Richard Lee Deaton: Independent researcher and semi-retired lawyer, former Assistant Director of Research, Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). Recent or upcoming works: “Protest and Palette: Social and Political Art in Canada, 1914-1968,” (in progress). Research interests: politics, society, and art; Marxist theory; Cuban art history; cultural studies; and North American labor history. Contact information: phone: 613-728-6099; email: deaton_richard@hotmail.com
Carol Duncan: Ramapo College of New Jersey [retired]. Publications include: Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (Routledge Press, 1995); The Aesthetics of Power : Essays in the Critical History of Art Cambridge University Press, 1993); John Cotton Dana and the Making of a Democratic Culture for America (Periscope Publishing,forthcoming, 2008).
James van Dyke: Reed College. Recent or upcoming works: “Über Kunst, Propaganda und Kitsch in Deutschland, 1933-1945” for the exhibition Kunst und Propaganda, German Historical Museum, Berlin, 2006 (in progress); “Max Beckmann, Sport, and the Neoconservative Critique of Civilization” in: Of Truths Impossible to Put in Words: Max Beckmann Contextualized, Rose-Carol Washton Long and Maria Makela, eds. (Frankfurt, New York: Peter Lang, 2006; in progress); “Franz Radziwill’s Vision of Joyful German Work: Painting, Social Identity, and Politics in the Weimar Republic,” Oxford Art Journal (forthcoming 2005); “Paul Klee und das Künstlerproletariat” in Paul Klee im Rheinland, exh. cat. Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn (Köln: Dumont, 2003), 180-187. Research interests: 20th century German painting; art and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich.
Travis English: Doctoral candidate, Art History and Criticism, Stony Brook University. Areas of Interest: Early 20th Century German art and visual culture; Marxist aesthetics. Recent Publications: “Otto Dix’s Lasurtechnik and the Dialectics of Tradition” (forthcoming in vol. 22 #2 of Art Criticism), and “Hans Haacke, or the Museum as Degenerate Utopia” in Kritikos (vol. 4 #3). english.travis@gmail.com
Kathryn M. Floyd: Visiting Assistant Professor, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York. Recent works: Between Change and Continuity: Documenta 1955-2005 (PhD diss.: University of Iowa, 2006; awarded the Deans’ Distinguished Dissertation Award); Assistant Editor for Dada (Themes and Movements Series), edited by Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Phaidon Press, 2006); currently working on a book on the history of the Documenta exhibition (Kassel, Germany), an article on historical photographs of art exhibitions, and a paper on the 1968 protests at Documenta, the Venice Biennial, and the Milan Triennial. Research interests: Twentieth-century German art and art institutions; History of Exhibitions (esp. biennials and periodic exhibitions); German Dada and Constructivism; Historiography of Art History. Contact info: katy.floyd@gmail.com
Kirsten Forkert: artist, independent critic, activist and PhD student in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is currently teaching media studies at Goldsmiths and a course on alternative media at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. She also works for University College Union, the national union for academic staff in the UK. She is also involved with Rampart Social Centre, Micropolitics Research Group, and the London Housing Action Now coalition. She has written on conceptual art, tactical media, cultural policy and other related issues. email: kforkert@gmail.com
Joanna Gardner-Huggett: DePaul University, Chicago. Recent or upcoming works: “Margaret Gardiner: Activist Collector,” British Art Journal (forthcoming); “The Women Artists’ Cooperative Space as a Site for Social Change: Artemisia Gallery, Chicago (1973-1979),” Social Justice (forthcoming). Research interests: intersection between feminism and arts activism. Contact information: phone: 773-325-4890; email: jgardner@depaul.edu; fax: 773-325-1950
Benj Gerdes is a NY-based artist and activist working in film, video, photography, and a number of collaborative and/or public frameworks. Most prominent among his collaborative practices is work as a co-organizer of 16Beaver Group. His recent work focuses on the affective and social consequences of contemporary economic and state regimes. His video essay in collaboration with Jennifer Hayashida, Room of the Sun, examining the prehistory of neoliberal economics through the figure of Swedish monopoly capitalist & “Match King” Ivar Kreuger (1880-1932), will be completed in early 2009. He currently teaches in the Department of Cinema, Binghamton University. www.clnswp.org www.16beavergroup.org
Janet Goldner: My work fuses the tactile, spatial forms of sculpture with elegant, succinct comments on contemporary social issues. I create my often-poetic steel sculptures using a welding torch as a drawing instrument, cutting images and sometimes text into them. I first traveled to West Africa in 1973. Since spending eight months in Mali on a Fulbright in 1995, I have been engaged in a dialogue with Malian artists concerning our lives, work, and creative process. The combining of Western and non-Western images and ideas are a result of many trips to Africa, as well as a response to my own layered American cultural identity. Over thirty years as an active artist, I have shown my work in over twenty solo exhibitions, and nearly one hundred group exhibitions throughout the United States, as well as in Lithuania, Germany, Italy, Bosnia, Australia, New Zealand, and Mali. I am the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and artist residencies, including a Fulbright Fellowship to Mali and a grant from the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid and the Ford Foundation. An artist-scholar, I have curated exhibitions, published articles and catalogs, and lectured at conferences, universities, and community venues. The evolution of my sculpture traces my enduring exploration of sculptural form, my ongoing relationship with African culture, and my lifelong involvement in political activism.
Elizabeth Grady: Elizabeth Grady is curating Structuring Perception at NurtureART, Brooklyn, opening November 4, 2005; and Parts to the Whole at Vox Populi, Philadelphia, opening January 6, 2006. She has an essay on Gary Simmons appearing this fall on the website of the Whitney Museum and has just published essays on Franz Ackermann, Matthew Ritchie, Alexander Ross, and Terry Winters in Elisabeth Sussman, Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Sculpture (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2005). In addition, she is working as Adjunct Professor of Art History at F.I.T.-SUNY in New York, Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum, and Special Assistant to the Estate of Diane Arbus. Email: ELIZABETH_GRADY@fitnyc.edu
Beth Hinderliter, SUNY College at Buffalo. Recent and upcoming works: Hinderliter, Kaizen, Maimon, and McCormick, eds., Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2009). Research interests: modern and contemporary art history and feminism. Contact information: 716-878-3675 (phone); hindersb@buffalostate.edu.
