Matt Bowman is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American & Native American art. He studies Native representation by Euro-American painters, sculptors, and photographers; intersections between Indigenous and American art histories; landscape and ecological issues; and art histories of the American West and Southwest. 

He has received the Wyeth Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship at The Smithsonian American Art Museum. Over the 2025-2026 academic year he will be in residence in Washington D.C. working on his dissertation entitled “Contested Lands, Fraught Waters: Images of Taos Pueblo and its Northern New Mexican Terrain, 1900-1970.” During one month in summer 2024, he researched his dissertation as the Duane H. King Short-Term Fellow at the Helmerich Center for American Research, University of Tulsa in Tulsa, OK. 

Matt received a B.A. in art history from Augustana College (IL), an M.A. in art history from The University of Connecticut, and an M.A. in Indigenous studies from The University of Kansas. His M.A. thesis at UConn uncovered meanings in John La Farge’s Old Philosopher stained glass window housed at The Thomas Crane Memorial Library in Quincy, MA. His M.A. thesis at KU investigated the historical and cultural significance of Cyrus Dallin’s The Scout, a monumental bronze statue of a Lakota on view at Penn Valley Park in Kansas City, MO. Between graduate degrees he worked as an instructor at Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove, IL and as a docent at the Farnsworth House in Plano, IL. 

Research Interests

• American Art