Janet Catherine Berlo

Janet Catherine Berlo is an American art historian and academic, noted for her publications and research into the visual arts heritage of Native American and pre-Columbian cultures. She is currently Professor Emerita of Art History and Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Berlo is known for her scholarship on Plains Indian drawings, material culture, and the ethics of museum representation. She is a recipient of the College Art Association’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Native American Art Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award.

Early life and education

Berlo was born in November 2, 1952, in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. She attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she obtained a B.A. summa cum laude in 1974. Her postgraduate studies were undertaken at Yale, where she completed a master's degree in art history in 1976, and her Ph.D. in the same subject area was awarded in 1980. During her graduate studies, she was awarded a Danforth Graduate Fellowship (1974–1978) and a Joseph Albers Traveling Fellowship for Pre-Columbian Art (1976–1977).

Academic career

After a semester as an instructor at Yale while completing her PhD, Berlo became an assistant professor in the Art Department at the University of Missouri–St. Louis in 1979. Excepting some periods of leave and visiting appointments, Berlo remained associated with the UMSL for the next 17 years, reaching associate professor in 1985 and a full professorship in 1990, as well as serving as department chair during multiple terms.

During the 1986–1987 academic year, she served as Acting Director of Pre-Columbian Studies and Curator of the Collection at Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard University). She has held visiting professorships and endowed chairs at institutions, including Yale University (1988), the University of California, Los Angeles, where she held the UCLA Arts Council Chair in 1992, and Harvard University (2002).

In 1997 Berlo left UMSL for the University of Rochester, where for five years she held the positions of Susan B. Anthony Professor of Gender Studies and Professor of Art History. After a semester in 2002 as a visiting professor at Harvard, in 2003 she returned to Rochester as Professor of Art History and Visual and Cultural Studies. From 2003 to 2020, she served in this role and co-directed the Visual and Cultural Studies Graduate Program from 2003 to 2005. She achieved emerita status upon her retirement in 2020.

Alongside her academic appointments, Berlo has curated major museum exhibitions across the United States. Her curatorial projects include Past Forward: Native American Art from Gilcrease Museum (2024), co-curated with Chelsea Herr as a major traveling exhibition circulated by the American Federation of Arts. José Bedia: Transcultural Pilgrim (2011), co-curated with Judith Bettelheim for the Fowler Museum at UCLA, which traveled to the Miami Art Museum in 2012. Wild By Design: Two Hundred Years of Innovation and Artistry in American Quilts (2003), co-curated with Patricia Crews; and Plains Indian Drawings 1865–1935: Pages from a Visual History (1996), co-curated with Gerald McMaster for The Drawing Center in New York and the American Federation of Arts.

Research and scholarship

Her scholarship engages with nineteenth-century Plains Indian ledger drawings, Inuit graphic arts, women’s textile traditions, contemporary art and photography, and native art and eco-critical analysis. She expressed it in her 2013 article "Beyond the Mirror: Indigenous Ecologies and 'New Materialisms' in Contemporary Art" (co-authored with Jessica Horton for Third Text). Her 2023 monograph Not Native American Art: Fakes, Replicas and Invented Traditions is her most recent work, which focuses on the critical investigation of cultural replication and fakes.

Awards and honors

Berlo has received several awards, honors, and fellowships, including the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association in 2025 for Not Native American Art and the Native American Art Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. Her scholarship has also been recognized by a Fellow in Residence appointment at the Sainsbury Research Centre, University of East Anglia (2020), a Senior Fellowship at the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center in Santa Fe (2017), and a Faculty Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2012–2013). Earlier in her career, she was honored with a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1999–2000), a Getty Senior Research Grant (1994–1996), an NEH Fellowship for College Teachers (1994), and the University of Missouri Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching (1994).

Publications

Diehl, Richard A.; Berlo, Janet Catherine, eds. (1989). Mesoamerica After the Decline of Teotihuacan, A.D. 700–900. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Berlo, Janet C., ed. (1992). The Early Years of Native American Art History: The Politics of Scholarship and Collecting. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Berlo, Janet C. (2000). Spirit Beings and Sun Dancers: Black Hawk’s Vision of the Lakota World. New York: George Braziller.

Berlo, Janet Catherine; et al. (1998). Native paths: American Indian art from the collection of Charles and Valerie Diker. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 9780870998560.

Berlo, Janet C. (2001). Quilting Lessons. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Berlo, Janet C. (2006). Arthur Amiotte: Collages, 1988–2006. Santa Fe: Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.