蜜桃传媒

Throughout her academic career, Elizabeth “Libby” Otto, professor of modern and contemporary art history in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies and director of the Humanities Institute, has received a series of prestigious awards and fellowships in recognition of her scholarship.

Her most recent honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and the Senior Fellowship from the Dedalus Foundation.

Otto also received the Justus Bier Prize for curators for the 2024 exhibition on “Bauhaus Under National Socialism.” The Bier prize was awarded to Otto and her co-curators for the exhibition in the German city of Weimar. The exhibition was also a candidate for an Exhibition of the Year award from Europe’s largest art magazine, “Kunstmagazin ART.”

Otto, known for her thorough and innovative investigations into overlooked stories and histories of modern art, describes the awards as both surprising and affirming. When she learned of the Guggenheim award, she was in Mexico City. “I burst into tears,” Otto recalls. “I put it on social media, and my colleagues and friends called or texted me to congratulate me, and so did people who I hadn’t talked to since high school.”

Otto says she’s “just really grateful” for the award, especially given the current environment of uncertainty in research funding.

Otto’s Guggenheim project, along with her other fellowships, will support the completion of her forthcoming book, “Bauhaus Under Nazism: Creativity, Collaboration, and Resistance in Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1945.”

The work is based on new questions that arose as she was completing her acclaimed book “Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spiritualities, Gender Identity, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics” (MIT Press, 2019), which re-examined the iconic art and design school — so often remembered as a relatively staid and practical movement — as a locus of experimental culture. Her new book explores the trajectories of Bauhaus-trained artists, designers and architects under Nazi rule, revealing a more complicated and often troubling history than standard narratives, which have positioned Bauhaus as continuing to exist only in exile outside of Germany.

“There’s this tendency for art historians — and people in general — to want artists to be on the right side of history,” Otto explains. “To want them to be prescient, to know what the right thing to do is and to do it. And they don’t always. They are as flawed as the rest of us.”

Otto’s research has uncovered Bauhaus members at both extremes: those who became Nazi party members and those who were victims of the regime. But the majority, she has found, were somewhere in between; they complied and retooled their artistic work in order to survive — even if it meant designing concentration camps and armaments plants.

“The book is about being clear about history — what someone could do, what they couldn’t do and what they chose to do with their Bauhaus skillset.”
In addition to her research, Otto says sharing and telling unknown stories has been really meaningful to her.

“It’s been a lot of close work finding family members or finding archives that are not very well known. This has allowed me to tell the stories of Bauhaus members who are often totally forgotten, but whose experiences and work during the Nazi period are deeply moving — or troubling.”

Another particularly rewarding part of Otto’s research is setting historical records straight.

“My shtick as a scholar is to look for stories that are being repeated over and over again that are just wrong — and the stakes of telling a wrong story not only limit our understanding, but in some ways do harm to history and to the present,” she says.

“In the case of my current book project, the well-rehearsed idea that Bauhaus was exclusively a movement in exile starting in 1933 is factually incorrect — 80% or more of its members remained in Nazi Germany. When I give public talks on this book, people understand a link today. What do you do when you vehemently disagree with your government and yet you don’t want to or can’t leave your home country?”

Otto says being the recipient of the Justus Bier Prize for curators for the exhibition she co-curated in Germany was a pleasant surprise. The Bier prize is awarded to curators of exhibitions in German-speaking countries who have demonstrated a special understanding of 20th and 21st-century art. The name of the prize honors the art historian Justus Bier (1899-1990), who had a successful career in his native Germany until, in 1936, he was fired from his position as director of the Kestner Gesellschaft because he was Jewish. In exile, he moved to the United States, where he was able to resume his career as an art history professor and museum director.

Another recent milestone for Otto is her selection for a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard 蜜桃传媒. The fellowship has an acceptance rate of just under 3% and is awarded to only 50 scholars each year across multiple disciplines. 

Despite being offered a semester at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton — where Einstein once worked — Otto ultimately chose to spend a year at Harvard for its archival resources. As the Catherine A. and Mary C. Gellert Fellow, her research will draw on archives housed at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where Bauhaus founder and architect Walter Gropius was a faculty member.

“Harvard has the best Bauhaus archive outside of Germany,” Otto notes.

She emphasizes the critical importance of private foundations and fellowships in today’s political climate, particularly in the face of attacks on federal arts and humanities funding. “A colleague of mine working on antisemitism in Nazi visual culture had his NEH grant terminated,” she says.

“In that context, “the fact that we have this robust structure of private grants … is so incredibly important right now. These institutions are stepping up hard and really helping people like me finish our projects. They are also giving everybody hope.”