Congratulations to Dr. Tess McCoy, who defended her dissertation “Indigenous Installation Art as Story: Material, Method, and Memory in the Practices of Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Hannah Claus, and Maureen Gruben” under the direction of Dr. Kristin Dowell in the spring of 2025.
Dr. McCoy specializes in the visual cultures of the Americas and global contemporary art, with a focus on Circumpolar Indigenous art. She has a particular interest in Alaska Native communities and Indigenous communities throughout Canada. Her research pursuits include studies on Indigenous customary materiality, cultural memory, stories and storytelling practices, identity creation, legacies of colonialism, environmental stewardship, activism, and visual sovereignty.
Her dissertation specifically looks at the installation artworks of three Circumpolar Indigenous women artists. Using Indigenous storywork and visual sovereignty as methodological and theoretical guides, she considers how abstract art installations communicate personal and communal knowledge and experiences through materials, symbols, memories, and processes.
Dr. Dowell writes:
“Tess’s expansive and innovative research process has taken her to archives, museums, collections, and artist studios from Washington D.C. to New York City, to Montreal and Ottawa to Anchorage, Alaska. She is the first scholar to analyze the installation art of these three Indigenous women artists: Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Iñupiaq/Athabascan/German/Irish), Hannah Claus (Kanien’kehá:ka [Tyendinaga Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte]/English), and Maureen Gruben (Inuvialuk). She explores how each of their installation art works reflect storied objects that reclaim and foreground Indigenous materiality, relationality, labor, and knowledge. Her work brings a new lens to Circumpolar Indigenous Art while making critical interventions in the fields of Native American Art History and Global Contemporary Art. It has been an honor to chair her dissertation committee and to see her research develop across these years!”
About Dr. Dowell’s mentorship, Tess writes, “Kristin has been an amazing advisor over the last five years. She has taught me so much about research and writing that has become invaluable to me as a scholar. Her guidance and her friendship have been a highlight of my time at FSU.”
Dr. McCoy received funding support to travel to Canada and Alaska for her research, as well as to present at conferences nationally and internationally, through Florida State University’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Center, The Graduate School, and the Department of Art History. She obtained further funding through the American Philosophical Society’s Phillips Fund for Native American Research, The Pittsburgh Foundation’s Walter Read Hovey Memorial Fund, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Tess has presented her research at several conferences over the last several years, including the Association for Art History Conference at the University of York in spring 2025, The Materiality of Resistance symposium at the California College of the Arts in 2024, the American Society of Ethnohistory Crisis and Resilience conference in 2023, and the Inuit Studies Conference, Auviqsaqtut at the University of Winnipeg in 2022.
As a doctoral candidate, Tess served as the professor and curatorial advisor for the undergraduate Museum Object practicum course in 2024 that culminated an online exhibition, The Art of Persistence: Exploring Symbols, Materials, and Function in Southwestern Indigenous Art. She also co-curated the online Global Indigenous Cinema Showcase with Dr. Kristin Dowell’s Global Indigenous Cinema course in 2020.
In addition to her doctorate studies, Tess has been an affiliate scholar of the FSU Native American and Indigenous Studies Center (NAIS). She supports the Center’s goals in amplifying Indigenous voices in and around FSU’s campus through conferences, community member and artist talks, film screenings, and exhibitions. In the future, she hopes to continue to support programming dedicated to Indigenous communities around the globe.
1. Legacy: Transcend, installation of gutskin parkas and raincoats from the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, Alaska, in Visceral, Verity, Legacy, Identity: Alaska Native Gut Knowledge and Perseverance exhibition curated by Sonya Kelliher-Combs and Ellen Carrlee, Photo by Tess McCoy.
2. Juneau, Alaska. Photo by Tess McCoy, 2023.
3. Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Red Idiot Strings, 2019, sheep and reindeer rawhide, nylon thread, acrylic polymer, wool, steel wire, beeswax. Installation at the Anchorage Museum. Photo by Tess McCoy.
4. Collection of objects from FSU’s Museum of Fine Arts for The Art of Persistence: Exploring Symbols, Materials, and Function in Southwestern Indigenous Art exhibition. Photo by Camryn Castellano, February 2024.