Collaborating at the intersection of contemporary art and the history of mathematics, Carleton College’s Sara Cluggish (Mary Hulings Rice Director and Curator, Perlman Teaching Museum) and MurphyKate Montee (Clare Booth Luce Assistant Professor of Mathematics) will use The Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship to aid research culminating in an ambitious 2025 exhibition that will surface critical reflections on the legacies of colonialism in math and challenge broad cultural perceptions of the field as “unbiased” and “impersonal”. Mathematical reasoning is found in every human culture and time period. It underscores disciplines such as art, music, religion, architecture, economics and engineering, in addition to formal academic study. Despite this global ubiquity, the study of mathematics in the US today is strongly associated with the Enlightenment in Europe.

The Fellowship will support curatorial research travel and a public symposium hosted by Carleton College in winter 2024. The symposium will pair four contemporary artists together with consulting mathematical scholars to reflect on four objects of study, which represent mathematical ideas transmitted from East to West: the Incan quipu, Japanese sangaku tablets, African fractals, and Islamic tiling. The project emphasizes that artists are crucial partners to scholars, students, and activists in decolonizing disciplines. Bringing artistic perspectives to the global development of mathematics is crucial in amplifying lesser-known histories, shedding light on new methodologies, and opening discourse by drawing in practitioners from groups previously underrepresented in their fields.