MUSEUM STUDIES

Lee Anne Wilson, IAIA Faculty

Biography:

Of Native American descent, Lee Anne Wilson has been involved in American Indian art for over 30 years.  After receiving her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University, she has taught at various universities and colleges throughout the United States

Her interest in cultural identity stems in part from personal experience.  Adopted as an infant, Wilson was brought up as a White Euro-American.  While working at the Smithsonian in the early 1990s, Wilson began the search for her own roots through a maze of government records going back to the mid-1800s. The biggest shock for Wilson and her colleagues was finding out that her tribal affiliation is Chippewa (or Ojibwa as it is also spelled) because that was the very tribe she had researched as a graduate student at Columbia University in the early 1970s.  Additional research uncovered a great-great grandfather who was an interpreter and Indian rights activist in the mid-1800’s and was the first Native American elected to the Minnesota state legislature and revealed a cousin who makes award-winning ash splint baskets, a traditional native craft which has validated Wilson’s own interest in creating art.   She recently joined the faculty at IAIA in the Museum Studies Department where
 

“Up Close and Personal.”  Wilson explores art in Prague, Czech Republic, July 2004.  Photo by M. Timberlake.

Education:

Columbia University New York, MA, PhD

Major Professional Activities:

Founder of the Native American Art Studies Association (NAASA)
Worked for the National Endowment for the Humanities and Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Awarded Senior Fulbright Fellowship to teach American Indian art history in New Zealand and to research contemporary Maori art.  Distinguished Visiting Art Historian at the Quay School of Fine Arts, Wanganui, New Zealand where she also had a one woman exhibition entitled “W[h]ither Home?” portions of which were later included in exhibitions in Europe.   In 2004 she received the Fulbright-Karl Franzen University Distinguished Professorship in Cultural Studies to teach in Austria and present a series of lectures in the former East Germany.  Her publications include a book and numerous articles on indigenous arts and she frequently lectures and conducts workshops.  Her most recent visiting lectureship is at the Savannah College of Art and Design where she is presenting “Narwhals, Natives, and Naturalists:  Museums and Colonialism.”

Publications:

The Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas:  Selected Readings, with Janet Catherine Berlo, Prentice-Hall, 1993, 392 pages.

Selected Articles/Brochures/Reviews:

• W(h)ither Home?  Quay Gallery, Quay School of Fine Art, Wanganui, New Zealand, 2000, 12-page exhibition brochure.

• ”Survival, Resistance, and Acculturation:  Guaman Poma's Use of Costume and Textile Imagery,” Studies in Iconography, Vol. 19, pp. 177-210, Richard K. Emmerson and Pamela Sheingorn, Co-editors.  Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, 1998. 

• ”Nature versus Culture:  The Image of the Uncivilized Wild-man in Textiles from the Department of Cuzco, Peru,” chapter 9 in Textile Traditions of Mesoamerica and the Andes:  An Anthology, pp. 205-230, Margot Blum Schevill, Janet C. Berlo, and Edward Dwyer, editors. Garland Press, 1991. U. of Texas Press, 1996.

• “Review, Early Years of Native American Art History:  Politics of Scholarship and Collecting,” Janet Catherine Berlo, ed., University of Washington Press, 1992, Curator, American Museum of Natural History, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 235-38, 1993.

• “Review, Circa 1492,” National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1992, Museum Anthropology, Journal of the Council for Museum Anthropology,  Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 63-65, 1992. 

• ”Visual Imagery and Social Change,”  in Phøebus 4, A Journal of Art History, pp. 24-31, Anthony Gully, ed., School of Art, Arizona State University, 1985.

• ”Southern Cult Images of Composite Human and Animal Figures,”  in American Indian Art Magazine, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 46-57, Winter 1985.

• ”Bird and Feline Motifs on Great Lakes Bags,”  in Native North American Art History:  Selected Readings, pp. 429-443, edited by Zena Pearlstone Mathews and Aldona Jonaitis, Peek Pubs., Palo Alto, CA, 1982.

• ”Interpreting Southern Cult Iconography:  A Synthesis,”  in Journal of the Theory and Criticism of the Visual Arts, pp. 41-61, edited by J. Young and A. E. Barela, School of Art, Arizona State University, 1982.

Teaching Statement:

I hope to bring my personal and professional experiences to the classroom to create an intense and exciting learning experience.  I love the whole process of learning, of exploring, of creating.  I can’t imagine anything more rewarding than to explore some new topic with a room full of eager students, myself included.  More than anything I want to convey my love of knowledge and the world as a place of never-ending learning to my fellow explorers.  I want us to look, to see, to perceive, to understand, to evaluate, and to value the many cultures and viewpoints of our ever more “globalized” world.  If I can get just one person to see the world through someone else’s eyes, then I will have made a very small contribution to world understanding.