Julia Bryan-Wilson

Julia Bryan-Wilson (PhD, UC Berkeley, 2004) is Professor of LGBTQ+ Art History and core faculty in Columbia's Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. Her research interests include feminist and queer theory, theories of artistic labor, performance and dance, production/fabrication, craft histories, photography, video, visual culture of the nuclear age, and collaborative practices. She is the author of four books: Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California, 2009, named a best book of the year by the New York Times and Artforum); Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson, Thames & Hudson, 2016); Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago, 2017, a New York Times best art book of the year and winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award, the Robert Motherwell Book Award, and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize); and Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (Yale, 2023). She is the editor of OCTOBER Files: Robert Morris (MIT Press, 2013), and co-editor of three journal special issues ("Amateurism," Third Text, 2020; “Visual Activism,” Journal of Visual Culture, 2016; and “Time Zones: Durational Art in its Contexts,” Representations, 2016).

Bryan-Wilson is Curator-at-Large at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). Her show Louise Nevelson: Persistence, was an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale in 2022; and with Andrea Andersson, she curated Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, which opened at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans in 2017 and traveled to the Berkeley Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, the ICA Philadelphia, and MOCA North Miami.

A widely published critic, Bryan-Wilson’s texts have been published in Afterall, Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Artforum, Bookforum, Camera Obscura, differences, Grey Room, The London Review of Books, October, the Journal of Modern Craft, Oxford Art Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, and many other venues. Her article “Invisible Products” received the 2013 Art Journal Award.

She was a 2019-20 Guggenheim Fellow, and her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery; the Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design; the Clark Art Institute; the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center; the Getty Research Institute; the Henry Moore Institute; the International Center for Writing and Translation; the Mellon Foundation; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Smithsonian Archives of American Art; the Terra Foundation; and the Townsend Center for the Humanities, among others. She was an inaugural recipient of the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and has won several awards for her teaching and mentoring. She was the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in Spring 2014, and in 2018-19 she was the Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor at Williams College. In 2023-24 she will be a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar. (2023)

Publications

Books

• Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, University of California Press, 2009, 283 pp, ARG. Excerpt. Reviews: Rahtz (Art Hist), Corris (Art J).

• Robert Morris (editor), MIT Press (October Files), 2013.

• Art in the Making: From Paint to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson), London: Thames and Hudson, 2016.

• Fray: Art and Textile Politics, University of Chicago, 2017. [1]

• Louise Nevelson's Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face, Yale University Press, 2023, 352 pp. Publisher.

Journal issues

• editor, with Jennifer González and Dominic Willsdon, Journal of Visual Culture: "Visual Activism", 2016.

• editor, with Shannon Jackson, Representations 136: "Time Zones: Durational Art and Its Contexts", University of California Press, Fall 2016.

• editor, with Benjamin Piekut, Third Text 34(1): "Amateurism", 2020. [2]

Book chapters, papers

• "A Curriculum for Institutional Critique, or the Professionalization of Conceptual Art", in New Institutionalism, ed. Jonas Ekeberg, Oslo: Office of Contemporary Art, Fall 2003, pp 89-109; repr. in Beck’s Futures, London: Institute of Contemporary Art, Summer 2004, pp 8-19.

• "Remembering Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece", Oxford Art Journal 26:1, Spring 2003, pp 99-123.

• "Hard Hats and Art Strikes: Robert Morris in 1970", The Art Bulletin 89:2, Jun 2007, pp 333-359.

• "Dirty Commerce: Art Work and Sex Work since the 1970s", differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Summer 2012, pp 71-112; repr. in Work, ed. Friederike Sigler, Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2017.

• "Handmade Genders: Queer Costuming in San Francisco circa 1970", in West of Center: Art and the Countercultural Experiment in America, 1965-1977, eds. Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011, pp 77-92.

• "Occupational Realism", TDR: The Drama Review, Winter 2012, pp 32-48; repr. in It's the Political Economy, Stupid!, eds. Gregory Sholette and Oliver Ressler, Pluto Press, 2013; repr. in Living Labor, eds. Milena Hoegsberg and Cora Fischer, Sternberg Press, 2013.

• "Still Relevant: Lucy Lippard, Feminist Activism, and Art Institutions", in Materializing Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art, eds. Catherine Morris and Vincent Bonin, MIT Press, and New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2012, pp 70-92.

• "Against the Body: Interpreting Ana Mendieta", in Ana Mendieta: Traces, ed. Stephanie Rosenthal, London: Hayward Gallery of Art, 2013, pp 26-38.

• "Knit Dissent", in Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present, eds. Suzanne Hudson and Alexander Dumbadze, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp 245-253; repr. in Craft Becomes Modern: The Bauhaus in the Making, 2017.

• "Eleven Propositions in Response to the Question: “What Is Contemporary about Craft?”", The Journal of Modern Craft 6:1, Mar 2013, pp 7-10.

• "'Out to See Video': EZTV’s Queer Microcinema in West Hollywood", Grey Room 56, Summer 2014, pp 56-89.

• "Simone Forti Goes to the Zoo", October 152, MIT Press, Spring 2015, pp 26-52.

• "For Posterity: Yoko Ono", in Yoko Ono: One Woman Show 1960-1971, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2015, pp 21-30.

• "Seth Siegelaub's Material Conditions", in Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art, eds. Leontine Coelewij and Sara Martinetti, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 2015, pp 30-43.

• "The Present Complex: Lawrence Alloway and the Currency of Museums", in Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator, eds. Lucy Bradnock, Courtney Martin, and Rebecca Peabody, Getty Research Institute, 2015, pp 166-187.

• "Keeping House with Louise Nevelson", Oxford Art Journal, Mar 2017, pp 109-131.

• "Mother-Taught: Embellishing Madalena’s Threads", in Unexpected Partners: Self-Taught Artists and Modernism in Interwar America, New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2024, pp 72-79.
  • At pynte på Madalenas tråde, Copenhagen: Billedkunstskolernes Forlag (Kunsten som forum), 2024, 35 pp. Publisher. [3] (Danish)

• more

Links

• Profile on Columbia U
• Profile on Berkeley U (archived)
• Wikipedia