Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Contemporary Art
Dissertations in Progress by Subject, 2013

Show completed dissertations

Aldridge, Kelly Rae, “Crumbs from the Revolutionary Table” (Stony Brook University, Z. Patterson)

Apostol, Corina, “Dissident Education: Socially Engaged Art from the Former East in Global Context (1980–Present)” (Rutgers, J. Sharp)

Aramphongphan, Paisid, “Sleeper Modernism: Jack Smith, Freddy Herko, Andy Warhol ca. 1960” (Harvard, C. Lambert-Beatty)

Arnadottir, Heida Bjork, “The Depth of Material: Art History and Speculative Realism, in Search of a Methodology” (University of British Columbia, T. Smith)

Aronowicz, Miriam, “The Triangle Arts Trust: Contemporary Art and Transnational Production” (Toronto, E. Harney)

Autry, La Tanya, “The Crossroads of Commemoration: Lynching Landscapes in America” (Delaware, C. Holloway)

Bago, Ivana, “Post-Yugoslav Artistic Practices at the Unidentified Grave of the Yugoslav Project” (Duke, K. Stiles)

Bares, Eva, “Finding Place: Diaspora Experiences in Contemporary African Women’s Art” (Stony Brook University, B. Frank)

Berrill, Margot, “Kitchen Humour: Feminist Video Art and Pop Culture” (UIC, H. Higgins)

Bick, Tenley, “Capital and Rags: Michelangelo Pistoletto in Turin, 1958–1972” (UCLA, G. Baker)

Blakinger, John R., “Artist under Technocracy: Gyorgy Kepes and the Cold War Avant-Garde” (Stanford, P. Lee)

Boivin, Julie, “Horrid Beauty: Rococo Ornament and Contemporary Visual Culture” (Toronto, M. Cheetham)

Boone, Jobyl, “Christo and Jean-Claude in the United States, 1964–2005” (Delaware, A. Gibson)

Brockman, Kristin, “Processing Failure: Engineers and Artists at Bell Labs, 1965–72” (Ohio State, K. Paulsen)

Cammarata-Seale, Heather, “Stuffed with Paradox: Taxidermy and Contemporary Art, 1990–2010” (Rutgers, J. Marter)

Canac, Sandrine, “From Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion: The Early Work of Robert Barry (1963–1975)” (Stony Brook University, A. Uroskie)

Cappetta, Andrew, “Pop/Art: The Birth of Underground Music and the British Art School, 1960–1980” (CUNY, C. Bishop)

Carter, Kristen, “‘What Do We Do Now?’ Strategies and Responses to Disillusionment, ‘Failure,’ and Rage: Individuality and Art After 1968” (University of British Columbia, S. Guilbaut)

Chagnon, Katrie, “Le ‘presque rien’ comme horizon d’attente contemporain de l’esthétique phénoménologique” (University of Montreal, O. Asselin)

Chatalbash, Rachel, “Contemporary Art and Internationalism at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1952–1988” (CUNY, A. Chave)

Cho, Hyeok, “Can the Subaltern Artist Speak? Postmodernity, Femininity, and Racial Identity in Lee Bul’s Art” (Binghamton University, J. Tagg)

Choi, Jung E., “Impossible Geography: Alternative Spatiality in Ubiquitous Computational Environments” (Duke, M. Hansen)

Chubb, Emma, “Of Margins and Migrations: Representations of Moroccanness in Contemporary Art” (Northwestern, H. Feldman)

Collins, Nicholas, “Site Responsibility: Eco-art and Environmental Ethics in the Anthropocene” (Louisville, S. Jarosi)

Corey, Pamela Nguyen, “Cities Compared: Contemporary Art and Artistic Subjects in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia” (Cornell, K. McGowan)

Cornejo, Kency, “Visual Disobedience: The Geopolitics of Experimental Art in Central America, 1990–Present” (Duke, K. Stiles, E. Gabara)

Debin, Megan Lorraine, “Body Traces: Performance Against Violence in Mexico, 1994–2012” (UCLA, C. Villaseñor-Black)

Dees, Janet, “The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Performance Art as Art History” (Delaware, A. Gibson)

DeLand, Lauren, “Invisible Men: The Risks and Pleasures of Self-Portrayal in the Work of Contemporary American Male Artists” (Minnesota, J. Blocker)

Dell’Aria, Annie, “The Moving Image in Public Art: US and UK, 1980–Present” (CUNY, H. Senie)

DiBenedetto, Erica, “The Conceptual Methods of Sol LeWitt’s Art” (Princeton, B. Doherty)

Dierkes, Anne-Louise, “Assemblage as Opposition: California’s Counterculture and the Struggle for US Cultural Definition” (CUNY, A. Chave)

Ditner, Judy, “War at a Distance: Conceptual Realism in Contemporary Art” (Boston, K. Sichel)

Domene Danes, Maria, “Reshaping Archive in Contemporary Artistic Practices around the Lebanese Civil Wars” (Indiana, Bloomington, D. Schuld)

Dubreuil, Martine, “Identification de tensions au sein de la collection du Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal et observation de leur gestion, en particulier” (University of Montreal, E. Dubuc)

Dyangani Ose, Elvira, “Poetics of the Infra-Ordinary: The Aesthetic of Recognition in Modern and Contemporary Urban Africa” (Cornell, S. Hassan)

Erickson, Ruth, “Assembling Social Forms: Sociological Art Practice in Post-1968 France” (Pennsylvania, C. Poggi)

Evans, Emily Joyce, “The Search for Proletarian Photography, 1926–1936” (UIUC, T. Weissman)

Ewing, Margaret, “Unsettling the Politics of Reckoning: Hans Haacke in Germany” (UIUC, S. Hudson)

Ferber, Andrea, “Transhistoricity and Aestheticized Violence: Nancy Spero’s Works on Paper” (UIUC, S. Hudson)

Fiala, Julie, “Towards an Ethics of Listening: Examining Research Methods and Praxis in Community-Centred Art” (Queen’s University, C. Robertson)

Fiset, Daniel, “Photographie d’art contemporain et culture visuelle: Vers de nouvelles fonctions de l’image” (University of Montreal, S. Paquet)

Franco, Joshua, “Marfa, Marfa: Minimalism, rasquachismo, and Questioning ‘Decolonial Aesthetics’ In Far West Texas” (Binghamton University, T. McDonough)

Gaitan, Juan, “Act Without Image” (University of British Columbia, S. Guilbaut)

Gerspacher, Arnaud, “Posthuman Animals in Art: France and Belgium 1972–85” (CUNY, C. Bishop)

Gogan, Jessica, “Experiment, Construct, Care: Art, Pedagogy, and Participation in Contemporary Art Museums” (Pittsburgh, T. Smith)

Goldstein, Jennifer, “Moving Bodies, Moving Things: Convergences of Art and Dance, 1960–1975” (Stony Brook University, A. Uroskie)

Grayson, Saisha, “Cellist, Catalyst, Collaborator: The Work of Charlotte Moorman, 1963–1980” (CUNY, C. Bishop)

Guerrero-Hernandez, Juan Carlos, “Photography, Video, and Mutilated Bodies: Constellations and Paradoxes in the Representation of Current Violence and Internal Conflict in Contemporary Art in Colombia between 1991 and 2012” (Stony Brook University, A. Uroskie)

Gyorody, Andrea, “‘To Reproduce is Human’: Joseph Beuys and the Multiple” (UCLA, G. Baker)

Hamelin, Candice, “Behind Immaterial and Material Divides: East German Photography, 1949–1989” (Michigan, M. Biro, G. Eley)

Harbin, Virginia Allison, “Visual Excess in Contemporary Art from the South Asian Diaspora” (Rutgers, T. Flores)

Heer, Melissa, “Bordering: Contemporary Performance Art and Activism in Northeast India” (Minnesota, J. Blocker)

Herrero Matoses, Fernando, “Antonio Saura: The Spanish Avant-Garde and the Monster” (UIUC, J. Fineberg)

Huang, Karen, “Artists’ Reenactments: The Vietnam War, the War on Terror, and the Performance of American Activism” (USC, K. Flint)

Hunt, Steve, “The Body of Sculpture: Anthony Caro’s Writing Pieces” (Ohio State, S. Melville)

Jackson, Katherine, “The Artist as Social Worker? The Community Art Movement in the UK and Re-examining the Role of the Artist in Contemporary Society” (University of British Columbia, J. Mansoor)

Jordan, Cara, “Joseph Beuys and Social Sculpture in the United States: Suzanne Lacy, Rick Lowe, and Mary Jane Jacob” (CUNY, H. Senie)

Kapica, Steven S., “Negotiating Obscenity: Rhetoric, Media, and the Composition of the Obscene” (Northeastern, C. Gallagher)

Kienle, Miriam, “Community at a Distance: The Networked Art of Ray Johnson” (UIUC, T. Weissman)

Kim, Joy Jeehye, “New Documents to Pictures: Lee Friedlander and the Re-making of the Photographic Image, 1962–1989” (Yale, D. Joselit)

Klorman-Eraqi, Na’ama, “Feminism and Photography in Britain in 1970s and Early 1980s” (Binghamton University, J. Tagg)

Kruglinski, Jennifer, “Signal Disruptions: Gendered Tropes and Feminist Burlesque in the Work of Martha Rosler and Eleanor Antin” (Stony Brook University, A. Uroskie)

Kuntz, Katrina, “The Art of Failure” (Stony Brook University, A. Uroskie)

Lacis, Indra, “Contemporary Art Star: Marina Abramović and the Celebrity Female Artist” (Case Western Reserve, E. Landau)

Law, Jessica, “Topology, and the Materialization of Space within Drawing” (University of British Columbia, J. Mansoor)

Lawrence, Nora, “Dan Flavin’s Histories” (CUNY, A. Chave)

Lee, Joo Yun, “Sensuous Communities: Materialized Spectatorship in Ryoji Ikeda’s Intermedia Installation and Performance” (Stony Brook University, Z. Patterson)

Lortie, Marie, “Afrique en Créations: Transnational Patronage in the Francophonie” (Toronto, E. Harney)

Madura, Joe, “Revising Minimal Art in the AIDS Crisis, 1984–1998” (Emory, J. Meyer)

Maroja, Camila, “Framing Latin American Art: Contemporary Institutions and the Configuration of a Regional Identity” (Duke, K. Stiles, E. Gabara)

Martynyuk, Olena, “Center-Periphery Dialogues in Moscow’s Post-Conceptual Artistic Communities of 1980s–1990s” (Rutgers, J. Sharp)

Matuszak, Joanna, “Assertions of Identity: Russian Performance Art in the Aftermath of Perestroika” (Indiana, Bloomington, J. Kennedy)

Maydanchik, Michelle, “Creative Disruption: Performance Art in Post-Soviet Moscow” (Chicago, M. Jackson)

Metcalf, Megan, “Dancing with the Art World: Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, and Simone Forti Encounter the Contemporary Art Museum” (UCLA, M. Kwon)

Moon, Kavior, “Form and Operation: Works by Michael Asher, ca. 1979–2011” (UCLA, M. Kwon)

Musteata, Natalie, “From Radicality to Romanticism: The Institutionalization of the Artist as Curator, 1970–2010” (CUNY, C. Bishop)

Olivas, Yvonne, “System Withdrawal: Lee Lozano’s General Strike” (Stony Brook University, Z. Patterson)

Oliver, Alexandra, “Critical Realism and Contemporary Photography” (Pittsburgh, J. Ellenbogen)

Perucic, Nadia “From Fiction to Fact: The Need to Document in Post-Yugoslav Visual Art from 1991 to the Present” (CUNY, C. Bishop)

Pinar, Ekin, “Canyon Collective Artists: Micropolitics in West Coast Experimental Film, 1960–79” (Pennsylvania, K. Beckman, C. Poggi)

Plant, Johanna, “Artist-Run Archives and Constructions of Canadian Contemporary Art History” (Queen’s University, C. Robertson)

Poirier, Josianne, “L’exploration de la lumière dans le processus de production de l’image des villes contemporaines” (University of Montreal, S. Paquet)

Prater, Erika, “Through the Woods: Fairy Tales, Documenta, and Kassel’s Cultural Export” (Minnesota, J. Blocker)

Quick, Jennifer, “The Dynamics of Skill: Ed Ruscha, 1956–1970 (Harvard, R. Kelsey)

Raabe, Vanessa, “Dissident Desires: Mapping Queer Ethos in Chilean Visual Art, 1975–1990” (UCLA, C. Villaseñor-Black)

Reynolds-Kaye, Jennifer, “Contemporary Pre-Columbian Art” (USC, M. Gomez-Barris)

Roberge Van Der Donckt, Julia, “Le musée et la cité: reconfiguration de l’espace de la controverse” (University of Montreal, S. Paquet)

Roesch, Nathanael, “On Sport, Representation, and Contemporary Art” (Bryn Mawr, L. Saltzman)

Routh, Mitali, “Matthew Barney: Deadpan, Animality, and the Sculptural Idiom” (Duke, K. Stiles)

Roy, Andréanne, “La perception du marché de l’art par les acteurs institutionnels de l’art au Québec: nouvelles attitudes, nouveau rapprochement” (University of Montreal, S. Paquet)

Ruff, Georgina, “The Apparatus of Luminary Immersion: How the Lamp Changes Everything” (UIC, H. Higgins)

Salas, Alexis, “Performing the Making: Uses of Public Spheres of Collaboration by Artists in Mexico City, 1987–2003” (UT Austin, A. Giunta)

Salinger, Victoria, “Translating Mathematics: The Art of Hanne Darboven” (Chicago, C. Mehring)

Schoenberger, Janna, “Ludic Conceptualism: Art and Play in the Netherlands from 1959–1975” (CUNY, R. Golan)

Sichel, Jennifer, “Criticism without Authority: Gene Swenson, Gregory Battcock, Jill Johnston” (Chicago, D. English)

Simblist, Noah, “Psychogeographies of Occupation: Art and Politics at the Borderland” (UT Austin, A. Reynolds)

Skorin-Kapov, Jadranka, “Aronofsky’s Human Condition: Between Kubrick and Spielberg, with a Nod to Fassbinder” (Stony Brook University, A. Uroskie)

Smith, Ginger Elliott, “Practicing Big Science: Artists, Technology, and Institutions in 1960s and 1970s Southern California” (Boston, G. Williams)

Smucker, David, “Auto-centric Photography and the Traveling Index: Automotive Movement in Postwar American Photography, 1959–Present” (Stony Brook University, A. Uroskie)

Smulevitz, Cara, “*‘Girl, if you make the movie, I promise you somebody will see it’:**Generosity, Grrrl Power, and Miranda July*” (UIC, H. Higgins)

St Jean, Mathieu, “L’effet de la présence: conscience corporelle dans l’art contemporain” (University of Montreal, J. Lamoureux)

Sytsma, Janine, “Departures: A Critical Study of the Ona Group and the Spread of Onaism” (Wisconsin, Madison, H. Drewal)

Szymanek, Angelique, “The Fear of Rape, the Threat of Looking: Performance, Activism, and Spectatorship” (Binghamton University, T. McDonough)

Tanga, Martina, “Acts of Disengagement: Italian Art in the 1970s” (Boston, G. Williams)

Tanta, Mirela, “State Propaganda or Sites of Resistance: Socialist Realism in Romania, 1945–1989” (UIC, H. Higgins)

Trench, Carolyn, “Performativity’s Moment: Vogue, Queer Video Production, and Theoretical Discourse” (Pennsylvania, G. Shaw)

Triandos, Theodore, “A Social History of Postmodern Art and Its Criticism” (Delaware, A. Gibson, C. Holloway)

Tyson, John, “Hans Haacke: Beyond ‘Systems Esthetics’” (Emory, J. Meyer)

Uchill, Rebecca, “From Atmospheres to Transactions: Art, Experience, and Alexander Dorner’s Audience” (MIT, C. Jones)

Voss, Annemarie, “Incremental Remedies: Contemporary Women Artists and Ecology, 1980–2000” (Rutgers, J. Marter)

Walsh, Taylor, “Medium at the Margins: Bruce Nauman, 1965–1975” (Harvard, C. Lambert-Beatty, B. Buchloh)

Wei, Chu-Chiun, “Globalism and Identity in Taiwanese Contemporary Art, 1978–2009” (CUNY, A. Chave)
Welton, Jessica W., “Fred Kabotie and the Genesis of the Santa Fe Style” (Virginia Commonwealth, R. Hobbs)

Wertheim, Laura, “Dust and Shadow Feminism: Disavowed Supportive Labor, Feminine Transitivity, and Temporal Drag in Postwar American Art and Performance” (Minnesota, J. Blocker)

Werther-Rosenow, Barbara, “Communicative Strategies in Contemporary Video Art” (Rutgers, T. Flores)

Westerman, Jonah, “Standard Deviations: Reality, Reproducibility, and Politics in Performance Art since 1989” (CUNY, C. Bishop)

White, Marisa, “A Feminist Inheritance? Questions of Ambivalence and Subjectivity in Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, and Robert Gober” (CUNY, A. Chave)

Zinsli, Beth A., “Writing with Salt Water and Sunlight: Circulation and Contemporary Spanish Caribbean Photography” (Wisconsin, Madison, J. Casid)

Zulueta, Ricardo E., “Queer Art Camp Superstar: Fashioning the Video Cyberworld of Ryan Trecartin” (University of Miami, W. Rothman, C. Lane)