project is in collaboration with the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Project Lead: Beáta Hock
Grant Awarded: $140,000 (2021)

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V.

The Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History is using a Getty grant to offer emergency support to art historians in Ukraine affected by Russia’s war with the country. One-time honoraria of €5000 will bring 14 mid-career or senior scholars together for an online seminar program that aims to reduce scholarly isolation and support international collaboration. Participants will present their research to one another and discuss their ideas with colleagues during this time when in-person dialogue is severely limited.
Project Lead: Tristan Weddigen
Grant awarded: €70,000 (2023)

New Europe Foundation

A grant to New Europe Foundation is supporting Periodization in the History of Art, a series of research seminars on art historiography at New Europe College in Bucharest, Romania. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, art historians in East-Central Europe have been reexamining the discipline, concerned that conventional categories of artistic style or period fail to accommodate fully the region's diverse artistic heritage. Such designations as "Renaissance," "Baroque," "modern," and "avant-garde" imply tidy stylistic periods and a predictable succession of artistic forms. A reexamination of the cultural assumptions that lie behind these categories has led scholars from the region to develop new methodologies, especially in relation to the study of modern and contemporary art. Today, these concerns have become of general interest to art historians working in the region. The Getty grant will bring together generations of scholars from the region to discuss and debate the efficacy of periodization, to share current works-in-progress on related topics, and to explore opportunities for collaborative research that crosses national borders and engages new methodologies.
Project Lead: Anca Oroveanu
Grant awarded: $231,000 (2018)

University College London

Led by experts on modern art in East-Central Europe, Confrontations: Sessions on East European Art History investigates the entangled histories of East European art through a series of symposia held within and beyond the region. The sessions present contrasting aesthetic and critical positions related to East European art from the 1950s–1980s for discussion, in order to develop more rigorous and integrated accounts of art history in this territory. The majority of participating researchers come from former socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Baltic countries, allowing for local scholarly exchange and the development of new professional networks in the region.
Project Leads: Maja and Reuben Fowkes
Grant awarded: $180,000 (2019)

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