Research
Projects
Modern Migrants: Paintings from Europe in US Museums
Modern Migrants examines thousands of provenance records of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Modern paintings created in Europe between 1860 and 1945, now housed in US museum collections. The project investigates when, why, and how these paintings migrated from Europe to America, with special attention to political upheaval (wars, National Socialism, persecution), dynamics of transatlantic art markets, and individual and institutional collecting strategies. Rather than treating provenance as isolated object histories, the project reconceptualizes provenance information as empirical evidence of cultural and social phenomena — enabling questions about temporal, spatial, social, and conceptual trends and network dimensions.
PAESE 3.0 — Provenance and Collection Research Digital
PAESE 3.0 builds on the original PAESE project (Provenance Research in Ethnographic Collections in Lower Saxony, 2018–2022, funded by Volkswagen Foundation) — the first project of its kind on collections from colonial contexts in Germany. The project aims to make collected data usable for computer-aided analyses, transforming colonial and postcolonial museum provenance information into Linked Open Data (LOD). Special focus is placed on geographical information and its digital representation — a particularly complex challenge given colonial territorial divisions and changing national borders.
View project
(Un)Mapping Infrastructures: Transnational Perspectives in Modern and Contemporary Art
A network of 9 scholars from the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and Switzerland critically examining art world infrastructures (museums, biennials, galleries, academies) from a transnational, non-Eurocentric perspective. The project identifies blind spots and neglected peripheries in the narratives of modern and contemporary art.
View project
whatisapainting.com
An algorithmically generated interactive website exploring how museums classify and describe paintings. Each page refresh randomly selects a different institutional classification from US museum data and presents it through a dynamic, Mondrian-style generative layout. The project reveals that there is no universal consensus on what a "painting" is, even among major museums — demonstrating the diversity of artistic mediums from watercolor on canvas to oil on asbestos. This definitional plurality is a foundational challenge for the Modern Migrants project's scope.
View project