New York, New York, April 26, 2016—Bard Graduate Center is pleased to announce that Associate Professor Aaron Glass has been named a 2016–17 Getty Scholar to contribute to the annual theme of “Art and Anthropology.” The award will support a three-month residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where Glass will investigate Franz Boas’s development of an anthropological theory of art at the end of the nineteenth century.
Dr. Glass’s teaching and research focuses on First Nations visual art
and material culture, media, and performance on the Northwest Coast of North
America, as well as the history of anthropology and museums. Themes recurring
in his work include colonialism and indigenous modernities, cultural brokerage
and translation, the politics of intercultural exchange and display, discourses
of tradition and heritage management, and cultural and intellectual property.
His dissertation, along with a companion film, In Search of the Hamat’sa: A Tale of Headhunting, examines the ethnographic representation and performance history of
the Hamat’sa or “Cannibal Dance” of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) of British
Columbia. In spring 2011, he curated Bard Graduate Center’s first Focus
Project: Objects of Exchange: Social
and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast. He is currently collaborating with the U’mista Cultural Centre to
restore and present Edward Curtis’s 1914 silent film, In the Land of the Head Hunters,
and, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, creating a
critical, annotated, digital edition of Boas’s pioneering 1897 monograph on the
Kwakwaka’wakw culture. Glass received his undergraduate degrees from Reed
College (BA) and the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (BFA), his master’s
from the University of British Columbia, and his PhD in anthropology from New
York University
