History of Art and Architecture

Katie Loney

Advisor: 

Biography

Katie Loney is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in nineteenth-century art and design of the U.S. and the Anglo-Indian world. She is currently the Douglass Foundation Fellow in American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is writing her dissertation “Lockwood de Forest, The Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company, and the Global Circulation of Luxury Goods.” Her dissertation traces the AWCC’s teakwood furnishings and cut-brass ornament through the various aesthetic worlds they inhabited, including workshops, showrooms, international exhibitions, and domestic interiors. The goal of this work is not merely to chart the movement of the AWCC’s work, but to reconstruct the social and material networks that facilitated the global circulation of luxury goods and capital—arguing that Orientalist interiors in the US both required and produced these systems of circulation.

Katie received her BA in Art History from the University of Oregon and MA in Art History from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her MA Essay, “A Late-Nineteenth-Century ‘Safavid’ Ware for International Audiences: The Indiana University Art Museum Qajar Tile,” examined the work of Iranian potter Ali Muhamad Isfahani in relation to growing international art markets in the late nineteenth century.

Her work has been supported by several organizations including the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and CASVA. In 2022–2023, Katie will be in residence at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as a Wyeth Foundation Predoctoral Fellow.

Education Details

PhD, University of Pittsburgh, in progress
MA, Indiana University, Bloomingon, 2015
BA, University of Oregon, 2010

Selected Awards

Wyeth Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2021–2022 (deferred to 2022–2023)

Douglass Foundation Fellowship in American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021–2022

Terra Foundation Travel Grant, Terra Foundation for American Art, Administered by CAA, 2020–2021

Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship, University of Pittsburgh, 2020–2021

Predoctoral Fellowship for Historians of American Art to Travel Abroad, Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art (fellowship to research craft and design traditions in India), 2019–2020

Graduate Fellow in Public History, World History Center, University of Pittsburgh, 2019

Marstine Prize, Dig Where You Stand at the 57th Carnegie International (with Emi Finkelstein, Becca Giordano, Paula Kupfer, and Ellen Larson), 2019

Conference Presentations & Workshops

“Manufacturing Indian Applied Arts: The Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company and the Global Circulation of Luxury Goods,” The Raw and the Refined: Commodities, Processing and Power in Global Perspective Workshop, The Commodities of Empire Project, University of London’s School of Advanced Studies, September 2021

Work Forces: Mobilizing the Visual and Material Cultures of Labor, Collection-Based Mellon Workshop, Collecting Knowledge Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh, May 2019

“Re-arranging East Indian Furnishings at Bryn Mawr College: Mary Garrett and M. Carey Thomas’ Patronage of Lockwood de Forest,” The Ambient Interior in the United States During the Long Nineteenth Century Workshop, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, February 2019

“Appropriating the ‘Orient’ in the Moorish Smoking Rooms of Cornelius Vanderbilt II,” Bodies in the City: Otherness and Urbanism, Art History Association Graduate Student Symposium, University of Oregon, April 2015