Finding Innovation In the Ancient Americas

Meghan Tierney, Assistant Professor of Art History

Meghan Tierney and Maia Peele '23

Meghan Tierney feels very fortunate to have an accredited museum at her disposal on campus.  “I treat it like a laboratory, especially for my ‘Museum Studies’ class,” she says. In the first few weeks of each semester, she encourages students to meet the staff, view the works on display, and simply explore—and become comfortable in—the gallery spaces, all as part of the process of honing their critical eye.

For her research, she’s been focusing her own critical eye on the Nasca culture of ancient Peru and how they used sculptural ceramics for cultural expression. Their legacy lives on in tens of thousands of brightly painted ceramics, made before the use of electric kilns and pottery wheels. “Maybe it doesn’t sound so extraordinary given our technology now, but at the time the innovation to do that is mind-boggling.”

Beyond serving simply as a canvas, each piece—adorned with images of beans, peppers, and other foodstuffs— is also a vessel. So in addition to examining the sculptural aspects, Tierney also studies the relationship that people of the Nasca culture had to food.

The Nasca also made vessels in the shapes of heads, which is another avenue of Tierney’s research. “We have this correlation between actual preserved human heads, a cultural practice of the Nasca, and these ceramic versions that are depicted with their eyes wide open and ‘alive.’ There are some interesting relationships going on between artistic reality and expression versus these real-world objects that were living human beings.”

Tierney understands that she is introducing students to time periods, regions, cultures, materials, and techniques that are likely unfamiliar to them. “A lot of people think, ‘Well, I’m taking an art history class, so I’ll look at lots of paintings and marble sculptures,’” says Tierney. “I do some of that too, but the arts of the ancient Americas and my research in Nasca ceramics are very different from what people are used to.”