Bio

Elizabeth “Betsy” S. Hawley, Ph.D. (she/her) is an art historian, writer, and curator specializing in modern and contemporary art and art of the Americas. Her research often focuses on Native North American art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and other areas of expertise include ecocritical art, feminist/women’s art, political/activist art, and art of the American West. Throughout her work, which is grounded in theories of intersectionality, decolonization, and transcultural circuits of influence, she seeks to account for the art and experiences of members of communities that have historically been marginalized.

Betsy’s research has been published in American Art, Art in America, Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, Nierika: Revista de Estudios de Arte, Peace and Change: A Journal for Peace Research, and Religion and the Arts, and her book and exhibition reviews have appeared in Art Inquiries, Boston Art Review, Hyperallergic, Panorama, and Winterthur Portfolio. She has also contributed to numerous edited volumes and exhibition catalogues.

Her current book project, under contract with the University of Nebraska Press, tracks the ways Pueblo and Anglo-American artists in New Mexico grappled with fallacies of authentic Indigeneity and biases regarding gender roles in art production during the first half of the twentieth century. Her research has been supported by the Lunder Institute for American Art, Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Pittsburgh Foundation.

Recent exhibitions include Landscapes of Survivance (Santa Clara University Art Gallery, 2023), a show featuring contemporary U.S.-based Indigenous artists working in the broad category of landscape art in ways that underscore the survivance of their cultures’ systems of knowledge, particularly as related to place, and Borderwaters (Alabama Contemporary Art Center, 2023), which presents the work of contemporary artists who frame geopolitical U.S. boundaries as borderwaters, emphasizing the shorelines of the U.S. and its island regions; the linkage between waterways and colonialist, imperialist U.S. policies; and the ecological inseparability that ensures changes in one area’s borderwaters have global effects. Betsy also organized Native Feminisms (apexart, 2021), an exhibition showcasing the aesthetic richness and political power of artworks produced by contemporary Native North American artists whose practices address intersectional issues of feminisms and Indigeneity.

Previously, she curated African American Artists of the Great Migration at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she also assisted in the organization of Modern Times: American Art 1910 – 1950. She curated a section of the MoMA show Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive, exploring the ways Wright drew inspiration from Indigenous cultures and the stereotypes thereof in his work, and she provided research for California / Mexicana: Missions to Murals, 1820 – 1930 at the Laguna Art Museum, organized as part of the Getty Foundation’s “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, Latin American and Latino Art in LA.”

Continuing the research begun for Native Feminisms, Betsy is also working on a publication project that looks to the varied ways contemporary Indigenous artists respond to Native feminisms in their practices. Portions of this work have been published in Art in America and the edited volume Expanding the Parameters of Feminist Artivism.

Betsy joined the faculty at the University of South Alabama in 2022. Previously, she held visiting faculty positions at Boston University, Earlham College, Northeastern University, and Santa Clara University. She has also taught courses at Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, St. Francis College, and various senior colleges at the City University of New York.