Carolyn Butler-Palmer

Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh
Assistant Professor
Williams Legacy Chair in Modern and Contemporary Arts of the Pacific Northwest

Fine Arts Building 143
By appointment| Phone 250-721-7943
cbpalmer@uvic.ca

Areas of Research

  • Historiography of Pacific Northwest art
  • Contemporaneity and post-avant-garde practices of art and curating
  • Art, the environment, and identity politics
  • Contemporary Indigenous arts of the Pacific Northwest
    Modern art/modernism and the Pacific Northwest
  • Documentary photography and environmental activism

Oral art history and the Michael Collard Williams Collection

Courses

2012-2013
HA 264: Art History and the Lens
HA 381B: Arts of the Pacific Northwest: 1945-present
HA 493/593: Advance Seminar on the Williams Collection: TBD

2011-2012
HA 381B: Arts of the Pacific Northwest: 1945-present
HA 484/584: Advance Seminar in Arts of the Pacific Northwest: Art and the Environment
HA 493/593: Advance Seminar on the Williams Collection: Exhibit Design and Installation

2010-2011
HA 484/584: Advance Seminar in Arts of the Pacific Northwest: Practices in Exhibition and Installation Design
HA 381B: Arts of the Pacific Northwest: 1945-present
HA 493/593: Advance Seminar on the Williams Collection: Community Engaged Exhibit Design

Brief Biography

            Carolyn’s mother was born to New Zealand immigrants in Rossland, British Columbia. Carolyn’s husband grew up in Burnaby and is related to the founders of the Great Northern Railway, a project around which the idea of a Pacific Northwest region emerged. She has family who now live in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon as well as in Alberta, Ontario, New Zealand, China, and England who identify themselves in various ways, including Canadian, American, Métis, New Zealander, Chinese-Canadian, and English.
            Her research is inspired by her family’s varied experiences of identity, mobility, and place. Carolyn’s research focuses on critically examining how artists and photographers assert, modify, challenge, or deny the idea of the Pacific Northwest. She has published several articles about photographer, painter, and carver David Neel’s negotiation of the Pacific Northwest from the 1980s to the present. Carolyn is currently working on a book manuscript, David Neel: A Cosmopolitan Aesthetic, an outgrowth of her dissertation.
            She also has two articles under review. The first, “Building Autonomy: The Fifteenth Ward Hall of the Mormon Women’s Relief Society,” examines the impact of railway expansion into the Pacific Northwest on women’s culture in the intermountain west. The second, “Surrealism, Tourism, and Collecting: Max Among Some of His Favorite Dolls and Ernst’s Tourist Aesthetic,” critically and comparatively examines Ernst’s collections of Indigenous objects from the Southwest and Pacific Northwest.
            Carolyn is currently leading the Williams Public Oral History Project and is designing an art installation at Cool-Aid Community Health Center, in Victoria, British Columbia.

Selected Professional Achievements

Board Member UAAC, 2011-present

Selected Publications

“Creating Metaculture: Community-based work with the University of Victoria's Williams Bequest,” University Museums Collections Journal, vol. 3 (2010), appeared 2011: 53-60.

 “Renegotiating Identity: ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art as Family Narrative,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol.29 (2008): 186-223.

 “David Neel: Cosmopolitan and Kwagiutl?” in Indigenous Cosmopolitans: Transnational and Transcultural Indigeneity in the Twenty-First Century, Maximilian C. Forte, ed., Peter Lang Press, 2010.
 
“Paintings in the Present Tense,” in David Neel: Living Legends (Gatineau, QE:
Inuit and Indian Art Gallery and the Canadian Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, 2003): 17-25.

“Preservation and Conservation” Separate Disciplines, Common Goals,” Proceedings 1995 Interdisciplinary Conference: Knowledge Tools for a Sustainable Civilization. Fourth Canadian Conference on Foundations and Applications of General Science Theory, (1995): 212-219.

Selected Exhibitions:
Chief Curator, “Connect the Blocks,” January 26-February 22, 2011, Legacy Gallery, Victoria, British Columbia.

Chief Curator and Research Curator, “Regarding Wealth,” February 24-June 10, 2010, Legacy Gallery, Victoria, British Columbia.

Chief Curator, “A Walk Through the City: Experiencing Victoria as Flâneur,” February-April, 2009, Legacy Gallery, Victoria, British Columbia.

Learn about...