Past Winners

Past Award Winners

Distinguished Service Award

2021

Corinne Kratz

Professor of Anthropology and African Studies Emerita at Emory University, and Emory Director for the African Critical Inquiry Programme

Kratz’s academic accolades are expansive, reflecting a lifetime of scholarly and engaged anthropological achievement. Over the course of her near 50-year career, Kratz has redefined both museum anthropology and critical museology, especially at the intersections between these fields and African Studies. Kratz is the author of The Ones That Are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition, which is a description of, and extended academic reflection upon, Kratz’s own exhibition ‘Okiek Portraits,’ a traveling exhibition of fieldwork photographs taken during her work with the Kaplelach and Kipchornwonek Okiek people of Southern Kenya. Including tri-lingual captions, short dialogues between Kratz and her Okiek interlocutors, and the use of color photographs, the exhibition challenged earlier visual stereotypes of the Okiek. Based on the failures and successes of the exhibition as it traveled around the United States, Kratz’s ethnography has become one of the first book-length studies to take seriously the idea that an exhibition may be engaged as an anthropological ‘field site’ in its own right, and is regarded as a seminal study for visual anthropology and critical museology, and  exemplifies participatory and collaborative methodologies while taking seriously the dynamics and contexts of visitors and institutions.

Kratz’s impact on a truly global community of scholars is evident from her scholarship and mentorship, especially her support of African Early Career Researchers. In addition to mentoring young scholars at Emory University, Kratz’s service and mentoring activities extend transnationally to the Institutions of Public Culture Program, and the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship at Emory and South Africa. Following Ivan Karp’s death in 2011, Kratz carried forward their commitment to developing public intellectual life in Africa still further, by establishing the Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz Fund. The Fund supported the creation of the African Critical Inquiry Program, which has gone on to provide scholarships for, and to in other ways support the research of, African doctoral students from across the continent, and to host workshops in South Africa. We honor her generosity of spirit and time, and her indelible human connection with a global community of colleagues.

2018

Candace Greene

Ethnologist, Collections and Archives Program, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

Obtaining her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Oklahoma in 1985 and her MA in Anthropology from Brown in 1976, Dr. Greene has been engaged with museums, collections, students and communities for 40 years. She is widely regarded for her ground-breaking work in museum anthropology within the United States and Europe, and increasingly for her ability to forge new strategies of pedagogy within museums through programs such as the Summer Institute of Museum Anthropology (SIMA) (2008- 2017), for which she won a CMA Ames award in 2012. SIMA has helped to place a new focus on museum collections and archives as part of graduate training within North America. Doing so, she has activated a growing network of some 108 students and brought to NMNH an impressive array of leading scholars in museum anthropology from around the world to serve as faculty. SIMA has also trained 41 collections interns as future museum and archives professionals.

This fall, Greene retired from the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) after 32 years of service at the Smithsonian. From 1990 to the present she has served as an Ethnologist in the Collections and Archives Program, a position, which built on her role as Collections Manager from 1985 to 1990. For a year (2010-11) she was also the acting Director of the National Anthropological Archives. Before coming to the NMNH she worked from 1974 to 1981 at the Stovall Museum of Science and History (now Sam Noble Museum) as the Curator of Collections. In addition to her Smithsonian work, Greene has mentored interns for over 20 years and taught graduate students at the George Washington University and through SIMA for over 12 years. Greene has an impressive scholarly record with three books on different aspects of 19th and 20th century North American Plains material and visual culture, as well as some 43 articles and chapters, and a number of online exhibits, one of which Lakota Winder Counts (http://wintercounts.si.edu), which won both a Webby Award and a U.N. World Summit Award.

2017

Howard Morphy

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Australian National University, and Honorary Curator, Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford

A visionary of bringing cross-cultural methods and an interdisciplinary approach to museum studies, Howard Morphy’s noteworthy contributions to the study of art and anthropology, and his fierce commitment to Aboriginal Australian artists and communities for well over 40 years, is recognized by the Council for Museum Anthropology for the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award. As an emerging scholar, Morphy conducted fieldwork in northeast Arnhem Land of Australia, establishing working relationships and friendships with Yolgnu artists that continue to distinguish his pivotal arguments for inclusivity of non-European artists in the fields of art history, art criticism, and visual anthropology. His work with Arnhem Land communities on art, exhibitions, and critical legal cases is a stellar example of meaningful long-term collaboration, much also done in collaboration with Frances Morphy. Morphy’s many years working with Yolgnu artists and friends has influenced a rich collection of scholarship and exhibitions that contextualize art as inseparable from social, political, and economic processes. As a scholar of social theory, he has also been a tireless advocate for recognizing the important role that museum anthropology has played in the history of anthropology and the tremendous potential it continues to hold.

Through his curatorial and academic work at the Pitt Rivers Museum and Oxford University, Morphy pioneered a model for graduate studies, bringing together an inter-disciplinary team of scholars and museum professionals. Recognizing the strength of creating a multifaceted approach to the study and presentation of material culture, Morphy returned to Australia and developed an interdisciplinary focused graduate degree program as founding Director of the Research School of Humanities at Australian National University. As a result of his openness to collaborate with colleagues, work with students, and create residencies for Aboriginal Australian artists to cultivate cross-cultural dialogue, Morphy’s influence on museum studies, visual anthropology, and art history is far reaching.

He is the author of several seminal works on Australian Aboriginal art including Ancestral Connections (1991) and Becoming Art: Exploring Cross Cultural Categories (2007); he is co-editor of The Anthropology of Art: A Reader (2006), and Rethinking Visual Anthropology (2007). His exhibitions include Yingapungapu, one of the inaugural exhibitions for the National Museum of Australia, and the co-curated exhibition Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation at the British Museum. Dr. Morphy has also directed, consulted on, and partnered with filmmakers, producing Journey to the Crocodiles Nest with Ian Dunlop and directing and editing We Stand on the Footprints of the Old People (2010) with Peter Eve and Ursula Frederick. In 2013 he was awarded the Huxley Memorial medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

2016

Adrienne L. Kaeppler

Curator of Oceania, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

Working in the Pacific, Kaeppler pioneered the combination of collections based research and careful provenance research with field collaborations with communities. Having worked with and in museums – notably the Bishop Museum and Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History (1984 – present) – her two hundred articles and edited/co- authored and single authored books focus on the cultures of the Pacific and the interrelationships between social structure, material culture and the arts, especially dance, music, and the visual arts. This breadth and depth of her publications is matched by an equally expansive list of important exhibitions. Since receiving her PhD in 1967 from the University of Hawaii she has continued to be a vital force in the field of museum anthropology. Nurturing many generations of scholars from the Pacific and other regions, she has received many awards for her work: the Silver Jubilee Anniversary Medal given by the King of Tonga for contributions to Tongan culture, the 2012 Kalani Ali`i Award from Aha Hipu`u (Four Hawaiian Royal Societies) for Lifetime Achievements in the Study of and Contributions to Hawaiian Culture, and was named the 2011 Smithsonian Secretary’s Distinguished Lecturer. She is past president of the World Dance Alliance of the Americas, has held various positions in the Society for Ethnomusicology, is a fellow of the American Anthropological Association, and an advisor to UNESCO on Intangible World Heritage.

Her most recent scholarship focuses on Pacific Island barkcloth and exemplifies her continued relevance as a scholar and pioneer. For this work she has brought together a remarkable range of museum research methods in this project. One is replicative technology, which involved gathering and cultivation of the mamaki plant purportedly once used in barkcloth, then harvesting and processing it with assistance of Pacific Island tapa- makers who were in-residence at the Smithsonian. Another method has been working with scientists to conduct high tech analysis of barkcloth using SEM, DNA, and other sophisticated laboratory methods.

2015

Ruth Phillips

Canada Research Chair in Modern Culture and Professor of Art History
, Carlton University

Ruth Phillips was awarded for her extraordinary contributions to key literatures within museum anthropology, and her important contributions through her vision and leadership in creating two web-accessible databases and their associated research networks, GRASAC and the MOA’s Reciprocal Research Network. Each bring key developments in digital and community collaboration together and take the museum anthropology profession in new directions. Her exhibitions include Patterns of Power: Early Great Lakes Indian Art and the Jasper Grant Collections; The Spirit Sings; Across Borders: Beadwork in Iroquois Life. Publications include: Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums; Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900; Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, and Unpacking Culture: Arts and Commodities in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds. She has been a member of the Task Force Report on Museums and First Peoples; Director of the Museum of Anthropology; active with the Otsego Institute, the Hearst, Peabody Harvard, Native American Art Studies Association. She was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2007.

2013

Nancy Parezo

Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona and Curator of Ethnology at the Arizona State Museum

Nancy Parezo has a long and distinguished career of scholarship, museum work and mentorship. Parezo’s work has helped shape a new generation of museum anthropology scholarship. In terms of scholarship, her projects—which range from sandpainting studies to fashion shows—have contributed to our understanding of the dynamics of material culture in Native North American societies and the settler-colonial framework of the United States, as well as the formation of anthropology. She has published research on a variety of topics germane to the discipline, including: Navajo religion, art, economics, law, and culture change; archival and ethnohistoric research on Southwestern Native American material culture, arts, and crafts; and the history and impact of world’s fairs. To date, she has authored, edited, or co-edited more than a dozen books—including Anthropology Goes to the Fair (2007), Hidden Scholars (1993) and Daughters of the Desert (1988)—along with many dozens of peer-reviewed articles.

CMA Book Award

2024

John Carty

Balgo: Creating Country. 2021. University of Western Australia Publishing. 

The Nomination for Balgo: Creating Country highlights Carty’s skill in combining a rich ethnographic account with the methods of art history and an appreciation of the importance of collections and archives. Drawing on vast sources, Carty studies Balgo art from various perspectives, including art history, anthropology, economics, religious study, statistics, and gender studies. Balgo: Creating Countryseamlessly integrates an art historical understanding cultivated through the study of changing forms over time with an understanding of the social processes represented in those changes, made known through sustained and ethical research relationships.

Balgo: Creating Country is the fruit of years of original research with close and insightful examination of Balgo art, history, individual experiences, community life, and the living world. It situates desert art and the creative process in complex historical, economic, and political dynamics. Balgo: Creating Country successfully navigates the scale of art practices, attending to over 15,000 artworks all the while being attentive to the artists at a very human scale. A distinguishing and innovative aspect of the book is Carty’s use of kinship relationships and kin diagrams to analyse and demonstrate the aesthetic and stylistic relationships between paintings over time.

CMA’s Book Award Committee wholeheartedly agreed with the Nomination that Balgo: Creating Country “exemplifies the unique contribution museum anthropology as a discipline is able to make to the understanding of world art, by challenging received Western categories yet at the same time bringing different art histories into dialogue with one another.”

Upon learning of the Award, Balgo artists shared this message with CMA:

“We are very proud of this book, and we are happy that other people can see its importance through this award.  Our art is more than art, more than painting, it is our Country – who we are as people. It takes a lot to see what we are painting. This book tells that story: from the early days before whitefellas, to the mission days, and now today, where we are strong people who have built a new life for ourselves in Balgo. That’s what’s in our painting. It’s a big book, but it tells an even bigger story. (Warlayirti Artists, Balgo, Australia.)”

2022

2021

Jason Gibson, Deakin University

Gibson, Jason M. 2020. Ceremony Men: Making Ethnography and the Return of The Strehlow Collection. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

In this deftly reflexive and sensitive work, Jason M. Gibson analyzes the historical colonial context for the collection of central Australian men’s songs, stories, and ceremony by linguist/anthropologist T.G.H. Strehlow.  Gibson redresses the anthropological myth of Strehlow as heroic salvager and replaces it with an awareness of the intentional co-creation of this archive by Anmatyerr and Arrernte ceremonial specialists who actively allowed their secret and sacred knowledge to be recorded for posterity. Through ethnographically specific, place-based exchanges with contemporary Anmatyerr ritual knowledge holders, Gibson offers a nuanced understanding of authority, ownership, and reciprocity that emerge around this significant archive and the significance of its holdings to Anmatyerr men today. Eschewing simplistic repatriation rhetoric and grounded in rich fieldwork and Anmatyerr ritual knowledge holders’ perspectives and voices, this ethnography intimately details the challenges and opportunities in co-stewarding this collection into the future.

2020

James Swan, University of Oklahoma & Jim Cooley, Sam Noble Museum of Natural History

Swan, D. and Cooley, J. 2019. Wedding Clothes and the Osage Community: A Giving Heritage. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Wedding Clothes and the Osage Community by Daniel Swan and Jim Cooley is an exemplar of what museum anthropology can and should be. The book is the result of long-term collaborative work with the Osage Nation, and uses archival, ethnographic and ethnohistorical methods to reanimate museum collections of Osage heritage. Doing so the book is a highly accessible multi-media examination of change and continuity in Osage wedding traditions and clothing. Through its attention to material culture the book demonstrates not only the rich vibrancy of the Osage wedding traditions but demonstrates the sort of work that can only be done through what Ray Silverman termed “slow museology” which is work that is built on mutual respect, collaboration, and trust. This is a book that transcends its subject matter and helps us all see the possibilities of museum anthropology.

Honorable Mention

Solen Roth, Université de Montréal

Roth, S. 2018. Incorporating Culture: How Indigenous People are Reshaping the Northwest Coast Art Industry. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Incorporating Culture by Solen Roth is a unique ethnography of the “artware” industry. Solen coins the term artware to describe commodities decorated with Pacific Northwest coast images that circulate inside and outside of Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. The book examines the array of values these objects accumulate as they transition between these sites, and is a sophisticated historical and multi-sited ethnographic look at the intercultural phenomena of the artware industry, which is an example of what she terms ‘culturally modified capitalism.’ Doing so the book helps shed light on a compelling and important feature and dynamic of the intercultural object-world and economy in the North West Coast.

2019

Chip Colwell, Denver Museum of Nature and Science

Plundered Skulls & Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

Chip Colwell’s Plundered Skulls & Stolen Spirits is a moving examination of the work of repatriation and shines important light on the manifold ways in which museums have participated in settler-colonialism. Recounting his experiences as a curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Colwell shows what the possibilities that addressing these legacies entail, the necessity of doing so, and the ways the work of slow museology can help anthropologists and museums begin to repair the inequities of the past and present. The book is an important conversation-starter for the discipline and the public more widely about museums, collections, human remains, and ethics.

Honorable Mention

Diana Marsh, National Anthropological Archives, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

Extinct Monsters to Deep Time: Conflict, Compromise, and the Making of Smithsonian’s Fossil Halls (Berghahn Books, 2019)

Diana Marsh’s book Extinct Monsters to Deep Time (2019) emerges out of her dissertation, which examined the development of the new dinosaur exhibit, David H. Koch Hall of Fossils – Deep Time, at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. The book is an important contribution to the genre of museum ethnography, and provides key methodological insights into doing research in and on museums. The book reveals the hidden labor and negotiations involved in exhibit making, chronicles the history of paleontology, and demonstrates why the work of natural history museums matters.

2018

Margaret Bruchac, University of Pennsylvania

Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists (University of Arizona Press)

“Savage Kin is an insightful examination of the previously hidden histories of Native interlocutors who helped to facilitate and make anthropological knowledge about Native North American communities possible. Using ‘restorative methodologies’ to examine a vast array of archival and museum collections, Bruchac raises important issues about the history of bicultural relationships that inform anthropology, the possibilities and value of archives and museum collections for research, and the sociology of knowledge production. This book will we feel not only push the discipline to rethink our received disciplinary histories but will also encourage other scholars to take more seriously the complicated legacies within archival and museum collections.”

Honorable Mention

Laura Peers and Alison Brown

Visiting with the Ancestors: Blackfoot Shirts in Museum Spaces (Athabasca University Press)

“Visiting with the Ancestors (2016) is the result of long-term collaboration between Peers and Brown and the many communities that compose the Blackfoot Nation of Canada. The book tells the story of their collective work to bring and exhibit five Blackfoot shirts held in the Pitt Rivers Museum to the Glenbow Museum and the Galt Museum in Alberta, Canada. Their display in 2010 was the first time the shirts had been in Canada since being collected in 1841 by agents of the Hudson Bay Company. The book discusses the handling sessions facilitated by the project through which Blackfoot people could engage with these objects and through multiple voices examines what these encounters meant for all involved. The book is an important example of museology practice, the power of objects and the need for more engagements with Native communities”

Michael M. Ames Award for Innovative Museum Anthropology

2024

Mnaajtood ge Mnaadendaan: Miigwewinan Michi Saagiig Kwewag Miinegoowin Gimaans Zhaganaash Aki 1860 / To Honour and Respect: Gifts from the Michi Saagiig Women to the Prince of Wales, 1860

The 2024 CMA Michael M. Ames Prize for Innovative Museum Anthropology is awarded to the exhibition project Mnaajtood ge Mnaadendaan: Miigwewinan Michi Saagiig Kwewag Miinegoowin Gimaans Zhaganaash Aki 1860 / To Honour and Respect: Gifts from the Michi Saagiig Women to the Prince of Wales, 1860.

The project researches on and displays baskets made by women at what is now Hiawatha First Nation (HFN) in Ontario and gifted to the Prince of Wales in 1860. The exhibition enables Michi Saagiig community members to reconnect with their ancestors and visit their creations.

Congratulations to the co-curators Lori Beavis and Laura Peers as well as the HFN community members who involved in the project. See their amazing work here: https://www.tohonourandrespect.ca/

2022

Fuyubi Nakamura, The University of British Columbia

A Future for Memory: Art and Life after the Great East Japan Earthquake

Nakamura’s project explores issues of memory, materiality, public commemoration and the role of museums related to the 2011 earthquake/tsunami/nuclear event in Japan. The project is articulated through a complex suite of activity, publication, and exhibition linking to broader work such as a program to create 3D models of urban environments lost to the tsunami and the Lost and Found Project, involving family photographs which emerged in tsunami debris. The exhibition is supported by public, academic, and school programs as well as videos and online tours in multiple languages. One of the project’s strengths is the ways in which it engages robustly with multiple cross-cultural and cross-generational audiences.

2021

Nicola Levell, The University of British Columbia

Shadows, Strings & Other Things

Through puppetry, this project showcases seven modes through which visitors and scholars experience the (im)material cultural heritage of puppetry and exhibit making, including an onsite gallery, digital 3D scans of the exhibit, videos, podcasts, virtual reality, an open access gallery guide, and Bodies of Enchantment. This multi-modal project offers a compelling model for all anthropologists working towards innovative scholarship and public engagement. Multiple facets of museum operations are evident in the project’s design and execution: from sensitive collecting and documentation, to curation, to theatrical and creative public programming, to the multi-purpose digital platform that extended and archived the temporary exhibition.

“Shadows, Strings & Other Things” is an exemplar of how museum anthropology generatively troubles easy distinctions between tangible and intangible culture; animacy and object; and brings into public conversation ontological queries about things-belongings-beings. Levell’s museological practice does not shy away from politics and the pressing need to unsettle Western hegemonic structures, nor is it anchored in an ahistorical and disengaged formation—rather it invokes the core principles of Michael Ames’ efforts to decolonize and democratize museums.

2019

Aaron Glass, Bard Graduate Center

The Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology

“The Story Box” explores the hidden histories and complex legacies of one of the most influential books in the field of anthropology, Franz Boas’s “The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians” (1897). This groundbreaking holistic portrait of a Native North American society resulted from Boas’s fieldwork among the Kwakwaka’wakw of British Columbia and collaboration with his Indigenous research partner, George Hunt. Although Boas recognized the dynamism of Indigenous cultures, the book conceals three important historical conditions of its own making: Canada’s assimilation policy, which outlawed potlatch ceremonies; the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where Boas and Hunt conducted much of their fieldwork; and Hunt’s status as a full co-author. Hunt later corrected and expanded the book, in part by reconnecting hereditary treasures to the families to whom they belong. Hundreds of pages of unpublished revisions, consigned to archives after Boas’s death, have been reunited with the book for the first time.

An innovation in reflexive museology, “The Story Box” lays bare the collaborative relationships and modes of creative labor that have always made possible the production of anthropological knowledge itself. Not only does the exhibit reveal some of the hidden histories behind the 1897 book’s production and influence within anthropology, it demonstrates the lasting impact of the book within the Kwakwaka’wakw communities. Curated by Aaron Glass with the participation of students at Bard Graduate Center, “The Story Box” was co-developed with the U’mista Cultural Centre, a Kwakwaka’wakw museum in Alert Bay, BC, to which it travelled.

2018

Suzanne Seriff and Marsha Bol

Gallery of Conscience, Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe

Dr. Suzanne Seriff and Dr. Marsha Bol are receiving the Ames Award for their work from 2010-2017 in founding and developing the Gallery of Conscience at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, and for collaborative projects, exhibitions, and documentation created through the Gallery of Conscience. Seriff first guest-curated, then directed the Gallery of Conscience during this time. As the museum’s director from 2009-2015, Bol’s vision was instrumental in creating the Gallery of Conscience and supporting its projects and evolution until her retirement. Their work with the Gallery of Conscience embodies the kind of creative, timely, deeply engaged, and significant projects and interventions that the Michael M. Ames Award was created to recognize.

2017

Jisgang, Nika Collison, Curator, Haida Gwaii Museum

“Yahhudang.gang” Curation

Jisgang (Ts’aahl; eagle clan, Haida Nation), Nika Collison (Curator, Haida Gwaii Museum) was awarded for her innovative approach to indigenous curation and museum work more broadly. “Yahhadang.gang” describes an ethic of the Haida that places respect at the core of relationships. Collison has developed an approach to museum work that grows from this Haida concept creating a uniquely indigenous ethical museum practice. She first developed this approach while engaged in repatriation work as a senior negotiator for the Haida Repatriation Committee and has since brought it to her wider curatorial and museum advising work. Collison’s exhibition work, for example, is exemplary for its grounding in collaborative and consultative processes, including “Art and Artist,” an exhibition that brought 80 pieces to the Haida from private and public collections. Her advisory work with museums also demonstrates her deep and abiding community-based knowledge and the unique way that her museum practice combines the international museum world and Haida cultural practices. Her recent work with the American Museum of Natural History to have an historic Skedans chest used in a potlatch before being exhibited at the Haida Gwaii Museum provides a fitting example. That project and her other museum work in Canada, the United States, and around the world, are a testament to her ability to create a space for respectful engagement. Her indigenous model of curatorial practice does not so much “bridge” two worlds of museum curation but innovatively produces a new one.

2016

c̓əsnaʔəm: the city before the city

c̓əsnaʔəm: the city before the city comprised three exhibits at the Musqueam Cultural Education Resource Center (MCERC), the Museum of Vancouver (MOV) and the Museum of Anthropology (MOA), all of the same title, that opened in Vancouver in January 2015 (http://www.thecitybeforethecity.com). this interdisiciplinary, inter-institutional, and intercultural project –it was collaboratively planned by Leona Sparrow, Jason Woolman, Larissa Grant, and Terry Point from Musqueam’s Treaty Lands and Resource office, Susan Roy from the University of Waterloo, Viviane Gosselin from Museum of Vancouver, and Susan Rowley and Jordan Wilson from the UBC Museum of Anthropology. The team also worked with a Cultural Advisory Group of six Musqueam community curators representing different aspects of community life and a diversity of families: Howard E. Grant and Howard J. Grant, Johnny Louis Sr., and Wendy Grant-John as community and inter-governmental leaders, Larry Grant as a leader in cultural and language revitalization, and Mary Roberts as a leader in education and the public school system, as well as (as if that wasn’t complex enough), Kate Hennessy, Alissa Antle, Reese Muntean and a team of students from Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology on new media components of the show.As a wholly collaborative, multi-sited exhibition, c̓əsnaʔəm makes a significant contribution to museum anthropology. In addition, the project crossed temporal and disciplinary boundaries by showcasing both archaeological and contemporary material culture. It also tackled politically charged, relevant, topics and emphasizes advocacy and change. Moreover, this exhibition project is also a perfect fit for an Ames award because it was Michael Ames who founded UBC-Musqueam collaborations with Leona Sparrow, one of the Musqueam curators, in 2001 (http://www.musqueam.bc.ca/musqueam-101). c̓əsnaʔəm: the city before the city was a timely, creative, complex, and impactful exhibition project that was an ideal winner for the 2016 Ames award.

2015

Fiona McDonald, Kate Hennessey, Craig Campbell, Stephanie Takaragawa, Trudi Smith

Ethnographic Terminalia

Fiona MacDonald (Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Arts & Humanities Institute (IAHI)), Kate Hennessy (Assistant Professor of Media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts + Technology (SIAT)), Craig Campbell (Assistant Professor of Cultural Forms and Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin), Stephanie Takaragawa (Assistant Professor of Sociology at Chapman University), and Trudi Smith (artist and visual anthropologist at the University of Victoria), were awarded for their innovative curatorial and exhibition work on Ethnographic Terminalia, a curatorial collective. For the past seven years, Ethnographic Terminalia has curated group exhibitions in tandem with the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association–in cities such as Philadelphia, New Orleans, Montréal, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago. These off-site, innovative installations have blurred the boundaries of museology, ethnography and contemporary art, through collaborations with ethnographers, cultural theorists, and over 110 artists to date, and through creative uses of space, materials, and new media. Michael Ames was unwavering in his commitment to ‘de-school’ the museum, to revolutionizing ways of knowing and learning within and beyond the walls of the museum. Ethnographic Terminalia is exemplary of Ames’ idea of de- schooling the museum, destabilizing authoritative structures and creating a relational web of proactive and self-motivated individuals who, in this case, are pushing at the institutional and disciplinary boundaries of museums, art and anthropology. They have offered radical, alternative ways of thinking through things and representing different forms of knowledge and praxis.

2014

Leslie Witz and Noëleen Murray

Hostels, Homes, Museum: Memorialising Migrant Labour Pasts in Lwandle, South Africa (2014)

Leslie Witz (History Department, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa) and Noëleen Murray (Geography and Environmental Studies, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa) are awarded for their book Hostels, Homes, Museum: Memorialising Migrant Labour Pasts in Lwandle, South Africa (2014), their intellectual and practical work with the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, and the exhibit “Hostel 33.” The Museum is the first town-ship based museum in the Western Cape province of South Africa and was founded in 1998 to serve as a reminder of the migrant labor system that undergirded the apartheid system. In a 1990s post-apartheid development scheme to refurbish hostels into family homes, a committee decided to preserve one dormitory, block 6, hostel 33, as the foundation for the new museum. Witz and Murray have worked with LMLM board members, museum staff, residents and appointed professionals since 2000 on the development of the museum and the exhibition based on its key artifact–the migrant labor hostel. They have also helped create a walking tour of the area, build collections, and design a public space around the museum. This long-term engagement and their research on and documentation of the LMLM’s exhibitions over the years became the basis for their book.

2012

Candace Greene

Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology (SIMA)

Candace Greene (Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History) conceived of the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology (SIMA) as a vehicle for training graduate students in the use of museums and collections as significant resources for anthropological enquiry. The SIMA program provides graduate students interested in material culture with an unparalleled opportunity to engage in intensive training in collections-based research under the direction of faculty members with a wealth of research and teaching experience. The curriculum for the program is succinctly described on the SIMA promotional poster as “putting theory and things together.” As director of the Institute she recruited other professionals to help develop the program—notably Nancy Parezo who has been a faculty member from the beginning. Dr. Greene secured consecutive National Science Foundation grants to support the implementation of the SIMA program. Each year since its inception in 2009, SIMA has hosted and trained 12 aboriginal and non-aboriginal students from across North America and beyond in museum anthropology and material culture research.

2011

Laura Peers, Alison K. Brown, and Heather Richardson

Blackfoot Shirts Project

Laura Peers (Curator of the Americas, Pitt Rivers Museum and reader in Material Anthropology, University of Oxford) and Alison K. Brown (Lecturer, department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen), in conjunction with Pitt Rivers Museum conservator Heather Richardson worked with all four Blackfoot Nations (Siksika, Piikani, Kainai in Canada, and the Blackfeet of Browning, Montana, in the United States) to bring five early 19th century shirts, in the Pitt Rivers Museum collection since 1893, to Alberta where they could be seen, handled, and studied by more than 500 Blackfoot youth, teachers, ceremonialists, elders, and artists. Tangible outcomes included a travelling exhibition in 2010 at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and the Galt Museum and Archive in Lethbridge, as well as a website describing the project, recording Blackfoot responses, outlining lesson plans, and conservation approaches (http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/blackfootshirts).

2010

Jim Enote

Pathways to Zuni Wisdom, A:shiwi Map Art Project, Kechiba:wa Digital Collection

Situated within the Pueblo of Zuni, in western New Mexico, the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center is a private not-for-profit museum that works “for the people and by the people.” Jim Enote, Executive Director of the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center, has been at the center of the Museum’s innovative programming, which focuses on preserving and perpetuating Zuni traditional knowledge. Moving beyond the museum’s small public exhibit and collection, Enote imagined and implemented a string of ground-breaking projects that connects youth to elders, and ancient life to modern ways. Projects included “Pathways to Zuni Wisdom,” an after school and summer program that uses the traditional farming and gardening to help students learn about the environment and scientific principles, the “A:shiwi Map Art Project,” which uses local Zuni artists to render the Zuni cultural landscape, the “Kechiba:wa Digital Collection” project, a collaboration with the Cambridge Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology enabling Zunis to have access to British collections through a culturally-sensitive digital database.

Student Travel Award

2024

1. Amanda Sorensen (PhD Candidate, University of Maryland) 
2. Haley Bryant (PhD Candidate, University of Toronto)

2022

1. Emily Jean Leischner (PhD Candidate, University of British Columbia) for the organization of the CMA Invited session “Co-Creating an Anti-Colonial Cultural Sector” in which she will present “Captured Voices Still Speak the Law: Sound Recordings of Indigenous Voices in Museums.”
2. Annissa Malvoisin (PhD Candidate, University of Toronto), serving as a panelist on the CMA-sponsored panel, “Between Critique and Practice: Unsettling Collections Management through Anthropology.”

2019

1. Haley Bryant (PhD Candidate, University of Toronto) for the roundtable on “Virtual Realities: Worldbuilding beyond the Ethnographic Frame.” Haley will also chair the roundtable on The Politics and Stewardship of Collections Data in a Digital Climate.”
2. Elizabeth Kozlowski (PhD Candidate, Tulane University) for her paper entitled, “Object[ified] Identity” to be presented in the session Elizabeth organized entitled “Race, Representation and Migration.”

2018

1. Elizabeth Derderian (PhD Candidate, Northwestern University) for the paper titled “Playing with the Rules: Ideologies of Critique and Freedom of Artistic Expression in the UAE.”
2. Amanda Guzmán (PhD Candidate, University of California, Berkeley) for her paper entitled, “Teaching Museum Anthropology and Cultural Equity by Design.”

2017

1. Halena Kapuni-Reynolds (PhD student, American Studies Department and the Museum Studies Graduate Certificate Program, the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa) for the paper titled “Moʻokūʻauhau (Genealogies) of People and Practice: Indigenous Curation and the Care of Kanaka ʻŌiwi Collections at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum.”
2. Emily Buhrow Rogers (PhD student, Department of Anthropology, Indiana University and a Research Associate with the Mathers Museum of World Cultures) for her paper entitled, “Weaving the Commons in Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians Basket Making.”

2016

1. AK de Morais (PhD Candidate, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz) for his paper titled “Contingent Collection and Uncertain Objects: Thinking through the Smithsonian-Universal African Expedition.”
2. Sowparnika Balaswaminathan (PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego) for her paper entitled, “Contesting Tradition: What is Visible and Valuable through Iconic Replication.”

2015

1. Adrian Van Allen (PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley) for her paper entitled, “Object Lessons: Dioramas, Genomes, and Shifting Concepts of Authenticity at the Smithsonian.”

2014

1. Joseph Feldman (PhD Candidate, Cultural Anthropology, University of Florida) for his paper titled “’Not South Africa’: Making Transnational Justice Peruvian at a National Museum Project” in the session entitled “Transitional Justice in Space and Time”
2. Hannah Turner (PhD Candidate, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto) for her work organizing the session, “Producing Anthropology through Museum Collections: Conversations in Critical Cataloguing,” for which her paper was entitled, “The Infrastructure of Ethnographic Data.”

2013

1. Emma-Louise Knight (Research Assistant, University of Toronto) for her paper entitled “Repatriation Revisited: Contemporary Meanings of the Kwakwaka’wakw Potlatch Collection” in the session, Source Community and Museum Engagements (Thursday, November 21, 2013).
2. Catherine Nichols (PhD Candidate, Anthropology, Arizona State University) for her work organizing a session entitled “Museum Methodologies & Collaborations: Papers in Honor of Nancy J. Parezo” (Friday, November 22, 2013), where her paper is entitled “Designating Duplicates: How Curators Chose Museum Objects to Give or Keep.”

2012

1. Jennifer K. Brown (PhD Candidate, medical anthropology, University of Pennsylvania) for her paper titled, “Bones, Blood, and Basketry: The Curation of Life by Museums and Biobanks.”
2. Rachel Roy (PhD Student, Museum Anthropology, University of British Columbia) for her work with Art History, Anthropology and Critical Curatorial graduate students co-curating the No Windows (2010) exhibition and related Sound of Conversation program at the Satellite Gallery.

2011

1. Fiona McDonald (PhD Candidate, Visual Anthropology and Material Culture, University College London) for the exhibition Field, Studio, Lab organized by theEthnographic Terminalia Collective in collaboration with Dr. Erica Lehrer, Director of the Center for Ethnographic Research.
2. Diana E. Marsh, (PhD student, Museum Anthropology, University of British Columbia) for her work organizing the panel “Living Collections: Social Networks of Space, Place and Materiality,”for which her paper was entitled“‘Reassembling’ the ‘Social Life’ of a Medicine Man at the Science Museum, London.”

2010

1. Suzanne Godby Ingalsbe (PhD Candidate, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University) for her paper -“Circulating the Past and Future Through Museum Artifacts”
2. Danielle Merriman (MA Student, Cultural Anthropology, University of Denver) for her paper “Community Museum or Tourist Shop?: Local Contestation of Museum Meanings in Costa Rica”,