PhD Candidate; Graduate Writing Fellow
she/her/hers
Shannon Bewley is an advanced PhD Candidate in modern and contemporary art history at Boston University. Her research focuses on twentieth-century public sculpture commissions. She draws on newspaper reports, community interviews, and institutional archives to situate artists’ careers within the professionalization of arts administration amid state, federal, and international public funding for the arts. Her commitment to public art is anchored to her upbringing in Birmingham, Alabama, where living amid sculptures like the monumental cast iron Vulcan, and abstract and figurative Civil Rights memorials provided foundational experiences for her research and pedagogy.
Her dissertation, to be defended in Spring 2026, is titled “Earth Artists, Ancient Earthworks, and Land Reclamation Sculpture from 1965 to 1985.” This project traces the history of land reclamation sculpture, or major public commissions of earthen art that rehabilitated industrial wasteland and abandoned mines into sites that are both public parks and aesthetic experiences. She expands the well-researched history of the American style of earth art to explore the cultural, political, and administrative context in which artists like Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, and Michael Heizer adopted ancient, Native, and Indigenous earthworks as a form of visual art and ecological remediation. Bewley contextualizes the development of these projects at the intersection of American national identity and archaeology, environmental concerns and policy, and perception of historic earthworks in the popular culture of the United States. She argues that land reclamation sculptures illustrate the potential of interdisciplinary public art to offer both aesthetic experience and community space, while also attesting to the ongoing contributions of Native and Indigenous culture to American visual art and identity.
Prior to entering Boston University, Bewley was the Provenance Research Fellow in the departments of American and European Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Alabama.
Research Interests:
- Twentieth-Century Sculpture
- Public Art Administration
- Land Art
Dissertation in Progress:
“Earth Artists, Ancient Earthworks, and Land Reclamation Sculpture from 1965 to 1985”
MA Paper:
“Mary Miss, Suzanne Harris, and Alice Aycock: Sculptors in ‘Crummy Spaces’”
2022-2023:
Senior Editor, SEQUITUR
History of Art & Architecture Diversity & Inclusion Committee
Chair, African American Art History: Present Coordinates Symposium
2021-2022:
Forum co-Coordinator, Graduate Student History of Art & Architecture Association
Junior Editor, SEQUITUR
History of Art & Architecture Diversity & Inclusion Committee
2020-2021:
Co-President, Graduate Student History of Art & Architecture Association
Vice-President, Graduate Student Organization
2019-2020:
GSO Representative, Graduate Student History of Art & Architecture Association