Smithsonian American Art Museum Announces 2019–2020 Fellowship Appointments

The Smithsonian American Art Museum will host 21 new fellows for the 2019–2020 academic year. The museum’s program grants awards for scholars and students to pursue research at the museum, including senior, predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships. Recipients are part of the premier residential fellowship in American art—one that celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2020.

The 2019–2020 museum fellows are:

• Sarah Bane, Joe and Wanda Corn Predoctoral Fellow, University of California, Santa Barbara; “Join the Club: Regional Print Clubs in the United States During the Interwar Period”
• Elizabeth Buhe, Smithsonian Institution postdoctoral fellow, Fordham University; “Sam Francis: Beside Painting”
• Heather Caverhill, Terra Foundation for American Art Predoctoral Fellow, University of British Columbia; “Mutable Modernisms: An Art Colony in Blackfoot Territory and the Lives of its Works”
• Lee Ann Custer, Douglass Foundation Predoctoral Fellow, University of Pennsylvania; “Urban Voids: Picturing Light, Air, and Negative Space in New York, 1890–1930”
• Davida Fernández-Barkan, Smithsonian Institution predoctoral fellow, Harvard University; “The Mural at a Crossroads: The Paris International Exposition of 1937”
• Christine Renee Garnier, Smithsonian Institution predoctoral fellow, Harvard University; “Amalgamating the West during the American Silver Age”
• Faye Raquel Gleisser, Smithsonian Institution postdoctoral fellow, Indiana University; “Guerrilla Tactics: Art and the Cultural Domestication of Militancy in America, 1967-1987”
• Hanna Hölling, Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Fellow, University College London; “Fluxus and the Material Legacy of Intermediality”
• Josie Johnson, Terra Foundation for American Art Predoctoral Fellow, Brown University; “Before the Iron Curtain: Margaret Bourke-White’s Early Soviet Photographs”
• Tara Kaufman, William H. Truettner Graduate Fellow, Temple University; “Antarctic Encounters: Perceiving Ecological Change in Frank Wilbert Stokes’s Landscapes”
• Shu-Wen Lin, Lunder Fellow for Time-Based Media Conservation (2018–2019 appointee), Independent Conservator
• Robin Lynch, Terra Foundation for American Art Predoctoral Fellow, McGill University; “Packaging Environments: The Art and Design of the Container Corporation of America”
• Kyungso Min, Big Ten Academic Alliance Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow, University of Wisconsin-Madison; “Post-translational Belonging: The Languages of the Future in Transnational New Media Art After 1984”
• Dina Murokh, Wyeth Foundation Predoctoral Fellow, University of Southern California; “‘A Sort of Picture Gallery’: The Visual Culture of Antebellum America”
• Ana Cristina Perry, SAAM predoctoral fellow in Latinx art, CUNY Graduate Center; “Raphael Montañez Ortiz and Alternative Spaces, 1966–1972: From Repulsion to Exaltation”
• Caroline Riley, Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in American Art, University of California, Davis; "MoMA Goes to Paris in 1938: Building and Politicizing American Art”
• Krystle Elaine Stricklin, Smithsonian Institution predoctoral fellow, University of Pittsburgh; “Grave Visions: Photography, Violence, and Death in the American Empire, 1898–1913”
• Natalia Vieyra, Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow, Temple University; “Tropical Intransigents: Camille Pissarro and Francisco Oller in the Atlantic World, 1848–1898”
• Rashmi Viswanathan, Smithsonian Institution postdoctoral fellow, University of Hartford; “Receiving the Global Modern: Private Politics of Interest in the Post-war United States”
• Kristina Wilson, George Gurney Senior Fellow, Clark University; “Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power”
• Olivia Kathleen Young, Patricia and Phillip Frost Predoctoral Fellow, University of California, Berkeley; “How the Black Body Bends: Sensorial Distortions of Black Contemporary Art”

Since 1970, the museum has provided more than 680 scholars with financial aid and unparalleled research resources, as well as a world-class network of colleagues. Former fellows now occupy positions in prominent academic and cultural institutions across the United States, Australia, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East and South America. Fellowship opportunities include the Joe and Wanda Corn Fellowship for scholarship that spans American art and American history, the Douglass Foundation Fellowship for predoctoral research, the Patricia and Phillip Frost Fellowship, the George Gurney Fellowship for the study of American sculpture, the SAAM fellowship in Latinx art supported by the Smithsonian Latino Center, the alumni-supported Joshua C. Taylor Fellowship, the Terra Foundation for American Art Fellowships for the cross-cultural study of art of the United States up to 1980, the William H. Truettner Fellowship and the Wyeth Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship for the study of excellence in all aspects of American art. The museum also hosts fellows supported by the Smithsonian Institution Fellowship Program, the Smithsonian Big Ten Academic Alliance, the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship Program, the Smithsonian Postgraduate/ Postdoctoral Fellowships in Conservation of Museum Collections Program and the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s International Placement Scheme.

Applications for the 2020 fellowship cycle will open in September. For information about how to apply and previous fellows’ abstracts, visit americanart.si.edu/research/fellowships, call

(202) 633-8353 or email saamfellowships@si.edu.  

The museum maintains six online art-research databases with more than a half-million records, including the Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture that documents more than 400,000 artworks in public and private collections worldwide and extensive photographic collections documenting American art and artists. An estimated 180,000-volume library specializing in American art, history and biography is shared with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. An active publications program of books, catalogs and the critically acclaimed peer-reviewed journal for new scholarship American Art complements the museum’s exhibitions and educational programs.

About the Smithsonian American Art Museum

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is the home to one of the largest and most inclusive collections of American art in the world. Its artworks reveal America’s rich artistic and cultural history from the colonial period to today. The museum’s main building is located at Eighth and F streets N.W., above the Gallery Place/Chinatown Metrorail station. Museum hours are 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily (closed Dec. 25). Its Renwick Gallery, a branch museum dedicated to contemporary craft and decorative arts, is located on Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street N.W. The Renwick is open from

10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily (closed Dec. 25). Admission is free. Follow the museum on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. Museum information (recorded): (202) 633-7970. Smithsonian information: (202) 633-1000. Website: americanart.si.edu.

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