On 5th June 2025, the Centre for the Art of the Americas hosted “US Art History and the Question of Settler Colonialism,” a workshop organized by Luke Naessens (Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow). The workshop posed settler colonialism as an unresolved question for art history, asking: What emphases, biases, or blind spots do histories of settler colonialism bring to the discipline, and how can we practice art history otherwise? How can art-historical questions of aesthetics, visuality, or materiality transform our understanding of settler colonialism’s processes and contradictions?
In Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (1999), Patrick Wolfe defined settler colonialism as a specific form of colonisation centered on the acquisition of territory and predicated on a logic of elimination. Although Wolfe drew on decades of preceding intellectual work by Indigenous activists and scholars, his book is often taken to mark the consolidation of settler colonial studies as a distinct interdisciplinary field. This workshop invited participants to reflect on the ways settler colonial studies (and its discontents) have registered in the history of American art over the past quarter century. While settler colonialism has become an omnipresent framework for the study of art in other Anglophone settler colonies, in the case of American art it has until recently it been largely confined to those domains where its effects are most explicit: for example, nineteenth-century landscape painting and the representation of Indigenous subjects. Taking its cue from settler colonial studies and Indigenous art histories, this workshop insists that settler colonialism is not a singular event in American history but an abiding structure that continues to shape the political, social, and indeed aesthetic orders of the United States.
Participants
Mary Roberts
Professor of Art History and Nineteenth-Century Studies, The University of Sydney
“Frontiers of American Orientalism: Frederic Church in Ottoman Lands”
Ariel Kline
Assistant Professor, Georgetown University
“‘Forcing the End’: Henry Ossawa Tanner in Palestine”
Julia Silverman
PhD Candidate, Harvard University
“Fred Kabotie’s Hopi Abstraction: Emic Modernisms against Settler-Colonial Art History”
Isabella Shey Robbins
PhD Candidate, Yale University
“On, Through, and By Country: Kamilaroi and Diné Land as Medium and Method”
Christopher T. Green
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History and Environmental Studies, Swarthmore College
“Indian Space Painting, Primitivism, and Nested Visual Sovereignties”
Luke Naessens
Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, The Courtauld Institute
“The Tense of Space: Richard Nonas, Postminimalist Sculpture, and Tohono O’odham Spatiality”
Kimberley Schreiber
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Institute of the Americas, University College London
“Family as Counterinsurgency: Leonard Freed’s Police Work (1980)”
Arabella Stanger
Associate Professor of Drama: Theatre & Performance, University of Sussex
“Dancing the Impossible at Black Mountain College”
