Dr. John Ott

EDUCATION
Ph.D. Art History, UCLA
M.A. Art History, UCLA
B.A. Art History & English Literature, Stanford
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Art History of the US before 1960; African American Art History
SELECTED HONORS AND AWARDS
American Council of Learned Societies Project Development Grant, 2018-2019
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 2016
John H. Daniels Fellowship, National Sporting Library & Museum, 2016
SECAC William R. Levin Award for Research in the History of Art, 2015
Society for the Preservation of American Modernists Publication Grant, 2014
Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, 2012
Senior Fellowship, Center for the History of Collecting, Frick Art Reference Library, 2012
Robert Lehman Foundation Senior Scholar Fellowship, Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies, 2012
Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2009–10
Patricia and Phillip Frost Essay Award (“for the most distinguished contribution to American Art”), 2009
JMU College of Visual and Performing Arts Madison Scholar, 2009–10
JMU General Education Distinguished Teacher, 2010–11
SCHOLARSHIP
Recent:
Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority (Ashgate Press, 2014; paperback, Routledge, 2016).
“Metropolitan, Inc.: Public Subsidy and Private Gain at the Genesis of the American Art Museum,” in Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner, eds., New York, Cultural Capital of the Gilded Age (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 122-38.
“Hale Woodruff’s Antiprimitivist History of Abstract Art,” Art Bulletin100:1 (March 2018): 124-45.
“Netted Together: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion at the Dawn of Comparative Biology,” in Alan C. Braddock and Laura Turner Igoe, eds., A Greene Country Towne: Philadelphia, Ecology, and the Material Imagination (Penn State University Press, 2017), 81–95.
“A Show of Unity: Art Exhibitions, Racial Integration, and the CIO,” International Review of African American Art 26:3 (October 2016): 28–33.
“The Warp and Woof of the Archive: Or, Anton Refregier, from Macy’s Showroom to Congressional Hearing,” Archives of American Art Journal 55:1 (Spring 2016): 50–63.
“Westward Contraction: Maynard Dixon Paints the Great Depression,” in Marion Wardle and Sarah Boehme, eds., Branding the American West (Oklahoma University Press, 2016), 64–87.
“Battle Station MoMA: Jacob Lawrence and the Desegregation of the Armed Forces and the Art World,” American Art 29:3 (Fall 2015): 58–89.
"Patrons, Collectors, and Markets,” in John Davis, Jennifer Greenhill, and Jason LaFountain, eds, Blackwell Companion to American Art (Malden, Mass.: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), pp. 525-34.
“Graphic Consciousness: The Visual Cultures of Integrated Industrial Unions at Midcentury,” American Quarterly 66:4 (December 2014): 883–918.
Current:
Mixed Media: The Visual Cultures of Racial Integration, 1931–1954
“African American Art Beyond the Harlem Renaissance,” in Eddie Chambers, ed., Routledge Companion to African American Art History(London: Routledge, forthcoming 2019). “Occidental Arrangements: Midcentury Episodes in an Emerging Global History of Art,” in Sandra Zalman and Austin Porter, eds., Reintroducing the Modern: The First Twenty Years at MoMA, 1929–1949(New York: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2019).
“Art and Economics” (with Robin Veder), American Art33:3 (Fall 2019)
“Race Forms: African-American Athletes in Eadweard Muybridge’s Photographs and Gilded Age Philadelphia”
PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
Association for Critical Race Art History
Association of Historians of American Art
American Studies Association
College Art Association
Southeastern College Art Conference
SERVICE
Dr. Ott is on the advisory board of Archives of American Art Journal.