Andrew James Hamilton

Andrew James Hamilton is associate curator of Arts of the Americas at the Art Institute of Chicago. His work explores the art and architecture of the ancient and colonial Americas, with particular interests in the Andes and textiles, as well as contemporary Native American art. He is deeply invested in analyzing objects, how they were made, used, and eventually disused, in order to understand why they were created and what cultural meanings they bore. His first book, Scale & the Incas, which he also illustrated, was published by Princeton University Press in 2018. It considers the role of scale in Inca material culture, built environments, and worldviews. Andrew is currently completing his second book, The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Biography of a Royal Inca Tunic, which examines the all-tocapu tunic in the collection of Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC.

Andrew is also a lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. He previously served as lecturer in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and was a member of the Princeton Society of Fellows. He received his BA in the history of art from Yale University and his MA and PhD in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University. His work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Getty Research Institute, the Fondation Fyssen, and the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale at the Collège de France.