Anthony Meyer

Assistant Professor

PhD, Art History, University of California, Los Angeles (2023); MA, Art History, University of California, Los Angeles (2017); BA, Archaeology and Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2013)

Anthony Meyer is a scholar of Indigenous arts from the ancestral and early modern Americas, with expertise across and beyond the hemisphere. His research and teaching are committed to reframing art historical categories, terms, and frameworks through Indigenous perspectives and languages, while also centering the Americas and its global impacts. His scholarship, though rooted in art history, also draws on methodologies and theoretical approaches from archaeology, ethnohistory, Indigenous studies, linguistic anthropology, and religious studies.

Meyer’s primary research navigates the crossroads between Nahua art, language, and religion in the Mexica Empire (1325 - 1521 C.E.) and the transatlantic world of sixteenth-century New Spain. He is currently writing his first book, The Givers: Tlamacazqueh and the Making of Nahua Religion, which examines the material and spatial practices of religious leaders known in Nahuatl as tlamacazqueh, or “the givers.” As Meyer argues, state artisans who worked with feathers, metal, and stone have come to dominate art historical writing on the Nahuas, but artistry—as defined by Nahuas themselves in the sixteenth century—was broad and not restricted to any particular material, occupation, or gender. The Givers takes up this Indigenous perspective to reclaim the artistic skills that religious leaders used to create and animate offerings under Mexica rule and in the early years of Iberian occupation. Using the Nahuatl language to guide its structure, each chapter of The Givers centers a single skill that religious leaders mastered, examining the materials, landscapes, techniques, formal elements, and linguistic understandings that constellated around each. Meyer explores how these makers learned (īxtlamachtiā), carried (māmā), cut (tequi), placed (tlāliā), joined (nepanoā), arranged (huīpanā), and bound (ilpiā) works made from amaranth, bark, flint, sap, shell, and plant fibers. Through such activities, religious leaders and their material works formed physical relationships with one another that enabled them to exchange animating energies. Within each chapter, Meyer also considers how these skills shifted with Iberian invasion, as religious leaders adapted to African and European practices brought by a nascent transatlantic empire. Analyzing Mexica imperial works alongside early colonial drawings, texts, and vocabularies, The Givers ultimately unfolds the complex world of Nahua religious making across an artificial divide, while centering the sacred—and often ephemeral—works that enlivened it.

Meyer is also at work on a second book project, provisionally titled The Ripples of Reform: Nahua Religion and Sacred Materialities in Sixteenth-Century Italy. Building on fieldwork conducted in Europe, Meyer examines how Nahua religion, sacred artworks, and ideas about materiality prompted new discussions among Italian officials, collectors, and scholars during intense periods of reformation in the early modern Catholic Church. The Ripples of Reform thus inverts scholarship that has stressed Christian influence in New Spain by instead venturing back across the Atlantic to expose the ripples that Nahua religion brought to Christianity on European shores. Each chapter explores a watershed moment: when Pope Clement VII met with and dressed Nahua travelers in European regalia as Protestant militias lay siege to Rome; when Church officials glossed religious drawings in Nahua manuscripts that itinerant artists then copied and circulated in Bologna; when Italian diplomats examined fig bark and documented its fleshy textures in Seville; and when humanists collected flint knives formerly used in Mexica sacrifice, comparing them to tools of circumcision in Florence. As Meyer demonstrates in these threaded histories, surfacing and unpacking such discursive ripples help to reframe the well-known narrative of Catholic reformation as one impacted by and indebted to Nahua religion and its sacred materialities.

Other current writing projects explore facial gestures and acts of resistance in Nahua drawings from the Historia Tlaxcala; the mediation of Christian officials into sacred Nahua portraits in early colonial manuscripts; the relationship between etched clay and furrowed land in sculpture from ancestral Colombia; and a theoretical apparatus for the concept of “surfaces” in the ancestral Americas, co-authored with Catherine H. Popovici. Outside of these projects, Meyer’s general research and teaching interests include frameworks of relationality; the relationship between ephemerality and impermanence; the role of morphology and semiology in studying (im)materiality; as well as the methodological and theoretical issues that arise in pursuit of the global.

For his research projects, Meyer has received support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Dumbarton Oaks, the Fulbright Association, the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Renaissance Society of America, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Social Science Research Council, and the University of Glasgow.

Before joining the IFA in the fall of 2025, Meyer will be the Austen-Stokes Ancient Americas Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. He has participated in several interdisciplinary workshops and projects, including Early Modern Conversions and Making Worlds at McGill University, the NEH-sponsored Early Modern Geographies of Knowledge (1400-1800) at St. Louis University, Global Genealogies of Early Modernity at the University of Pennsylvania, and a technical art history program at Harvard University. Meyer also has rich museum experience, having worked as a both a curatorial fellow and research assistant in the Art of the Ancient Americas department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as having trained at the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York City. He is also dedicated to expanding the presence of the Indigenous Americas through his current role on the caa.reviews Editorial Board with the College Art Association.

As an assistant professor at the IFA, Meyer welcomes prospective graduate students who work on any geography or time period in the Indigenous Americas.

Sample Courses

  • Mesoamerican Art and Architecture
  • Art and Architecture of the Ancestral Americas
  • Indigenous Materialities of the Americas
  • The Trouble with Terms: An Indigenized Art History of the Americas
  • Facing Europe: Indigenous Travelers, Knowledge, and Materials in the Early Modern World

Select Publications

“Organizar cosas en orden: Categorías coloniales, manufactura y religión nahua.” In XLV Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte: Epistemologías situadas, edited by Mónica Amieva. México, D.F.: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional de Autónoma. In press (expected 2025).

“Stony Bundles and Precious Wrappings: The Making of Patio Crosses in Sixteenth-Century New Spain.” In Conversion Machines: Apparatus, Artifice, Body, edited by Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin, 76-109. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2023.

“Toward a Decolonial Future: Relationality and Digital Scholarship.” Backdirt 48 (February 2022): 68-75.

“Thinking with History: Sixteenth-Century Epidemics and Colonial Legacies in the Americas.” Backdirt 47 (February 2021): 30-37.