Ray and Margaret Horowitz Visiting Assistant Professor in American Art
Elizabeth (Betsy) S. Hawley is a specialist in art of the United States, with a focus on modern art and Native American art. Her research interests also include feminist/women’s art, political/activist art, and art of the American West, and she has published across a range of these topics. Hawley is currently working on an article about Tonita Peña’s Pueblo painting practice, and she is preparing a book proposal based on her dissertation, an examination of transcultural dialogues that occurred among Pueblo and Anglo artists working in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Hawley balances her research and teaching with an active curatorial practice. In 2017, she curated a section of the MoMA show Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive, documenting Wright’s use of Native American figures and designs over the course of his career. Hawley provided research for the 2017/18 exhibition 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.” She is currently working on an installation titled African American Artists of the Great Migration at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she also recently assisted in the organization of Modern Times: American Art 1910 – 1950.
Hawley has previously taught art history courses at The New School, Pratt Institute, St. Francis College, and multiple campuses of the City University of New York. During her time at Boston University, she will lead seminars on topics in the field of modern and contemporary Native American art.