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Boston University Profile

Shannon Bewley is a PhD Candidate in the History of Art & Architecture at Boston University, where she earned her MA in 2021. Her research focuses on the exhibition histories of women sculptors in the United States and Latin America during the twentieth century. She draws on installation photographs, artist interviews, and institution archives to situate artists’ careers within the professionalization of museum practice and the rise of alternative exhibition spaces. Bewley is a Senior Editor on the scholarly journal SEQUITUR and is the lead organizer of the Boston University symposium African American Art History: Present Coordinates (November 11-12, 2022).

Prior to entering Boston University, Shannon Bewley was the Provenance Research Fellow at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Alabama. She researched the ownership, publication, and exhibition histories of more than eighty painting highlights in order to better contextualize and expand the narratives of the Museum’s holdings. Her research can be found on the Museum’s website, such as the provenance text for L’Arabe Pleurant son Coursier (The Arab Lamenting the Death of his Steed) (about 1812) by Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse.

While at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Bewley co-curated For Freedoms: Civil Rights and Human Rights (2018) and two rotations of 20th-century modernist paintings and works on paper in the American galleries. She also managed the digitization of over 1,000 of Museum’s exhibition archives from 1951 to 2006.

In 2017, Bewley earned a BA in Art History, a BFA in Studio Art (Sculpture), and a minor in German from Auburn University. At Biggin Gallery, Alabama, she installed more than thirty-five exhibitions over four years. She exhibited her cedar and steel sculptures in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Alabama