In Native North American artistic traditions, what is a replica? What constitutes a copy? In contrast with the larger field of art history, there is almost no literature on forgeries and replicas in this sub-field. Join us for Janet Catherine Berlo’s lecture, adapted from the introduction to her forthcoming book, Not Native American Art. Berlo considers notions of replicas, copies, tributes, forgeries, pastiches, and even digital surrogates as they apply to archaeological, historical, and contemporary Native arts of North America. The talk will be followed by a Q&A moderated by BGC PhD candidate Leonie Treier.

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Janet Catherine Berlo, professor of art history and visual and cultural studies emerita at the University of Rochester, holds a PhD in the history of art from Yale University. She is the author of many publications on the Indigenous arts of the Americas, including the most widely-used textbook in the field (Native North American Art, with Ruth B. Phillips. Second edition. Oxford, second edition 2015). Berlo has also written on American art history and quilt history. Her forthcoming book, Not Native American Art: Fakes, Replicas, and Invented Traditions will be published by the University of Washington Press in July 2023.

Leonie Treier is a museum anthropologist studying histories of collecting and representing Native American material culture in museums and beyond. Supported by a Smithsonian Institution predoctoral fellowship at the National Museum of Natural History, her dissertation critically explores the collection of material culture belonging to George Catlin’s Indian Gallery identifying and analysing material fabrications consisting of (de)construction, repurposing, and adding decorative elements of Native North American and non-Native source material, among other modifications, undertaken on a variety of items. She holds an MPhil in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from the University of Oxford and has published in Museum Worlds, Museum Anthropology Review, and the Journal of Museum Anthropology (upcoming).