The Institute of Fine Arts Faculty

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 also draws on methodologies and theoretical approaches from archaeology, ethnohistory, Indigenous studies, linguistic anthropology, and religious studies in his work.

Meyer’s primary research navigates the crossroads between Nahua art, language, and religion in the Mexica Empire (1325 - 1521 C.E.) and early modern New Spain. He is currently completing 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 in Nahuatl as the tlamacazqueh, or “givers of things.” As Meyer argues, 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 Indigenous understanding to reclaim the artistic skills and knowledge that Nahua religious leaders had, while also directing readers to the relational and co-constitutive bonds that makers and their works form with one another. Using the Nahuatl language to guide its structure, each chapter centers a single skill that religious leaders mastered, exploring how they learned (īxtlamachtiā), carried (māmā), cut (tequi), folded (cuēloā), placed (tlāliā), arrayed (chihchīhua), and wrapped (quimiloā) works made of amaranth, bark, flint, sap, shell, and plant fibers. Through such activities, religious leaders and their works formed physical relationships that enabled them to exchange animating energies by way of sight, touch, heat, and breath. The Givers of Things studies Mexica imperial art and architecture 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.

Meyer is also developing a second book manuscript that builds on fieldwork he conducted across the Atlantic. This project examines how Nahua religion, its ceremonial figures, and its sacred works prompted new discussion among European officials, collectors, and scholars during intense periods of reform in the early modern Catholic Church. In so doing, it aims to invert scholarship that has stressed Christian influence in New Spain by instead venturing back across the Atlantic to expose the ripples that Nahua religion brought to Christianity on European shores. Analyzing Nahua artworks alongside European archives, Meyer explores how papal diplomats inspected ceremonial works in the presence of Nahua travelers who had been trained in Mexica religious institutions; how cardinal authorities interacted with and glossed paintings of Nahua ceremonies and sacred histories; how artists translated Nahua religious leaders and their practices across printed books and engravings; as well as how humanists collected and studied ceremonial works and materials, comparing them to those used in Christianity and other known world religions. As Meyer demonstrates, unpacking such threaded histories help to reframe the well-known narratives of Catholic reformation as impacted by and indebted to Nahua religion, its actors, and its materials.

Other current writing projects explore facial gestures and acts of resistance in Nahua drawings from the Historia Tlaxcala; the mediation of Christian officials into sacred Nahua portraits in early colonial manuscripts; the relationship between etched clay and furrowed land in ceramics from ancestral Colombia; and a theoretical apparatus for the concept of “surfaces” in the ancestral Americas, co-authored with Catherine H. Popovici. Outside of these projects, Meyer’s general interests include frameworks of relationality; the relationship between ephemerality and impermanence; the role of morphology and semiology in studying (im)materiality; as well as the methodological and theoretical issues that arise in pursuit of the global. For his research, Meyer has received support 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.

Before joining the IFA, Meyer was the Austen-Stokes Ancient Americas Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. He 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. Meyer also has rich museum experience, having worked as a both a curatorial fellow and research assistant in the Art of the Ancient Americas department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as having trained at the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York City. He is also dedicated to expanding the presence of the Indigenous Americas through his current role on the caa.reviews Editorial Board with the College Art Association.

As an assistant professor at the IFA, Meyer welcomes prospective graduate students who work on any geography or time period in the Indigenous Americas.

Sample Courses

Mesoamerican Art and Architecture (lecture)
Arts of the Ancestral Americas (lecture)
Indigenous Materialities of the Americas (seminar)
Religion Making in Mesoamerica (seminar)
Indigenous Ephemeralities (seminar)

Select Publications

“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.