How do processes of exchange - understood as both the circulation of art as commodities or gifts, and as cross-cultural communication transacted via works of art - intersect in the contact zones created by travel, trade, and colonialism?
Paper long abstract:
Ruth B. Phillips is Canada Research Professor and Professor of Art History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her doctoral research, begun at SOAS in 1971 and completed in 1979, was directed by Guy Atkins and John Golding (Courtauld Institute) and resulted in her first book, Representing Women: Sande Masquerades of the Mende of Sierra Leone. Subsequent research on North American Indigenous arts and critical museology is published in Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art, 1700-1900 (1998) and Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (2011). Current projects focus on global Indigenous modernisms and historic Great Lakes Indigenous artistic production as a site of cross-cultural exchange. She has served as director of the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, President of CIHA and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
I am interested in 'exchange' in two different senses: as the circulation of works of art as commodities or gifts, and as cross-cultural communication transacted via works of art. I ask how these two processes intersect in the contact zones created by travel, trade, and colonialism and how art historical and anthropological approaches help us to understand the ways exchanges of different kinds shape perceptions of cultural difference and similarity.