Frames

Picture a gallery wall of framed art. Each frame provides a unique architecture for whatever fits within its bounds, but none are visually or conceptually disconnected. Instead, they mutually define and abut one another, overlapping conceptually and sometimes materially. I research, write, and teach about the institutions and ideas that frame art. In the process, I also explore the artists, critics, historians, curators, and people of all sorts who make images and their frames. 

Many artists have seen institutions  (whether yesterday's salons and academies or today's grant-making organizations and galleries) as necessary, but adversarial partners. Others have formed dynamic partnerships with institutions, finding in them collaboration rather than antagonism. Many more have been excluded from the category called art because they create outside of the frames that institutions recognize. 

At a basic level, art's relationship to institutions is social; institutions are formed by people and people are drawn together by shared tastes, ideas, experiences, and statuses. I work to recognize the agencies of institutions and the agencies within the institutions that frame art in the United States, including museums, magazines, and archives.

Framing institutions: Collections; archives, libraries, and museums; colleges and universities; journals, magazines, and publications; producing companies and theaters; reproductions and revivals.

Framing ideas: Mediums and materials; artistic spheres and genres; academic categories of art making; literature, dance, and visual art; creation and reception; privacy and publicity; movement and stillness; Blackness and whiteness; popular and elite statuses; queerness and straightness; masculinity and femininity; gendered and raced expressions and collections.