Anne Whitelaw, PhD

Anne Whitelaw joined the Department of Art History at Concordia in January 2011 following 11 years as a faculty member in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta. Her areas of teaching expertise include the history of visual culture in Canada, theories of museums and exhibitions, historiography and archives, and the history of advertising.

Whitelaw's research examines the intersections of art historiography and cultural institutions in Canada, with a particular focus on practices of exhibition and collecting as a means of understanding the formation of nationhood She has published extensively on the display of Canadian art at the National Gallery of Canada, on the integration of Aboriginal art into the permanent displays of national museums, and on the work of settler collectors in Canada. She is the author of Spaces and Places for Art: Making Art Institutions in Western Canada 1912-1990 (MQUP 2017) and is co-editor with Brian Foss and Sandra Paikowsky of The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2010).  Whitelaw is the co-leader of a SSHRC-funded partnership development grant examining the global circulation of objects from northern North America, with Beverly Lemire (University of Alberta) and Laura Peers (Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford) - see objectlives.com; she is also writing a book on the work of volunteer women in North American art museums.

Areas of Expertise

• History of visual and material Culture in Canada
• Museums and cultural institutions
  
• Women and museums
• Exhibitions and collecting
• The writing of Canadian art history
  
• Settler-colonial Theory

Distinctions & Awards

2016
ARRE Grant, Concordia University
Spaces and Places for Art, publication grant

2014
SSHRC Connections Grant
Settler-Colonial Art History Workshop II (October 2014)

2014
SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (2014-17)
co-applicant (PI: Beverly Lemire, University of Alberta)
Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America: Networks, Localities and Material Culture 1700s-2000s

2013
ARRE Grant, Concordia University
Settler-Colonial Art History Workshop I (October 2013)

SSHRC Insight Grant (2013-16)
participant (PI: Johanne Sloan, Concordia University)
Networked Art History: Assembling Contemporary Canadian Art from the 1960s to the Present

2012
ARRE Grant, Concordia University
Universities Art Association of Canada Conference

2009
Killam Fund President's Grants for the Creative and Performing Arts, University of  Alberta

2007
Killam Fund President's Grants for the Creative and Performing Arts, University of  Alberta

2002
Support for the Advancement of Scholarship Grant, University of  Alberta

2000-2001
SSHRC Junior Faculty Development Grant, University of  Alberta

View Anne Whitelaw's CV