Biography
Elizabeth Hutchinson is interested in the relationship between
the visual culture of a variety of North American groups and its
viewers. Her work uses the tools of close visual analysis, feminist
and postcolonial theory, and cultural history to bring out objects
contributing to historical and current cultural debates. Key issues
motivating her work include visuality and modernity,
transculturation in the arts of the Americas, and comparative
analyses of the visual culture of the United States and other
colonial cultures. She has explored these topics in relationship to
photography, painting, film, illustration, the built environment and
the decorative arts.
Research, Fellowships and Awards
Professor Hutchinson has recently held Fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Humanities, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum,
the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and Winterthur.
Professor Hutchinson's research projects include a book about
tourism and the visual culture of the American West and a series of
articles on racial mixing in the sculpture and photography of the
mid-nineteenth century. Articles related to these projects have
appeared in Third Text, Exposure, The Art Bulletin, American Art,
October, The History of Photography, the New-York Journal of
American History and in the recent anthology Seeing High & Low:
Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture.
Professor Hutchinson's teaching and mentoring has been recognized
with a Gladys Brooks Junior Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award
from Barnard College and a Star Teaching Award from the Barnard
Office of
Disability Services.
Teaching
Professor Hutchinson teaches courses on American visual culture from
the colonial period through the early twentieth century. Her classes
focus on both fine art and mass culture and trace the material
expressions of the diverse populations of North America, including
Anglo-Americans, African-Americans and Native Americans.
Courses Taught
Undergraduate Lectures: North
American Art and Culture, Native American Art II and Introduction to
Art History.
Undergraduate Seminars: The Visual Culture of the Harlem
Renaissance and Methods & Theories of Art History - BC Art History
majors requirement.
Undergraduate/Graduate Bridge Lectures: Colonial Portraitures
and Tourism and the North American Landscape
Graduate Seminars: Native
American Landscapes, The American 1870s and Colonialism &
Postcolonialism in the New World
Publications
The
Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in
American Art, 1890-1915, Duke University Press, 2009. A
widespread interest in Native American art at the turn of the
last century, which situates this American primitivist movement
within the contemporary cultural, political and economic changes
facing both Euro- and Native American people.