Ian Karp

Ian studies images and objects at the intersection of faith, artistic practice, and intellectual culture in northern Europe during the long seventeenth century. Drawing upon prints, illustrated books, and representations of the natural world, Ian’s work seeks to show how the period’s visual culture was fraught with tensions and harmonies between faith and reason, nature and artifice, observation and imagination, and humanity and the cosmos. Ian holds a B.A. in Art History and Classics from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and an M.A. in Cultural, Intellectual, and Visual History with Distinction from the Warburg Institute, where his studies were supported by the American Friends of the Institute. At the Warburg, Ian wrote his dissertation on Johann Jakob Scheuchzer’s Physica Sacra (1731–1735), a lavishly illustrated, natural-scientific commentary on the Bible. Ian was previously the John E. Andrus III Curatorial Fellow at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where he conducted permanent collection and provenance research, and worked on several exhibitions and publications, including “The Contemporary Print: Twenty Years at Highpoint Editions” (2021–2022) and “Botticelli and Renaissance Florence: Masterworks from the Uffizi” (2022–2023).