Archives
This page archives my publications, exhibitions, programming, and public scholarship. It takes the form of a list of ongoing actions; each project continues to influence my current thinking.
Describing the pleasures and pitfalls of Romanticism, as explored in the film Tár (dir. Todd Field, 2022) for Providence Arts and Letters with four collaborating students. | August 2023
Themes: Romanticism as an ongoing, emotional practice; fragments, relics, and eternity; fantasies of genius, time, and timelessness; collaborative scholarship
Discussing Trans inclusion and building community through the concept of "ecstatic architecture" with the artist Edie Fake and Providence College students | March 2023
Exploring ballet, Christmas, and the aesthetic of perfect control that unites them in an autoethnographic essay for Catapult. | December 2022
Themes: technique and control; the pleasure of craft; imagining transcendence; militarized femininity
Understanding poet and critic Edwin Denby's theories of ballet photography as a collaboration between the choreographer, dancer, and photographer at Perphoto, the first international conference dedicated to performance photography. | September 2022
Themes: visual pleasure and kinesthesia; choreographic empathy or inner mimicry; collaborative art practice and queer fandom; imagined movement and stillness
Recovering Joseph Cornell’s unfinished interpretation of one of the most fraught performance traditions, blackface minstrelsy, as part of the Newberry Library’s American Art and Visual Culture Seminar. | October 2020
Themes: unfinished work; fandom and imagined choreography; racialized performance, mimicry, and imagined histories; creative archival practice; Romanticism
Rethinking art produced during one of the twentieth century’s most consequential conflicts, a reorientation of artistic practice circa 1942, as expressed by Pavel Tchelitchew via designs for his imaginary confrontation of the self, The Cave of Sleep, and a scenario by the visionary poet, critic, and committed Tchelitchevian, Parker Tyler inspired by the artist's drawings. | February 2020
Themes: unfinished work, later romanticisms, collaborative vision, visual interpretation of performance and poetry, eroticized ballet bodies, self-revelation
Discovering a small selection of what Lincoln Kirstein read and why, based on his diaries, correspondence, published criticism, and photographs of his library, for MoMA Magazine with illustrations by Jennifer Tobias. | April 2019
Themes: reconstructed archives; reading as creative practice; visual and literary collaborations; institutional reflections of the self; queer community formation
Considering a small selection of what Lincoln Kirstein wrote to highlight the breadth of his engagement with creative practices of all kinds, for MoMA Magazine. | March 2019
Themes: the craft of writing; eclecticism, taste, and patronage; interconnected literary, visual, and performing spheres of creative practice; reciprocity of publications and arts institutions
Researching the impact of magazine editor, New York City Ballet co-founder, critic, curator, and man-about-town Lincoln Kirstein, on the second-most important institution in his life, for MoMA’s dedicated exhibition and catalog, Lincoln Kirstein's Modern. | March-June 2019
Themes: the craft of writing, curation, and collecting; taste, figuration, and the ballet; institutionalization of South and North American contemporary art in the 1930s and '40s; inter-institutional development of MoMA and NYCB; queer community and photography
Revealing the many layers of Joseph Cornell’s gift to dance historian Lillian Moore: a sprinkle of glitter, a marble, a ribbon in deep blue, and an ode to ballet women across time From the Slipper of a Sylphide, for Panorama. | Spring 2018
Themes: art in archives and art of archives; Cornell's connections to and influence on dance history; fantasies of the past in the present; homages and Romanticisms; false continuity and resisting disruption
Curating images of death as a living or moving skeleton in European and Latin American works on paper, from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries, at the Blanton Museum of Art, with the exhibition "Dancing with Death" | September-November 2017
Themes: mortality; animated skeletons; death as a social practice; danse macabre; social leveling and humor; medical humanities; thematic continuity across time and space
Pushing the boundaries between photography and performance with the photographer Elizabeth Bick, via charged visual spaces, extended collaborations, and scored photographic actions, at UT Austin's Visual Arts Center. | January - February 2017
Themes: photographic performances and performing photographs; the falsity of disciplinary divisions; stage spaces; street photography as a performance; tourism; looking and display; collaborative practice and scholarship.
Bringing art to the public space of the AT&T Hotel and Conference Center, including Sara Madandar's textile-influenced portraits, John Stoney's investigation of transcendence, nature, and the paranormal, and James Sham's object and video explorations of [mis]communication, with Jade Walker. Sara Madandar: Another Birth | May - September 2016 | John Stoney: Medium | January - April 2016 | James Sham: Culture Shock | September - January 2016
Themes: art and institutions; painting, photography, video, and sculpture; collaborative curation; image, identity, and weaving; transcendence, magic, and trickery; translation and communication.
Displaying the many modes of artistic exploration undertaken by UT Austin faculty with the exhibition Inquiry: Department of Art and Art History Faculty Exhibition / Assembly / Collection / Assortment, co-curated by Jade Walker at the Visual Arts Center. January - February 2015
Themes: art and institutions/art of institutions; collaborative curation; diversity of mediums and methods; interactive display.