Ruth Phillips

Biography

Ruth Phillips received her doctorate in African art history from the School of Oriental and African Art at the University of London in 1979, and wrote her dissertation on the masquerades performed by Mende women in Sierra Leone. As a post-doctoral fellow she extended her research to the indigenous arts of North America. Two curatorial projects in this area, Patterns of Power: The Jasper Grant Collection and Great Lakes Indian Art of the Early Nineteenth Century (1984) and the Northeast component of The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada’s First Peoples (1988) stimulated a further expansion of her research to include the museum representation of non-Western arts. Phillips began teaching at Carleton in 1979. She is co-author, with Janet Catherine Berlo of the widely used survey text Native North American Art, for the Oxford history of art (revised ed. 2013). Her 1997 book Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900, argued for the authenticity of historical arts made for the curio and souvenir markets and explored the creative innovations and cross-cultural exchanges they embody. Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (2011 traces the epochal changes in representation and practices following the contestations and postcolonial critiques of the 1980s and 90s and was nominated for the Donner Prize in Public Policy.

Research Interest

Visual studies, museum studies, Aboriginal art and material culture, cultures of indigenous and diasporic communities.