Nadia Jackinsky-Horrell
Nadia Jackinsky-Horrell's M.A. thesis research in art history at the UW focuses on masking traditions in Alutiiq communities on the Kodiak Island archipelago and the Chugach region of Alaska. Her research covers both an overview of historical Alutiiq masks found in archaeological excavations and museum collections, and the revitalization of mask making today. Nadia is interested in examining the relationship between material culture and cultural memory. Toward this end, she has studied the collections at the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository on Kodiak Island, and conducted community based research with contemporary Alutiiq artists. Additionally, Nadia has examined related historical collections at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and the Bancroft Library at Berkeley. Nadia has also received a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, to study their Alutiiq and Yup'ik collections under the direction of William Fitzhugh in 2007.

Nadia at work on an archaeological site on Kodiak Island, AK, summer 2006.

Nadia poses with an Alutiiq mask from the Burke Museum’s Ethnology collection.

Ashley Verplank
Ashley Verplank is conducting research for her M.A. thesis in art history at the UW on Northwest Coast Native American daggers. Her specific focus is on Tlingit daggers, how their form relates to their function and their varying use of copper over time. In order to recognize outside influences and account for Native trade, she is conducting a broad survey of Northwest coast daggers. Through formal analysis of diverse blade, pommel and hilt styles, as well as construction techniques, she will attempt to determine a timeline for stylistic change on the coast and the historical events relating to these changes. She received a Smithsonian Institution Graduate Fellowship for the summer of 2006 to study the dagger collections at both the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History. NMAI curator Mary Jane Lenz was her principle advisor. In 2007, Ashley will be conducting additional research at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, the Chicago Field Museum, and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard.

Ashley Verplank examines daggers at the Cultural Resources Center, National Museum of the American Indian in Suitland, MD, as a Smithsonian Fellow during the summer of 2006.

Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse

Katie Bunn-Marcuse

The first Bill Holm Center Graduate Fellowship was awarded to UW art history graduate student, Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse for the 2005–6 academic year. She is completing the research and writing of her doctoral dissertation on Northwest Coast engraved silver and gold jewelry. Jewelry became a significant part of the commercial Native art market starting in the late-nineteenth century. Silver bracelets in particular remain important to Native people today both as a commercial art and as a means to display cultural identity. Yet, as an art form, jewelry has received little attention from scholars despite the ongoing manufacture, traditions, and symbolism that surrounds it. Bunn-Marcuse's research suggests that the importance of silver and gold bracelets to crest display, the potlatch payment system, and the commercial art market is far greater than previously thought.

Current Grant Recipients