Art Historian
I was trained as a specialist in American art history and my dissertation was an analysis of the responses to modern art in the 1920s. This was published in a shortened form as Modernism in the 1920s by UMI Research Press in 1985.
My second book was Art and Politics in the 1930s, Midmarch 1999.
It began to move away from traditional art history and into critical analysis of art with a spirit of advocacy. Nonetheless it was still scholarly and well footnoted. I spent years in archives, xeroxing letters and sources, like the entire run of New Masses, meticulously copying other sources. In the late 1990s we were working on larger computers, but only limited downloading and slow speeds dial ups).
My third book Art and Politics Now:Cultural Activism in A Time of Crisis Midmarch 2011 is a combination of contemporary theory, art criticism, journalism, and advocacy. I no longer consider myself limited to the model of academic distance in which I was trained, although I still follow the form of extensive footnoting of sources.
I am pioneering a new art history that is intensely aware of its place historically,and also intensely contemporary. For this book, I embraced online research, enabling rapid movement between art and politics in my research, an entirely new approach. I also did a great deal of theoretical framing. The availability of resources online in archives, images, websites, and information has transformed the way we can think about art. Now of course there is rapid communication online and easy access and downloading of information.
In addition to my published books, I have also published quite a few research articles and chapters in scholarly books, listed here under the Research Tab. One of my specialties has been the historiography of modern art, particularly with respect to the place of Alfred Barr and Clement Greenberg.
Last I have taught art history and contemporary art and theory for thirty years. My position within art history programs has frequently been the interface between the art historians and the artists.
