About: Nancy Austin is a scholar, artist, and public history activist based in Newport, Rhode Island. Her studio, Austin Alchemy, collaborates on experimental art projects that bridge historical scholarship, site-specific installations, an expanded notion of cultural tourism as an opportunity for public discourse, and the critical exploration of new location based technology.
Nancy Austin received her Ph.D. from Brown University in 2009, and has taught at RISD, Yale, and WPI.
Reach her at Nancy@AustinAlchemy.com
Independent Scholar: Nancy Austin is an interdisciplinary historian studying the ecology of culture in nineteenth-century America. Her scholarship is defined by meticulous archival research, a close reading of unusual or overlooked primary sources, and the use of place-based historical case studies that pioneer new ground about the possibilities and limits of modernism. Recurring concerns are: the social construction of the artist, designer, architect, and engineer as distinct or blurred cultural and economic gendered actors; the historiography of art and design as quintessentially modern practices; theories of authorship in art, architecture, and design; the history of the museum as a site; the nineteenth-century civic understanding of the library as a priority relative to the establishment of design schools and museums; coming to terms with what freedom means for women and for the woman in community; exploring the third term – the ignored history that disrupts a binary; explaining why history is a tool that matters. Her project is a critique asking us to consider how and why our understanding of the modern practice of art and the education of the artist has been so shaped by historiographical narratives codified after 1890. This work contributes to the comparative historiography of cultural categories and notions of authorship in the modern period. It is particularly relevant today as American cultural institutions and other educational edifices respond to dramatic changes in the 21st century and work to reinvent themselves.
Current Projects:
Book project: The Antebellum Rhode Island Art Association & the Founding of RI's Gilded Age Cultural Institutions
Book project on artist bequests and cultural institutions founded in the 1890s: Founding the American Academy in Rome, 1883-1914.
Article: Holly Home – Rhode Island’s Unknown Transcendentalist Utopian Community. Documentation and Legacy. With Robert O. Jones.
In a changing knowledge economy, Nancy Austin established Studio Austin Alchemy in 2008 to collaborate on experimental art projects that bridge place-based historical scholarship, an expanded notion of cultural tourism as an opportunity for public discourse, site-specific installations, and the critical exploration of new location-based applications and technology.
For the site-specific juried exhibition, Cryptic Providence, Nancy Austin collaborated with Brooklyn-based artist, Caroline Woolard. Footnotes (2008) was a site-specific tea-party installation, performing the entwined and buried histories of America’s first public sculpture critic and the founder of RISD, Helen Rowe Metcalf. Austin exhibited an iteration of this project at the RISD, Museum of Art in 2009.
As Malraux came up with his idea of a museum without walls, so must scholars today continually reimagine where they can critically engage new publics. Austin’s second intervention was Off-Road (2009). Her installation on historic synagogues, urban renewal, and religious tolerance in America was on view December 2009 through January 2010 in New Haven, CT as part of a group exhibition organized by Cynthia Beth Rubin and the Orchard Street Shul Cultural Heritige Artists Project. Click here for video.
From 2010 on, all of Nancy Austin’s scholarship will be communicated across a range of knowledge platforms, exploring how and where scholarship and new media can partner. Studio Austin Alchemy is a contemporary intervention in scholarship, art, and public history activism.
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Post Ph.D. Publications, May 2009-Present:
The Rhode Island Art Association & the Ecology of Culture in Pre-Civil War R.I.
(exhibition catalogue, September 2010).
American Academy in Rome - blogs on March 16, 2010 & May 24, 2010.
- Founding the American Academy Rome, 1894-1897.
- Tracing the AAR’s First Twenty Years: The Villa Aurora.
“Locative Media and the Possibility of Place”, Monthly Design Review (February 2010).
“Since the 1990s, we have been at a turning point in how to talk about location, just as we were more than a century ago talking about time. … We need a common understanding of a sustainable future. Talking about “where” will be part of it.”
[JSAH review] Andrew Saint. Architect and Engineer: a Study in Sibling Rivalry. In Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (December 2009): 581-582.
"Off-Road: The GPS Guide to Cultural Tourism in New Haven's Yale Hospital, Oak Street Connector and Historic Orchard Street Synagogue Area." An Art Installation by Nancy Austin in The Cultural Heritage Artists Project of the Orchard Street Shul (December 2009): 64-65.
Three chapters in Infinite Radius: a history of the Rhode Island School of Design (September 2009): 171-242.
- “‘What a beginning is worth’: The Women’s Centennial Committee of Rhode Island and the Founding of RISD, 1875-1877,” (©2002)
- “”No Honors to Divide’: Mrs. Metcalf and the Trustees of the Women’s Centennial Commission Fund,” (©2004).
- “The Jones Bequest Lawsuit and the Meaning of a Museum.” (©2000).
"A Place for Design: RISD at the Hoppin Homestead, 1878-1893," Towards a Genealogy of Visual Culture at the Rhode Island School of Design, 1875-1900 (Brown University, Ph.D. thesis, May 2009).
Publications, 1992-2006 (selected):
“Educating American Designers for Industry, 1853-1903.” In The Cultivation of American Artists: Education and the Commerce of Art in 19th-century America, ed. Diana Korzenik. (American Antiquarian Society, 1995): 187-206.
“Naming the Landscape: Leisure Travel and the Demise of the Salon.” In Transformations: The Languages of Personhood and Culture after Theory, ed. Christie McDonald. (Penn State Press, 1994): 35-60.
[review] Kristina Wilson. Livable Modernism. In Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 65 (June 2006): 315-316.
“New Content/New Form: Project-oriented Learning in the Introduction to Art History Course.” FATE in Review - Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (1992).
Calendar:
April 8, 2011: Invited Session Respondent on "The Centennial of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire," at the National Council on Public History annual meeting.
March 25, 2011 (Friday 6-7:30pm) I will be teaching a class at Trade School on “The Utopian Promise of 19th c Design Schools for Women”. My barter is a request for an object of possibility. Trade School, located at 32 Prince St in Soho, NYC, is an experimental barter education initiative of OurGoods – a barter site for artists. It was co-founded by my daughter, the artist Caroline Woolard.
Winter 2011: Visiting Scholar/Artist, American Academy in Rome
December 4, 2010: Speaking on historic signage at the Providence Preservation Society
November 5, 2010 in Washington, D.C.: Conference Scholar
First Wave Feminism & the Ecology of Culture in Antebellum Rhode Island
At: First Annual Feminist Art History Conference in honor of Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, American University.
October 2010: Co-speakers - Nancy Austin and Robert O. Jones on Margaret Fuller in Rhode Island and the Greene Street School. The October 1, 2010 Providence Athenaeum Salon on Margaret Fuller in Rhode Island is part of the international bicentennial celebration of unique first-wave feminist, Margaret Fuller (1810-1850). Companion walking tour: October 2 & 3.
September 2010: Guest Curator
The Providence Athenaeum’s rediscovered 1859 Tommaso Cuccioni Coliseum Photograph in Context at the Providence Athenaeum, Providence, RI “Meet the Curator”: Gallery Night September 16th from 5-7pm; and Noon-1pm on September 3 & 8 & 23.
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Contact: Please contact Nancy Austin at Nancy@AustinAlchemy.com