Degrees

Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
M.A., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
B.A., Joint Concentration: Fine Arts/Visual & Environmental Studies (studio arts), Harvard University

Main Interests

19th and 20th-century European art; the visual culture of French colonialism; history of photography; contemporary art

Research Interests

My current project is a book-length study of Henri Matisse's sculpture. It offers several close readings of Matisse's appropriations from nude photography and African art. I argue for the pivotal roles played by these two resources in helping Matisse refigure the European tradition of the nude, and the dominant narratives of identity that tradition was meant to support. The project also disputes the notion that Matisse, primarily known as a painter, was only a sculptor on the side, by demonstrating how his sculptures' nuanced play with constructions of race and gender is, in fact, a key to understanding the artist's larger fascination with cultural and sexual origins.

I am also researching and preparing an exhibition, "Henri Matisse and His 'Palette of Objects'" that will explore Matisse's personal collection--of African and Oceanic art, photographs, and objets d'art--as both subject and point of origin for his paintings and sculpture.

Although my current work is primarily focused on European art, it is grounded in the idea that the history of modernism in the West is a culturally hybrid history. I am fascinated by the role visual culture and technology has played in shaping points of contact between the West and its imagined Others.

Teaching Interests

Student Project

Dania Piscetta, "'All the Splendors of the Chinese Masters:' Henri Matisse's Interpretation of Chinese Painting and Decorative Arts," Honors Thesis (2011)

Lecture Courses

ARTH 111 Arts of the Western Tradition
ARTH 250 Modernism and Mass Culture in France, 1848-1914
ARTH 240 Art of the Avant-Gardes, 1900-1945: France, Germany, Italy and Russia
ARTH 340 Postwar and Contemporary Art, 1945-2000

Seminars

ARTH 398 Matisse and Methods
French Art and Its "Others"

Publications

The Pinup and the Primitive: The Sculpture of Henri Matisse (forthcoming, Yale University Press)

"Matisse: Painter as Sculptor,"(exhibition review) in Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, Spring 2009.

http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=46&Itemid=28

"Escultura en los orÃ-genes de la differencia: Matisse y Picasso en 1907" in Arte Moderno: Ideas y conceptos. Madrid: FundaciÓn Cultural, Mapfre Vida, 2008.

"The Joy of Life, The Idyllic in French Art, circa 1900 by Margaret Werth,"(book review) Modernism/modernity 11:3 (September 2004): 596-598.

"Biblical Gender Bending in Harlem: The Queer Performance of Nugent's Salome (1930)," Art Journal 57:3 (Fall 1998): 22-28.