Grant H. Kester

Grant Kester is Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, and the founding editor of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism. Kester is one of the leading figures in the critical dialogue around socially engaged art practice. He was the editor of Afterimage from 1990 to 1995. (2023)

Publications

Books

• A Survivor's Guide to Baltimore's Renaissance, photo. Chris Hartlove, 1992, 63 pp.

• editor, Art, Activism and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage, Duke University Press, 1998, 328 pp. TOC. Introduction. Publisher. [1]

• Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, University of California Press, 2004; new ed., upd., 2013, 264 pp. Publisher. [2]

• The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, Duke University Press, 2011.

• editor, with Bill Kelley Jr., Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art 1995-2010, Duke University Press, 2017. Introduction.

• The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde, Duke University Press, 2023, 280 pp. Introduction. Publisher.

• Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art, Duke University Press, 2024, 296 pp. Publisher.

Articles, book chapters

• "Access Denied: Information Policy and the Limits of Liberalism", in Ethics, Information and Technology. Readings, eds. Richard N. Stichler and Robert Hauptman, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Comp., 1994, pp 207-230. [3] [4]

• "Dialogical Aesthetics", ch. 3 in Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, University of California Press, 2004, pp 82-123, n211-217. Draws on Habermas and discusses Fiumara, Bakhtin, Levinas and Irigaray.

• "Autonomy, Antagonism and the Aesthetic", ch. 1 in Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, Duke University Press, 2011.

• ARG

• more

Links

• Profile on UC San Diego
• Academia.edu