Shannon Bewley is an art historian specializing in twentieth-century public sculpture, environmental art, and arts patronage. Drawing on institutional archives, newspaper accounts, and community interviews, her research examines how government agencies, cultural institutions, and local communities shape the commissioning and legacy of public sculpture. Her commitment to public art is rooted in her upbringing in Birmingham, Alabama, where monuments such as the monumental cast-iron Vulcan and the city’s abstract and figurative Civil Rights memorials provided formative experiences for her research and pedagogy. Her scholarship has appeared in Panorama: Journal of the Historians of American Art, Women’s Art Journal, and SEQUITUR.

She earned her PhD in the History of Art & Architecture from Boston University in 2026. Her dissertation, “Earth Artists, Ancient Earthworks, and Land Reclamation Sculpture in the United States from 1965 to 1985,” examines “land reclamation sculpture”: commissions of earthen sculpture that rehabilitated industrial wastelands and abandoned mines, transforming them into sites that function as both public parks and works of art. The project explores the specific social, political, and administrative conditions under which the convergence of federal arts patronage and environmental policy enabled suburban municipal agencies to commission such sculptures from major American artists Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, and Michael Heizer. Although the artists held different views about using art to ameliorate the effects of resource extraction, each incorporated imagery associated with ancient, Native, and Indigenous earthworks into his land reclamation sculptures. The project contextualizes their engagement with these earthworks within histories of archaeological tourism, environmental concern, and American national identity. The artists’ travels to view petroglyphs, burial mounds, performances, and temples in the United States, Mexico, Peru, England, and the Netherlands are considered as reenactments of longstanding settler-colonial traditions of exploration, excavation, and travel writing. Free and publicly accessible today, the resulting land reclamation sculptures illustrate the potential of interdisciplinary public art to provide both aesthetic experiences and community spaces while demonstrating the historical importance of Native and Indigenous earthworks to the development of twentieth-century American art and identity.

Bewley has taught undergraduate courses at Suffolk University, Simmons University, and Boston University. Her courses span visual culture from the Renaissance to the present and foreground gender, postcolonial methodologies, and global exchange. They include writing seminars on Native American and African American art history. Centering diverse and global narratives, her pedagogy emphasizes professional writing skills through assignments that connect art-historical inquiry with students’ lived experiences.

Bewley’s professional and pedagogical service reflects her commitment to scholarly mentorship, diversity, and inclusion. In 2022, she led the fundraising and organization of the doctoral student symposium African American Art History: Present Coordinates. The symposium featured presentations by five international doctoral candidates and a keynote lecture by Melanee Harvey, introduced by Patricia Hills. Alongside Colleen Foran, Bewley organized the fortieth-anniversary Mary L. Cornille (GRS’87) Graduate Symposium in the History of Art & Architecture in spring 2024. She also served as Senior Editor of SEQUITUR, overseeing the publication of four open-access volumes of the graduate student journal.

Prior to entering graduate school, Bewley held curatorial, research, and registration roles at her hometown museum, the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. As the museum’s inaugural Provenance Research Fellow, she researched the provenance, publication, and exhibition histories of eighty highlights from its American and European painting collections. Published on the museum’s website, this research expanded and contextualized the histories of the collection for both general audiences and academic researchers. As a Registrar’s Assistant, she managed the digitization and cataloging of more than 1,000 exhibition archives dating from 1951 to 2006. She remains connected to the visual arts in Alabama through her service on the Visual Arts Grant Advisory Panel for the Alabama State Council on the Arts.

Bewley earned a BA in Art History and a BFA in Studio Art (Sculpture) from Auburn University, graduating summa cum laude. Her award-winning studio practice centered on woodworking and welding; photographs of these works appear in this website’s header. For four years, she served as the primary art handler and photographer for more than thirty-five exhibitions at Biggin Gallery in Auburn, Alabama. Her experience as an artist and preparator informs her scholarly attention to the material logistics and interagency coordination required to create public art.