The Otsego Faculty Council began as the Otsego Institute Board in 1997, when the first Otsego Institute symposium was held. The name was changed in 2014 to reflect the more academic nature of council members’ involvement with the Institute. Council members are responsible for the overall direction of the Institute and conduct their meetings annually, in odd years at the biennial Otsego workshop and at various locations during the even-numbered years. Specific responsibilities of Council members include: identifying the theme of each symposium or workshop; identifying visiting scholars for the symposia and workshops; selecting participants; planning the symposium or workshop agenda; contributing to the Institute website; and reviewing contributions to the Alumni Review. Council members are leading scholars in the field of Native American art. In 2013, it was decided to include more junior scholars, particularly Indigenous ones, to involve them in the Institute as their careers develop. Currently, the sitting Council decides on new members.
Eva Fognell has a M.A. degree in Museum Studies form the Cooperstown Graduate Center, NY and an M.A. degree in Communication for Development from Malmo University, Sweden. She has been curator and collections manager of the Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art at the Fenimore Art Museum since 2002. She curates the museum's changing exhibitions drawn from the Thaw Collection along with such others as "Reveal Conceal: The Transforming Power of Masks and Masterpieces of American Indian Art: The Thaw Collection," a traveling exhibition of selected masterworks, whose catalog she edited. She creates museum education programs for schools K-12 as well as for the general public. Eva also teaches classes in Native American art, Material Culture and Collections Management at the Cooperstown Graduate Center and she is the onsite coordinator for the Otsego Institute.
Aaron Glass is an Associate Professor at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City, and a Research Associate in the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. He specializes in First Nations art, material culture, media, and performance on the Northwest Coast, as well as the history of anthropology and museums. His doctoral research, along with a companion film “In Search of the Hamat’sa,” examined the ethnographic mediation and cultural history of the Kwakwaka’wakw “Cannibal Dance.” Glass recently worked with the U’mista Cultural Centre to document the large Kwakwaka’wakw collection at the Ethnological Museum Berlin in an innovative digital database, and to restore and present Edward Curtis’s 1914 silent feature film, “In the Land of the Head Hunters.” He is currently collaborating on an NEH-funded project to produce a critical, annotated edition—in both print and digital media—of Franz Boas’s seminal 1897 monograph on Kwakwaka’wakw social and ceremonial organization. His books include The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History (co-authored with Aldona Jonaitis, 2010), Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (the catalogue for an exhibition he curated at the Bard Graduate Center in 2011), and Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka’wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema (co-edited with Brad Evans, 2014).
Emil Her Many Horses is an associate curator in the office of Museum Research at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, specializing in Northern and Southern Plains culture. Emil has served on the NAASA Board of Directors since 2009. A member of the Oglala Lakota nation of South Dakota and an accomplished beadwork artist, he won the 2002 Best of Show category at the Northern Plains Tribal Art Show for his tribute to the Lakota Sioux Vietnam Veterans. Emil was lead curator for the NMAI inaugural permanent exhibition Our Universes: Traditional Knowledge Shapes Our World, and has served as co-curator for Identity by Design: Tradition, Change and Celebration in Native Women’s Dresses and curator for two of the Our Peoples community exhibitions.
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Jonathan Holstein has had a lifelong interest in the material culture of the Americas, and began to study and collect Native American art in the 1960s. At the same time, intrigued with their aesthetics, he began to collect American pieced quilts. In 1971 he curated an exhibition, "Abstract Design in American Quilts" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. That, and his subsequent scores of exhibitions here and abroad, along with his books, articles, catalog essays and lectures on the subject, were significant in introducing a world audience to quilts as aesthetic objects and encouraging the concomitant growth of the contemporary art quilt movement. He continues to curate quilt exhibitions and write and lecture about both quilts and Native American art. Concurrently, he has acted for four decades as a consultant on American Indian art to collectors and museums, including the Thaw Collection at NYSHA. He is especially interested in determining, through direct analyses, the physical and historical aspects of Native American objects, origins and histories, functions and use patterns, materials and ages.
Heather Igloliorte (Inuit, Nunatsiavut Territory of Labrador) is an independent curator and Assistant Professor of Aboriginal art history at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, where she currently holds a Concordia University Research Chair in Indigenous Art History and Community Engagement. Heather completed her PhD in Cultural Mediations at Carleton University’s Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture (ICSLAC); her dissertation contributes the first art history of the Nunatsiavummiut, focusing on over 400 years of post-contact production, "Nunatsiavummi Sananguagusigisimajangit / Nunatsiavut Art History: Continuity, Resilience, and Transformation in Inuit Art" (2013).
Heather’s teaching and research interests center on Inuit and other Native North American visual and material culture, circumpolar art studies, the global exhibition of Indigenous arts and culture, and issues of colonization, sovereignty, resistance and resilience. Some of her recent publications related to this work include chapters and catalog essays in Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada (2014); Sonny Assu: Longing (2013); Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism (2012); Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 3 (2012); Curating Difficult Knowledge (2011); Native American Art At Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art (2011); Inuit Modern (2010); and Response, Responsibility, and Renewal: Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Journey (2009).
Heather’s teaching and research interests center on Inuit and other Native North American visual and material culture, circumpolar art studies, the global exhibition of Indigenous arts and culture, and issues of colonization, sovereignty, resistance and resilience. Some of her recent publications related to this work include chapters and catalog essays in Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada (2014); Sonny Assu: Longing (2013); Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism (2012); Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 3 (2012); Curating Difficult Knowledge (2011); Native American Art At Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art (2011); Inuit Modern (2010); and Response, Responsibility, and Renewal: Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Journey (2009).
Aldona Jonaitis is currently Director of the University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks, Alaska. In 1977, she received her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where she wrote her dissertation on Tlingit art. This became the basis of her first book, Art of the Northern Tlingit (1986). She began her career as a college professor at Stony Brook University, where she taught from 1973 through 1989. Moving from the academic realm to the museum world, she became Vice President for Public Programs at the American Museum of Natural History from 1989-1993. During that period she wrote From the Land of the Totem Poles: The Northwest Coast Art Collection at the American Museum of Natural History (1988) and curated the exhibition "Chiefly Feasts: The Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch" and edited the eponymous catalog (1991). Her more recent publications include Art of the Northwest Coast (2006), The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History (2010 with Aaron Glass) and The Totem Pole: A Traveller’s Guide (2012). Currently she is working with Sealaska Heritage Institute on an exhibit of Southeast Alaska Native art and a book on Tlingit art.
Evan Maurer is Director Emeritus of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. He holds a Ph.D. in art history, and is the author of some of the most influential exhibition catalogs in the field of Native American art, including Visions of the People: A Pictorial History of Plains Indian Life (1992), and The Native American Heritage (1977). Following his time as curator of the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the Art Institute of Chicago, he was Director of the University of Michigan Museum of Art and a Professor in the University's History of Art Dept., where he taught museum studies and topics in Native American art. He is currently engaged in research and writing on various aspects of Native American art history.
David W. Penney is the Associate Director of Museum Scholarship at the National Museum of the American Indian. An internationally recognized scholar, curator, and museum administrator, Penney was appointed as the first Associate Director of the newly organized Museum Scholarship Group at NMAI in April of 2011 after a long career at The Detroit Institute of Arts. Penney joined the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1980 as curator of Native American Art, was promoted to Chief Curator in 1996 and ultimately served as Vice President of Exhibitions and Collections Strategies from 2003 to 2011. At the Detroit Institute of Arts Penney directed the creation of one of the finest Native American collections in the country. Spanning 3,000 years of history, it includes several masterworks from the renowned Chandler Pohrt Collection of Woodlands, Great Lakes, Prairie and Plains culture artistry, newly installed in a 6,000-square-foot permanent gallery. As Project Director for the DIA reinstallation project, Penney directed the planning and design of over 5,000 objects from the museum’s permanent collection in 90 galleries totaling 150,000-square-feet of renovated space. Penney’s exhibitions of note include “Indigenous Beauty: American Indian Art from the Diker Collection,” (American Federation of Arts), “Before and After the Horizon: Anishinaabe Artists of the Great Lakes” a collaboration with co-curator Gerald McMaster and the Art Gallery of Ontario (2014), “The American Indian: Art and Culture Between Myth and Reality,” (2012) for the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. “Art of the American Indian Frontier: The Chandler Pohrt Collection,” The National Gallery of Art, The Seattle Art Museum, Buffalo Bill Historical Society, The Dallas Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Arts, (1992-1994); and “Ancient Art of the American Woodland Indians,” The National Gallery of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1986-1994). Author of numerous publications, Penney’s most recent work includes the exhibition catalogue for Before and After the Horizon…, an essay for the NMAI and Yale University Press collaboration, For the Love of His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw, “Native American Art: Pre-contact,” for the acclaimed Oxford on-line Bibliographies for Art History and the widely known Native North American Art,” for the Thames and Hudson World of Art Series published in 2004. Penney was president of the Native American Art Studies Association from 1999 to 2003 and served as a jurist for both the Alfred H. Barr Prize for Museum Publications, College Arts Association, from 2007 to 2010 and the Northern Plains Tribal Arts Exhibition and Market (1995, 1999). Penney was an adjunct professor of Art History at Wayne State University, a position he has held from 1988 to 2001. He received his Ph.D. (1989) in art history and archaeology from Columbia University and his Bachelor of Arts degree in art history from New York University, where he graduated summa cum laude in June 1978.
Ruth B. Phillips holds a Canada Research Chair and is Professor of Art History at Carleton University, Ottawa. Her research focuses on the indigenous arts of North America and critical museology. Her books include Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (2011); Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from theNortheast (1998); and Representing Woman: Sande Masquerades of the Mende of Sierra Leone (1995). She has served as director of the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology and president of the International Committee on the History of Art. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She is currently part of an international collaborative research project studying modernist arts produced during the 20th century by Indigenous and other artists living under colonial rule.
Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora) is a visual historian, artist, and curator with a particular interest in the issues of Indigeneity within a global context. She is an associate professor at Cornell University in the History of Art Department, served as Interim Chair for the Art Department 2009-2010 and will serve as the Directory or the American Indian Program 2011-2013. She was a 2010-2011 Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellow, with a focal theme of Global Aesthetics. Her recent projects include a Banff Residency for the Painter House Conversations (Canada) 2010, Te Tihi Scholar/Artist Gathering (New Zealand) 2010. She acted as a guest curator for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) inaugural exhibition (Washington, D.C., 2004) and exhibitions at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Barbican Art Center (London) and the Museum der Weltkulturen (Frankfurt). Her essays have included “Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors” in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law (10:2, Spring 2011); “Hide: Skin as Material and Metaphor” (NMAI: DC, 2010); Res ( Anthropology and Aesthetics 52, Fall 2007) and “Rebecca Belmore: Fountain” (Jolene Rickard and Jessica Bradley, Canadian entrant for the Venice Biennale 2005, co-published by the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery, Canada). Rickard is currently a recipient of a Ford Foundation Research Grant and is conducting research in the Americas, Europe, New Zealand and Australia that will culminate in a new journal on Indigenous aesthetics. She also has a forthcoming book on Visual Sovereignty. Ms. Rickard holds a Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo, and an B.F.A. from the Rochester Institute of Technology.