Associate Professor Mark Abbe Named Resident Research Scholar at J. Paul Getty Museum

Associate Professor Mark Abbe has been named as a resident research scholar at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Originally scheduled for Fall 2020, Abbe’s residency will now be taking place in 2021. His project for the duration of his residency will be Hidden Color: Polychromy on Ancient Marble Sculpture at the Getty. Abbe’s research in Ancient Polychromy has previously been featured in The New Yorker article, The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture.

Every year since 1985 the Getty Research Institute has invited scholars, artists, and other cultural figures from around the world to work in residence at the Institute on projects that bear upon its annual research theme. While in residence, they pursue their own research projects, make use of Getty collections, and participate in the intellectual life of the Getty Center and the Getty Villa. The 2020/2021 academic year at the Getty Research Institute will be devoted to The Fragment. Issues regarding the fragment have been present since the beginning of art history and archaeology. Many objects of study survive in physically fragmented forms, and any object, artwork, or structure may be conceived of as a fragment of a broader cultural context. As such, fragments catalyze the investigative process of scholarship and the fundamental acts of the historian: conservation, reconstruction, and interpretation. The evolution of an object—its material and semiotic changes across time, space, and cultures—can offer insights into the ethics and technologies of restoration, tastes for incompleteness or completeness, politics of collection and display, and production of art historical knowledge.

A specialist in Greek and Roman antiquity, Make Abbe approaches works of art as expressions of culture that are best explained by situating them within their historical, social, and philosophical contexts. Mark Abbe received his MA in History of Art and Archaeology (2007) and PhD in Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology (2013) from New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, as well as an Advanced Certificate in the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (2007). He is the founder of the multidisciplinary Ancient Polychromy Network at the University of Georgia and is associated faculty in the Department of Classics. In addition to extensive archaeological fieldwork in the Mediterranean (Italy, Greece, Turkey, Egypt), he has professional training in art conservation and the scientific investigation of works of art. He has received research fellowships from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, the American School of Classical Studies, and the American Research Institute in Turkey.