Titled 'Mr Magoo and Modern Art', my review of Dan Bashara's book Cartoon Vision: UPA Animation and Postwar Aesthetics (University of California Press, 2019) has been published in the new issue of Oxford Art Journal.
​To read the review visit Oxford Art Journal website

What do old Italian drawings have to do with shells, rocks, coins and other curiosities fro across the globe? These diverse objects were all donated to museums by George Hubbard Clapp (1858-1949), and aluminum industry pioneer whose collecting across art and science made him something of a modern-day Renaissance man. The Curious Drawings of Doctor Clapp, an exhibition at the University Art Gallery, rediscovers a collection of early modern drawings and the collector that brought them to the University, Dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, undergraduate museum studies students have worked with my colleague Christopher Nygren and I to conduct in-depth research that sheds new light on this collection and its donor. The student catalogue entries are published in an exhibition catalogue, which also includes essays by Pitt faculty and graduate students and my essay on their prior owner titled 'Before Clapp: The Drawings of Mary Burgwin Denny'.

​The exhibition is open Monday-Friday 10am-4pm and runs until December 6. Find out more at the UAG website

For a feature story on the new exhibition at the Warhol Museum airing today on NPR WESA 90.5, I discuss the complex religious meanings of Warhol's work with interviewer Bill O'Driscoll, and the line it navigates between faith and kitsch.

Listen to the story on the 90.5 WESA website 

On Monday 15 July, I participated in the launch event for the research publication I led at Tate Modern. Funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the resulting scholarly publication features some 600,000 words of new scholarship from more 100 scholars of American art. The publication was launched by Emily Pringle (Head of Research, Tate), Carrie Haslett (Programme Director, Exhibition & Academic Grants, Terra Foundation for American Art) and Christopher Griffin (Convenor, Research Programmes and Publications, Tate), with a panel discussion including with project contributors Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Assistant Professor, Princeton University), John R. Blakinger (Terra Visiting Professor of American Art, University of Oxford) and Lucy Bradnock (Assistant Professor, University of Nottingham).

Read Modern American Art at Tate, 1945-80

​With Caroline Riley (Smithsonian American Art Museum), I am co-convening a session for the College Art Association conference in Chicago, February 2020, seeking historical perspectives on the histories of corporate patronage.
 
Read the call for proposals on Academia.edu

To help promote the fantastic School of Drag program run by my colleagues at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, I was recently on NPR 90.5 WESA to discuss gender and performance in Warhol’s work with local journalist Hannah Gaskill.
 
Read the online summary on the 90.5 WESA website

​I have written the catalogue essay for a major exhibition of James Rosenquist’s works from the 1960s for Galerie Thaddeus Ropac in London. Opening in September 2019, the exhibition includes a diverse cross-section of the artist’s practice, including works from the TV-shaped paintings and 'Circles of Confusion' series that provide the focus for my new essay.

For exhibition updates visit the Galerie Thaddeus Ropac website

This coming week, my colleague Barbara McCloskey and I are leading the final Andrew W. Mellon funded collection-based workshop presented as part of the Collecting Knowledge Pittsburgh initiative. Titled 'Work Forces: Mobilizing the Visual and Material Cultures of Labor', the week-long workshop brings together 12 faculty and graduate students from across the University of Pittsburgh. This year’s program  is presented with the collaboration of the Carnegie Museum of Art, who has organized the participation of Chicago-based contemporary artist Dan Peterman in preparation for their own forthcoming exhibition on art and economic inequality.
 
Read more about Work Forces on the Collecting Knowledge Pittsburgh website

The presentation of Alexander Calder: Radical Inventor at the National Gallery of Victoria from 5 April until 4 August is accompanied by Anne Grace and Elizabeth Hutton Turner’s impressive catalogue, and includes my essay ‘Alexander Calder’s Industrial Revolution’ which argues for Calder’s engagement with the global systems of industrial modernity.
 
Read about the exhibition at NGV website and read my essay on Academia.edu

The student-curated This is Not Ideal exhibition has been featured in local media outlets NPR WESA 90.5, Pittsburgh City Paper and The Pitt News, along with a range of online and blog media outlets. Attendance at the exhibition is set to break a new record, with a raft of student-led talks, discussions and maker events attracting new audience to the University Art Gallery under its new director Sylvia Rhor.
 
Read media coverage of This is Not Ideal at NPR 90.5 WESA, The Pitt News and the Pittsburgh City Paper