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Anthony Meyer

Assistant Professor

PhD, Art History, University of California, Los Angeles (2023); MA, Art History, University of California, Los Angeles (2017); BA, Archaeology and Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2013)

Anthony Meyer is a specialist of Indigenous arts from the ancestral and early modern Americas, with expertise across and beyond the hemisphere. His scholarship and teaching are committed to reframing art historical categories, terms, and frameworks through Indigenous perspectives and languages, while also centering the Americas and its global impacts. Though trained as an art historian, Meyer draws on approaches from archaeology, ethnohistory, Indigenous studies, linguistic anthropology, and religious studies in his work.

He is currently at work on his first book, The Givers of Things: Religious Leaders and Relational Making in the Sixteenth-Century Nahua World, which examines the material and spatial practices of religious leaders known as the tlamacazqueh, or “the givers of things.” Artistry—as defined by sixteenth-century Nahuas themselves—was broad and not restricted to any particular material, occupation, or gender, but instead centered the relationships that makers formed with their works. The Givers of Things takes up this Nahua understanding to reclaim the artistic skills and knowledge that religious leaders had, while also directing readers to the relational and co-constitutive bonds that unfold between makers and their works during making. Each chapter centers a single skill that religious leaders mastered, exploring how they learned (īxtlamachtiā), carried (māmā), cut (tequi), folded (cuelpachoā), placed (tlāliā), arrayed (chihchīhua), and bound (ilpiā) ceremonial works made of bark, dough, reed, and sap. The Givers of Things studies Mexica works and spaces alongside early colonial Nahua drawings, texts, and vocabularies to unfold these skills within a dynamic sixteenth-century world, whose Indigenous makers, works, and practices stretched across and shifted with the violent rifts brought by Spanish invasion. This book project emerges from Meyer’s dissertation, which won the Biennial Dissertation Award from the Association for Latin American Art in 2025. An essay on its theoretical framework has also been published in The Art Bulletin.

Meyer is also developing a second book-length project that examines how Nahua religion, its ceremonial figures, and its sacred works impacted European officials, collectors, and scholars during intense periods of early modern Catholic reform. Other articles-in-progress look at ceramic figures from the ancestral Cauca Valley; the calmecac, a Mexica learning complex; Nahua portraits of Christian officials in early colonial manuscripts; facial gestures and religious destruction in the Historia Tlaxcala; and the concept of “surfaces” across the ancestral Americas, co-authored with Catherine H. Popovici. Outside of these projects, Meyer’s interests include Indigenous frameworks of relationality, animacy, and being; the role of Indigenous languages in studying (im)materialities; as well as the many issues raised by recent turns toward a “global early modern.” For his various projects, Meyer has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Dumbarton Oaks, the Fulbright Association, the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Renaissance Society of America, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Social Science Research Council, and the University of Glasgow.

Meyer has participated in several interdisciplinary workshops and projects, including Early Modern Conversions and Making Worlds at McGill University, the NEH-sponsored Early Modern Geographies of Knowledge (1400-1800) at St. Louis University, Global Genealogies of Early Modernity at the University of Pennsylvania, and a technical art history program at Harvard University. He currently serves on the caa.reviews Editorial Board with the College Art Association, as well as the Board of the Pre-Columbian Society of New York. Before moving to New York, Meyer was the Austen-Stokes Ancient Americas Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University.

At the IFA, Meyer welcomes prospective M.A. and Ph.D. students who work on any geography or time period in the Indigenous Americas.

Sample Courses

  • Arts of the Ancestral Americas (lecture)
  • Ancestral (Re)presentations (seminar)
  • Colonial Spaces, Indigenous Places (seminar)
  • Indigenous Ephemeralities (seminar)
  • Religion Making in Mesoamerica (seminar)
  • The Florentine Codex: Visual Texts, Textual Images (seminar)

Select Publications

“Tōltēcayōtl: Sixteenth-Century Nahua Perspectives on Relational Making.” The Art Bulletin 108, no. 2 (June 2026): 22-49.

“Organizar cosas: Categorías coloniales, manufactura y religión nahua.” In XLV Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte: Epistemologías situadas , edited by Mónica Amieva. México, D.F.: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional de Autónoma. In press (expected 2025).

“Stony Bundles and Precious Wrappings: The Making of Patio Crosses in Sixteenth-Century New Spain.” In Conversion Machines: Apparatus, Artifice, Body , edited by Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin, 76-109. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2023.

“Toward a Decolonial Future: Relationality and Digital Scholarship.” Backdirt 48 (February 2022): 68-75.

“Thinking with History: Sixteenth-Century Epidemics and Colonial Legacies in the Americas.” Backdirt 47 (February 2021): 30-37.