Annette de Stecher is an American art scholar. Her teaching and research focus on histories of integrated visual arts across cultures and politics of representation, with a special interest in women’s histories and critical museology.
Professor de Stecher’s book, Wendat Women's Arts (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022) breaks new ground in Indigenous art histories. Wendat Women’s Arts received the Canadian Historical Association’s Indigenous History Prize, 2023. The book was nominated for the College Art Association’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, 2023, and was supported by a Millard Meiss Award, a Kayden Award, and Social Science and Humanities Research Council awards.
Wendat Women’s Arts brings together a full history of the art forms of women of the Wendat First Nation of Quebec, challenges the historical anonymity of Indigenous women artists, and argues for their central role in community history and ceremony. Her book- in- progress, Chiefly Gifts: 1750-1820, supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute grant, looks at histories of Indigenous diplomacy and mediation with American and European colonial states.
Her teaching and work with M.A. and Ph.D. students engage with historical and contemporary American and Indigenous visual arts topics, as well as critical museology and exhibition practices. Study of collections and exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, the Colorado University Art Museum, and the Colorado University Museum of Natural History are an integral part of her course work.
Professor de Stecher received her M.A. in Art and Its Institutions and Ph.D. in Cultural Mediations from Carleton University, and her B.A. in Art History from McGill University. Her doctoral research was supported by a Fellowship at the Canadian Museum of History and a Curatorial Fellowship at Carleton University. After receiving her Ph.D., she held a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at Laval University.
Selected Publications
- Wendat Women's Arts. Montreal; Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022.
- “The Art of Community.” Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review 42 no. 2 (2017): 54-71.
- “Of Chiefs and Kings: Wendat and British Diplomatic Traditions, 1838-1842.” Ethnologies 37, no. 2 (2017): 103-130.
- “Souvenir Art, Collectable Craft, Cultural Heritage: The Wendat of Wendake Quebec,” in Craft and Community: the Material Culture of Place and Politics (February 2014).
- “Les arts wendats au service de la diplomatie et de la traite.” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 44, no. 2-3 (2014): 65-77.
- “Integrated Practices: Huron-Wendat Traditions of Diplomacy and Museology,” in Journal of Curatorial Studies (April 2014).