Ott selected for Lunder Institute Fellowship

The Lunder Institute for American Art, a collaborative initiative with the Colby College Museum of Art, has selected professor of art history John Ott as one of seven research fellows in its inaugural fellowship program, which will focus on work by African-American artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Specifically, Ott will conduct original research on an untitled 1948 work by the African-American abstract painter Norman Lewis (1909-1979) from the Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African American Art in Austin, Texas. Lewis is one of many figures that appear in Ott’s current book project Mixed Media: The Visual Cultures of Racial Integration, 1931–1954.

Lunder research fellows will travel to the Colby campus in Maine in November to study selected artworks, meet with the local art community and participate in high-level discussions about the state of African-American art history. Fellows will return in March 2020 to share their research in a public symposium and to discuss future outcomes for their work. In addition, the Lunder Institute and the museum will host a coinciding event at the University of Maryland, College Park. 

As the Lunder Institute Distinguished Scholar and Director of Research, Tanya Sheehan (William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art, Colby College) will oversee the program. Ott's cohort of research fellows consists of Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Assistant Professor, Princeton University), Adrienne Childs (Research Associate, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University), Tuliza Fleming (Curator of American Art, National Museum of African American History and Culture), Tess Korobkin (Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park), Key Jo Lee (Assistant Director of Academic Affairs, Cleveland Museum of Art), John Ott (Professor, James Madison University), and Rebecca VanDiver (Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University).