Wendy Bellion

Biography

Professor Wendy Bellion (Ph.D. Northwestern University) teaches American art history and material culture studies. She is also director of the university's Center for Material Culture Studies. Professor Bellion's scholarship takes an interdisciplinary approach to American visual and material culture, focusing on the late colonial and early national United States and exploring American art within the cultural geographies of the British Atlantic world and early modern Americas.

Her latest book, Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (2019), explores a history of material violence in New York City from the 1760s to the 1930s, tracing acts of political iconoclasm and the return of destroyed things in visual representations and civic performances.

Her book Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (2011), which the Smithsonian American Art Museum awarded the 2014 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship, examines the exhibition of illusionistic paintings and optical devices within post-revolutionary cultures of sensory discernment and undeceiving.

Bellion is also co-editor (with Prof. Mónica Domínguez Torres) of Objects in Motion: Art and Material Culture across Colonial North America (2011), a special issue of the journal Winterthur Portfolio. She is currently working on a new monograph about visual culture and the early national theater as well as a co-edited volume on global eighteenth-century material cultures for Bloomsbury's Material Culture of Art series (forthcoming 2023).

Her publications include essays on trompe l'oeil representation, sculpture, drawing instruments, theatrical illusion, and art-historical methodologies.