Please join Professor Sascha Scott (Syracuse University) as she reflects on her intellectual and ethical journey in writing about Indigenous art and history. Her current book project, Modern Pueblo Painting: Colonization, Aesthetic Agency, and Indigenous Visual Sovereignty, will provide the framework for this discussion. This book focuses on four Pueblo painters from three tribal communities in New Mexico to examine the aesthetics and politics of early twentieth-century Pueblo art. Prof. Scott explores the artists’ relationships to their home communities, their complex engagement with colonial economic and political structures, and some of the messages their art communicated to different audiences. The book’s narrative draws from oral histories and extensive archival research. The paintings highlighted in the book were selected in consultation with descendants of the artists and tribal government officials, and the project foregrounds the knowledge and voices of these constituencies along with Pueblo curators, scholars, artists, and other cultural liaisons.
About the Speaker: Sascha T. Scott is an associate professor of art history at Syracuse University, where she is also faculty for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program. She is currently working on a book about modern Pueblo painting, which has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New Foundation for Art History. She received the doctorate in art history from Rutgers.
