Taylor Rose Payer Awarded 2025 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art

The Department of Art History is proud to announce that Taylor Rose Payer has been awarded a 2025 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. The program is made possible by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation and administered by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

Payer is one of seven emerging scholars awarded for their promising doctoral research on the history of the visual arts in the United States. The awards are designed to promote scholarship that advances and expands the field of art history, including research that elevates voices, narratives, and subjects that have been historically underrepresented in the academy, including all facets of Native American art. Each fellow receives $42,000 to support one year of research, writing, and fellowship-related travel between July 2025 and May 2027.

“The Henry Luce Foundation remains wholeheartedly committed to support for doctoral education in American art through the dissertation fellowships administered by our excellent partners at ACLS,” said Teresa Carbone, Program Director for American Art at the Henry Luce Foundation. “The Foundation is pleased, each year, to recognize excellence, new thinking, and new voices in the field, and to provide flexible funding that best serves the plans and needs of these rising field leaders.”

Payer’s research traces the persistence of abstraction in the work of Native American women artists throughout the twentieth century. Within the context of major federal policy, this project considers four graphic artists— Angel DeCora, Mary Sully, Jessie Oonark, and Kay WalkingStick—who have consciously engaged with their experiences of modernity as Indigenous women by drawing on the textiles of their artistic foremothers to assert presence and visualize futurity. “Crafting Kinship” threads specific tribal epistemologies throughout, while examining the use of pan-Indigenous aesthetics in modern art and undermining settler modes of visual interpretation. This dissertation argues these artists are early examples of those who use strategic abstraction to articulate Native identity and resurgent practices in the United States and Canada.

“Over the last thirty-three years, alumni of this program have helped shape and transform the evolving field of American art history,” said ACLS Program Officer Alison Chang. “This year’s fellows show great potential to impact the field, and we are excited to support them as they chart new scholarly pathways.”