Contemporary American art and media are shaped by a tension between distortion and revelation—between images and narratives that obscure truth and preserve power, and acts of resistance intent on exposing what has been excluded. This struggle between dominant and marginalized—or entirely silenced—voices is neither new nor accidental, partly because the biases that define much of American history are embedded in the nation’s archives themselves.Â
To imagine a more just future, we must first look unflinchingly at this troubled legacy. The Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowships in American Art assist emerging scholars in taking up that challenge. Through a longstanding partnership between the Henry Luce Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, the annual fellowships support doctoral students pursuing research on the history of art and visual culture of the United States—including all aspects of Native American art.Â
As the 2025 cohort of Luce/ACLS dissertation fellows, seven emerging scholars are rethinking how the visual and material record of the US is made and remembered. Their work reveals that the art historical archive is no sealed vault but a living, contested platform—the parameters of which are not fixed but constantly expanding as new voices and visions come to occupy its frame.
Max Bowens (Harvard University)
Storing the Self: Art, Data, and Repatriation
The widespread adoption of metrics into visual technologies of the late nineteenth century marks the beginning of biometrics in America. “Storing the Self: Art, Data, and Repatriation,” chronicles three pivotal periods in the history of biometrics which fundamentally altered the visual construction of political subjecthood. From Civil War era bodysnatching to NAGPRA, passport identification to facial recognition, each phase involved a reconfiguration of the relationship between one’s image and one’s identity— one’s body and one’s data— in tandem with a redefinition of what constitutes an identificatory image. This project tracks the evolution of biometric technology alongside aesthetic and anthropological practices that worked with and against its visual rhetoric. “Storing the Self” pays specific attention to repatriation protocols which are currently dictating the return of early biometric subjects to their rightful Native American and African American ancestral groups.
O.M. Comstock (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)
Allen Fannin: Hand Spinning and Weaving, Nitty-Gritty Needs, and “The Black Craftsman Situation”
This dissertation critiques the antagonistic relationship between the studio craft movement, economic precarity, and race by providing the first study of Allen Fannin (1939 –2004), a studio craft practitioner known for his spinning and weaving between the 1960s and 1980s. Fannin’s frank appraisal of what he called “The Black Craftsman Situation” identified the limits of studio craft for those with “nitty-gritty needs.” This project gathers previously unarchived materials to examine different facets of Fannin’s practice: texture, how-to manuals, commercial production, and pedagogy. By considering the social and material stakes of Fannin’s work, this project pushes the field of American art to consider where race is found in the materials, techniques, and objects of American history.
Isabel Elson-Enriquez (CUNY Graduate Center)
Becoming Plastic: Synthetic Materiality in U.S. Art 1965-1975
This dissertation provides the first study of how plastic transformed art and cultural attitudes toward the human body in the post-war United States. The project analyzes works by several artists who embraced the material in the 1960s to work through issues of corporeality, including Senga Nengudi, John Chamberlain, Lynda Benglis, Carl Cheng, and the Ant Farm collective. “Becoming Plastic” argues that the proliferation of plastic forced a renegotiation of boundaries between synthetic and biotic matter which, in conjunction with social politics of the 1960s and 1970s, played a pivotal role in reshaping perceptions of the body and shifting definitions of humanness. Through a theorization of “synthetic materiality,” the study offers an interdisciplinary understanding of the material constitution of plastics, while reckoning with the way in which plastics have affected the materiality of the human body, both physically and discursively.
Jeannette Martinez (University of New Mexico)
Visualities of Belonging: Creating Terruño in Contemporary U.S. Central American Art (1990s–Now)
This dissertation explores how US Central American artists utilize landscape representation to craft a sense of belonging from the 1990s to the present. Terruño, a common term used throughout Central America to express sentiments of placehood through associations with the land, operates in this project as a conceptual framework, reinforcing how artists navigating the Central American diasporic experience engage with landscape representation to contend with complex geopolitical spaces. Archival examination of the Central American presence within American archives is juxtaposed with visual analyses of contemporary art that disrupt limiting historical narratives of Central America and its US diaspora. Bridging past and present, these archival interventions provide insight into how creating terruño serves as a radical act of agency for the Central American artists and communities confronting histories that have been misconstrued, silenced, and erased.
Taylor Rose Payer (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)
Crafting Kinship: Abstraction and Native American Women Artists in the Twentieth Century
“Crafting Kinship” traces the persistence of abstraction in the work of Native American women artists throughout the twentieth century. Within the context of major federal policy, this project considers four graphic artists— Angel DeCora, Mary Sully, Jessie Oonark, and Kay WalkingStick—who have consciously engaged with their experiences of modernity as Indigenous women by drawing on the textiles of their artistic foremothers to assert presence and visualize futurity. “Crafting Kinship” threads specific tribal epistemologies throughout, while examining the use of pan-Indigenous aesthetics in modern art and undermining settler modes of visual interpretation. This dissertation argues these artists are early examples of those who use strategic abstraction to articulate Native identity and resurgent practices in the United States and Canada.
Hampton Smith (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Making against Slavery: Artisanry, Capitalism, and the Material History of Abolition in the United States, 1791-1902
How is craft skill integral to freedom? “Making against Slavery” examines how Black artisans harnessed their expertise in trades such as blacksmithing and carpentry to enact abolition as a communal process. Spanning the Haitian Revolution to Black Reconstruction, collaborative acts of making, such as transforming tools into weapons or molding bricks to build community institutions, were central to resisting slavery and the anti-Black social order that followed. This project traces how different techniques—toolmaking, ornamenting, building, and maintaining—posed structural threats both during slavery and its afterlife as racial capitalism. By situating Black artisans’ techniques within their social, environmental, and political contexts, this dissertation develops an “art history from below,” demonstrating how artisanal skill was not only built the United States’ economy, but also fundamental to the convergences of abolitionism and communal freedom.
Natalie Wright (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Functional Fashions: Dress and Disability in the United States, 1950-1975
This project recovers a little-known historical moment when fashionable clothing—made by top manufactures and modeled by chic subjects—became central to a project of integrating disabled individuals into mainstream society. The goal was to make wearers “functional,” a concept that brought together the technical construction of clothing with medical and social ideals of rehabilitation. Leaders in the fields of medicine, design, and public policy conducted a national campaign to dress disabled persons in “functional fashions” that they hoped would increase the wearers’ physical and mental capacities. This dissertation locates important designs by and for disabled persons that evidence the ideological links between function and the aesthetics of self-fashioning. By demonstrating the significant role that function played in the social construction of disability in the twentieth century, this study theorizes a foundational concept in design and disability studies.
Even the most diligent research can encounter silence, especially when the objects themselves are no longer with us. In a recent conversation with the Foundation, Natalie Wright, a 2025 dissertation fellow, recalled an experience of confronting a vanished artifact—a reminder that the writing of art history often begins in loss.
Working against disappearance is an act of urgency. As time advances, firsthand accounts fade, and the material record fractures. Each scholar must learn to read what has withstood erosion and detect may be missing. How do researchers perceive those gaps in the surviving? And what role might the broader community play in preserving memory?
Dissertation fellows O. M. Comstock and Jeannette Martinez recently reflected on these questions. Martinez: There isn’t necessarily a first time, because the marginalization of Central American diasporic histories is very apparent. I think the constant confrontation of that erasure is what led me to do the work I am doing now through my dissertation research, which is all about acknowledging and contending with this bias in the archive. Generally speaking, it’s not so easy to find research related to Central American art, and there is even less on the diaspora. Seldom will you find a category of “Central American Art” within archival spaces. Just to begin finding a path to your research inquiry requires a significant amount of back end work, such as identifying the historical points of contact between American and Central American histories, to determine where to start looking. The “first experience’” is more like the “everyday experience” for me; the bias of the collective historical archive is a fact I navigate and contend with every day, whether it be in the archive or the lack of presence in research. Fortunately there are scholars already doing important work on creating a platform for US Central American art and diasporic visibility, but there is still a lot more to be done. Comstock: I took a history class during my undergrad at University of Idaho with Professor Matthew Fox-Amato on historical research methods. In that class we discussed the bias in the collective historical archive. An archive is typically just a collection of preserved documents. I learned that who produces or authors the documents, and whose documents are preserved, reveals the bias of the archive. The dominant group with legal and social power are typically the record creators and keepers. Comstock: The term “collective historical archive” may not be quite the right one, because it begs the question: Whose collective historical archive? The phrase assumes there is a single shared sense of US history, for example. In reality there is no set narrative and instead a plurality of histories, archives, and collective memories. Similarly, the term “layperson” assumes that a person outside of academia is not already an active participant in the creation and keeping of a collective historical archive. Alternative histories, or those outside of the dominant historical narrative, are largely preserved by families and communities outside of academia and institutional archives. Therefore, people can continue doing what they have already been doing: preserving cultural stories and objects by passing them on. This is especially true for art, craft, and material culture histories, which are based on objects rather than written documents. Martinez: I think the first step toward encouraging a collective building of the historical archive is providing more visible and welcoming access, as well as centering archives within communities. Even as an archival researcher, navigating platforms to access collections is not the most intuitive process. Initial steps, such as scheduling an appointment, are crucial in getting community members to take notice. If you think the platform is confusing and unwelcoming, how does that encourage new researchers to proceed to the next step? Additionally, we as researchers and archivists must ask ourselves not only how archives preserve history, but also whether they can uplift community. New platforms of memory-keeping, such as social media and digital archives, have been able to provide more knowledge and accessibility to archives and archive building, so they can be seen as modes for new sites of archival collaboration. Comstock: All narratives are incomplete. There is no way to tell a complete history because history is one person’s attempt to narrativize and find patterns in a curated set of events and stories. There are always new stories or people that can be added. My own dissertation project is a good example. It reframes a historically marginalized history within [yet another] historically marginalized history. The history of 1960s and 1970s craft is dominated by the debate between art and craft, which focuses on artists in the fiber arts movement who were exhibiting their work at high art institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, New York. While this craft history is understudied and most of these artists were women whose work wasn’t taken seriously within contemporary art at the time, this version of 1960s and 70s craft history still leaves a lot out. The Black American artist my dissertation is on, Allen Fannin, and other Black craftspeople working in textiles, ceramics, wood, metal, and glass in the same 1960s and 70s moment are left out of this narrative. However, recontextualizing the collective historical archive of craft is not as simple as bringing recognition to these artists in the same way the fiber arts movement has already been written about. The reasons why Black American craftspeople are not included are part of the story. In reframing the narrative, I have to also figure out why the original narrative was constructed in a certain way. Martinez: Assuming that a collective historical archive is “complete” is a problem that researchers should always be cognizant about. It is important to remember that there is always another angle, a new perspective, a comparative approach that creates intersecting paths that inform and mold history and contribute to the collective notion of the historical archive. In my case, my entire dissertation is about recognizing an invisible hemispheric art history.
Memory as Continuum
As American art history expands to readdress representation, exclusion, and archival bias, the 2025 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellows show how memory can be at once a tool of research, and an act of care. They remind us that history is not fixed, but made and remade in the present. Through their scholarship, the contours of American art grow richer, more complicated, and more inclusive.
