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Janet Catherine Berlo

  • Professor Emerita

PhD, Art History, Yale University, 1980

Office Location
513 Morey Hall
Telephone
(585) 275-9249

Research Overview

Research Interests

  • Native American art and visual culture
  • The politics of representation
  • Museum studies and critique
  • Quilt, craft, and “folk art”
  • History and historiography
  • Issues of materiality both old and new

Graduate Courses Taught

  • AHST 414:  Beyond the Boundaries: Folk and Outsider Art
  • AHST 476:  Gender and Representation
  • AHST 477:  The Museum and 'the Other'
  • AHST 585:  Visual Culture of Heritage and Identity
  • AHST 598:  Object Lessons

Undergraduate Courses Taught

  • SART 209:  Writing on Art
  • AHST 214:  Beyond the Boundaries: Folk and Outsider Art
  • AHST 276:  Gender and Representation
  • AHST 277:  The Museum and 'the Other'
  • AHST 398:  Senior Seminar: Object Lessons

Selected Publications

Selected recent and forthcoming publications (in addition to essays and catalogue entries in major exhibition catalogues of Native American art published in France, Germany, and the United States).

  • In press: Past Forward: Native American Art from Gilcrease Museum. Tulsa: Gilcrease Museum (with Chelsea Herr).
  • 2023: Not Native American Art: Fakes, Replicas and Invented Traditions, Seattle: U. of Washington Press. 2023, 366 pp.
  • 2020: “Indigenous Textiles of North America: A Century of Exhibitions,” (co-author: Elizabeth Kalbflesich) in Jennifer Harris, ed., A Companion to Textile Culture, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 417-434.
  • 2020: “Beauty, Abundance, Generosity, and Performance: Sioux Aesthetics in Historical Context” in  Dana Claxton, ed. The Sioux Project, Regina, Saskatchewan: MacKenzie Art Gallery, pp. 34-47.
  • 2020: “Suturing My Soul: In Pursuit of the Broderie de Bayeux,” in J. Amos and L. Binkley, eds., Stitching the Self, London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, pp. 155-170.
  • 2019: “The Energetic Line: Nineteenth Century Plains Artists, Leonard Baskin, and Fritz Scholder,” in Peripheral Vision(s): Leonard Baskin, Fritz Scholder, and Nineteenth-Century Ledger Drawings, Rhéanne Chartrand, ed. Hamilton, ON: McMaster Museum of Art, pp. 55-74.
  • 2015: Native North American Art. Oxford U. Press, (with Ruth Phillips). Revised and expanded second edition. 410 pp. (First edition published in French as Amerique du Nord: arts premiers, Paris: Albin Michel S.A., 2006) 2023. “Great Plains Art and Social Change: Courtship in the Old White Woman Ledger Drawings,” in Bruce Bernstein, et al., eds. Native American Art from the Thomas W. Weisel Family Collection, NY: Delmonico Books and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
  • “Beyond the Mirror: Indigenous Ecologies and ‘New Materialisms’ in Contemporary Art,” Third Text 120: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, ed. T.J. Demos.  January 2013 (co-authored with Jessica Horton)
  • “Changing Hands, Shifting Paradigms: Materiality, Craft, and Identity in 21st Century Native Art,” American Indian Art Magazine  38(3), summer 2013, pp. 58-69 (co-authored with Alexander Brier Marr)
  • “Transgressing Borders: Miguel Covarrubias and the Development of Native American Art History,” in Miguel Covarrubias: Drawing a Cosmopolitan Line, ed. Carolyn Kastner. Santa Fe: Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and Research Center, forthcoming 2014
  • “Navajo Sandpainting in the Age of Cross-cultural Replication,” in Theorizing Imitation in a Global Context, ed. Paul Duro. (forthcoming in special issue of journal Art History, 2014)
  • “Pueblo Indian Painting in 1932: Folding Narratives of Native Art into American Art History,” in The Blackwell Companion to American Art History, edited by J. Greenhill, J. Davis, & J. LaFountain, London: Blackwell, forthcoming 2014. (co-authored with Jessica Horton)
  • “A Gathering Place: Relationality in Contemporary Native Installation Art” in Native Art Now!  ed. V. Passalacqua and K. Morris, Indianapolis: The Eiteljorg Museum, forthcoming, 2014. (co-authored with Jessica Horton)
  • José Bedia: Transcultural Pilgrim, Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of Cultural History, UCLA, 2011 (exhibition catalogue, co-authored with Judith Bettelheim)
  • “The Body in the White Box: Corporeal Ethics and Museum Representation,” J. Marstine, ed., Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics:  Redefining Ethics for the Twenty-First Century Museum, NY: Routledge Press, 2011, pp. 353-378. (co-authored with Mara Gladstone)
  • “Navajo Cosmoscapes: Up, Down, Within,” Smithsonian Journal of American Art, Vol. 25 (1), 2011, pp. 10-13

Invited and Refereed Articles (selected)

  • 2023: “Great Plains Art and Social Change: Courtship in the Old White Woman Ledger Drawings,” in Bruce Bernstein, et al., eds. Native American Art from the Thomas W. Weisel Family Collection, NY: Delmonico Books and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
  • 2020: Indigenous Textiles of North America: A Century of Exhibitions,” (co-author: Elizabeth Kalbflesich) in Jennifer Harris, ed., A Companion to Textile Culture, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 417-434.
  • 2020: Beauty, Abundance, Generosity, and Performance: Sioux Aesthetics in Historical Context” in Dana Claxton, ed. The Sioux Project, Regina, Saskatchewan: MacKenzie Art Gallery, pp. 34-47.
  • 2020: “From ‘Artifakes’ to ‘Surrogates’: The Replication of Northwest Coast Carving by Non-Natives,” (co-author: Aldona Jonaitis) in A. Jonaitis and K. Bunn-Marcuse, eds, Native Art of the Northwest Coast: New Approaches, Seattle, University of Washington Press, pp. 76-91.
  • 2020: Suturing My Soul: In Pursuit of the Broderie de Bayeux,” in J. Amos and L. Binkley, eds., Stitching the Self, London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, pp. 155-170.
  • 2019: “The Energetic Line: Nineteenth Century Plains Artists, Leonard Baskin, and Fritz Scholder,” in Peripheral Vision(s): Leonard Baskin, Fritz Scholder, and Nineteenth-Century Ledger Drawings, Rhéanne Chartrand, ed. Hamilton, ON: McMaster Museum of Art, pp. 55-74.

Curatorial

  • 2020-2024: Co-curator with Chelsea Herr, Past Forward: Native American Art from Gilcrease Museum traveling exhibit circulated by American Federation of Arts, 2024.

Selected Awards/Grants

  • 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award, Native American Art Studies Association
  • 2017 Senior Fellowship, Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center, Santa Fe. Spring
  • NEH Fellowship for College Teachers, 2012-2013
  • Center for Craft and Creativity Fellowship, 2012
  • Distinguished Mellon Scholar in Residence, Department of Art History. U. Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Spring 2007
  • John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 1999-2000
  • Getty Senior Scholar Collaborative Grant, 1994-6