While at the Center, I worked on my book manuscript concerning the pre-Hispanic art market. Covering the late 1930s to 1960s, this book addresses Indigenous ancestral arts of Mexico and Central America in relation to the individuals and institutions in the Americas and Europe who handled them. It highlights trends in the market in relation to the historiography of Mesoamerica, disciplines of art history and archaeology, and histories of museums, as well as looking at the webs of complicity spread across multiple countries and governments. Most of my research comes from dealer archives, including the Pierre Matisse Gallery Archives and Stendahl Art Galleries Records, as well as museum archives. Examining business records and letters exchanged among dealers, sources, and clients, I consider how writers speak about artworks, and how their preferences and interpretations have contributed to a discourse that persists today.

At the Center, I worked on three book chapters—on Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico—and consulted resources from several institutions in Washington, DC. At the National Gallery of Art and Dumbarton Oaks, I studied photographs of Indigenous Art of the Americas, an exhibition of the Robert Woods Bliss collection at the National Gallery from 1947 to 1962, which included objects from Panama that the Stendahls sold to Bliss. Also at Dumbarton Oaks (which was a refuge during the 43-day government shutdown during the fall term), I found obscure pamphlets published by Jorge Lines, an archaeology professor in Costa Rica who sold his collection to the Stendahl Art Galleries in 1953. The pamphlets illustrate objects from Lines’s collection and provide excavation and provenance histories that were not transferred to the museums where the objects are housed today. Once the federal government reopened, I visited the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archive, where I studied Jesse Walter Fewkes’s journals and field notebooks from his 1905 visit to the collection of Teodoro Dehesa, then governor of Veracruz. Fewkes wrote about stone sculptures that the Dehesa family later sold, some of which Pierre Matisse purchased. These library and archival sources have allowed me to restore memory to the artworks I have chosen for my case studies, and have enriched the intellectual histories I am building around them.

I delivered my colloquium on the chapter about the stone sculptures from the Dehesa collection, focusing on ones called palmas that came from offering caches at the site of Texolo, Veracruz. Fewkes’s journals and field notebooks give more information about the palmas’ origins and the networks of collectors, scholars, and politicians interested in Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This case study thus sheds light on the history of collecting in Mexico, including by prominent politicians, whose collecting often related to patriotism and national identity based on an Indigenous past, but who also sold those works to clients outside Mexico. Matisse acquired some of the palmas in 1941 and sold one to the RISD Museum. Matisse, whose gallery sold mostly modern art, was primarily interested in the aesthetics of pre-Hispanic art. He marketed the palmas based on their technical and formal qualities, but he also emphasized their provenance from a historical collection in Mexico and their similarities to other examples in the Museo Nacional de Antropología.

My research has also traced the paths of palmas that other dealers sold to collectors and museums in the United States and Belgium, with the goal of creating “collective biographies.” This term expands conceptions of social lives of things and cultural biographies by anthropologists Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff. By following objects’ social lives collectively, we can see where they intersect and diverge. Collective biographies may provide insight both into the works and the paths they have followed, often connecting to economic and power structures that manipulated object groupings and archaeological sites as well as political and scholarly forces that shaped the histories and art histories of Indigenous people of the Americas. The range of actors and institutions in these biographies encompasses anthropologists, archaeologists, politicians, art dealers, and anthropology and art museums in Mexico, the United States, and across Europe. They appreciated these items for various reasons, including their cultural origins, aesthetics, or provenance histories. This array of motivations is emblematic of the diversity of perceptions of pre-Hispanic artworks, creating a fluidity in their meaning that persists today.

Emory University
Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow, fall 2025

Megan E. O’Neil will spend the spring 2026 semester as a Fulbright Scholar at the Faculty of Archaeology at Universiteit Leiden in the Netherlands. She will return to her position as associate professor of art history at Emory University for the fall 2026 semester.