Catherine Popovici

B.A., Smith College

M.A., Penn State

Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin

 

Catherine Popovici’s work primarily focuses on visual and material landscapes in the Indigenous Americas, specifically the Maya region of Mesoamerica. Her in-progress book manuscript, which has received outside support from the American Council of Learned Societies, is tentatively titled Variable Atmospheres: Experiencing the Stelae of the Copán Valley, Honduras. It centers on the Copán Valley stelae, 652 CE, a unique sculptural suite positioned along mountain ridges encompassing the ancient Maya city of Copán in western Honduras. The project argues, through object-oriented and place-based research, that the Maya mobilized features of the environment to amplify and transform the meaning of monumental stone sculptures. In tracing the production, use, reception, and afterlife of the Copán Valley stelae, this work reveals how the materiality of stone engaged various actors, from human viewers to atmospheric phenomena changing over time. Participating in conversations across art history, anthropology, and the environmental humanities, Variable Atmospheres focuses on the relationship between monuments, makers, viewers, and land.

 

Popovici’s second large project continues to theorize Mesoamerican landscapes by considering material and cosmological infrastructures. Tentatively titled Visual Flows: Movement and Paths through Mesoamerica, this work explores the ways in which roads were visualized, and therefore theorized, as a series of immaterial movements, akin to streams of water, passages of time, and flows of energetic forces.

 

Popovici has previously held positions at Indiana University, Bloomington, Johns Hopkins University, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Blanton Museum of Art.