In December 2024, Gustavus Adolphus College was awarded a $500,000 grant by the Mellon Foundation to support Object Lessons: Repatriation, Provenance, and Access in Art History, a project led by Dr. Colleen Stockmann. Gustavus Adolphus College stewards over one thousand artworks and objects in the Hillstrom Museum of Art and College Archives that span five continents and centuries, and include Native North America and East African art and objects. Object Lessons is a 3-year long interdisciplinary project that incorporates these artefacts and object-based learning into the humanities curriculum through course development, training colloquia, and undergraduate research fellowships. Object Lessons reckons with institutional history to understand how particular items came into the Gustavus collections, and mobilizes those instructive pathways for teaching and action. The project makes tangible the often abstract ethics of cultural heritage stewardship.
The grant supports the formation of a Faculty Cohort to learn art historical methods for use in their own research and to incorporate campus collections into their existing courses. Through the formation of an undergraduate fellowship program, students will work with objects in the collections and propose solutions for interpretive strategies, repatriation potential, and engagement with audiences on and off campus. Furthermore, the grant provides for several Summer student-and-faculty collaborative research grants. And finally, Object Lessons works to support open access to cultural heritage initiatives and researchers by adding the Hillstrom Museum of Art collection to the College Archives’s current online database, contributing to the OpenGLAM network, and providing physical access to the collections through exhibitions and workflow for visiting scholars.
About the cohort: The Faculty Cohort is led by Dr. Stockmann and Co-Lead, Martha Ndakalako. As a cohort, faculty will receive training in the focus areas of the project via annual Colloquia, stipends for course development to incorporate object-based research, and priority for Summer Research collaborations with students. The Faculty Cohort brings together humanists whose research methods overlap with art historical strategies and innovative pedagogy. Cohort members all engage with visual or material culture, historical and contemporary implications of colonial collecting practices, and situate their research and teaching in a social context. By the end of the grant period, the Cohort will be confident in teaching with objects from the Museum and College Archives, co-mentoring art historical student research, and together will continue to shift the emphasis of critical inquiry from two-dimensional archival sources to an array of oral texts, tangible objects, and other unexpected sources fully situated in networked contexts.
The Faculty Cohort members are Maddalena Marinari, Kate Keller, Sun Hee Lee, Severine Bates, Jon Gill, and Joaquin Villanueva.
Affiliated Faculty and Staff are Rachel Flynn (Digital Liberal Arts Librarian) and Adrianna Darden (the Archives Collections and Records Manager in the Folke Bernadotte Memorial Library). The Inaugural Undergraduate Research Fellows for Spring 2025 are Nora Birkholz (‘26), and Megan Lipke (‘25).
About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.