Blake Stimson
Professor of Contemporary Art, Critical Theory, and the History of Photography
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About
Blake Stimson is a specialist in contemporary art, critical theory, and the history of photography. He joined the Department of Art History in 2012. Before coming to UIC he was Professor of Art History and then Cinema and Technocultural Studies at University of California, Davis, where he also served as an active member of the graduate programs in Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Performance Studies and worked as a dissertation adviser for students from several additional programs.
He has written for Art Journal, Art Bulletin, Artforum, October, Texte zur Kunst, Oxford Art Journal, Third Text, New Left Review, Tate Papers, Etudes photographiques, Philosophy and Photography, The Brooklyn Rail and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, among many other publications. He is the author The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (MIT, 2006) and Citizen Warhol (Reaktion, 2013) and co-editor of five volumes: Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (with Alexander Alberro, MIT, 1999), Visual Worlds (with John R. Hall and Lisa Tamaris Becker, Routledge, 2006), Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (with Gregory Sholette, Minnesota, 2007), The Meaning of Photography (with Robin Kelsey, Clark Art Institute and Yale, 2008), and Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (with Alexander Alberro, MIT, 2009). His work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Polish and Serbian.
He is currently working on three book projects: "Vito Acconci and You," co-authored with Elise Archias, centers on Acconci's 1972 work Seedbed; "Guilt as Form," traces a counter-genealogy of contemporary art arising from the turmoil of 1960s; and "Seeing Like a State" focuses on the mature political aesthetics of Paul Strand.
Professor Stimson currently advises PhD candidates working in several areas: emotion in American art criticism; art and political accountability in Eastern Europe; art and the lost promise of socialism in Chile and Spain; modernist antimodernism in Iranian art and criticism; chaos in twentieth-century aesthetic theory and information theory; and photography and political subjectivity at the time of Iran's Constitutional Revolution.
Selected Syllabi
- AH 513: Marxism and Art (Fall 2024)
- AH 465: Arts of the Black Atlantic (Spring 2023)
- AH 100: Introduction to Art History (Fall 2019)
- AH 513: The State is Not a Work of Art (Spring 2019)
- AH 530: Seminar in The History of Photography: Barbarism as an Aesthetic Problem (Spring 2018)
- AH 561: Adorno (Fall 2015)
Selected Publications
The Labor of Teaching and Administrative Hysteria, co-authored with Elise Archias, The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 2023)
—Listed as one of the ten most-read Chronicle of Higher Education Review essays of 2023
—Assigned in several graduate-level seminars across the US, Fall 2023
Response to Daniel Spaulding’s post on academia.edu “Anti-Anti-PMCism: A Response to nonsite,” Dec 9, 2021, academia.edu/EliseArchias (December 2021)
Infantile “Left-wing” Disorder: An Update, nonsite (December 2021)
John Berger, Michael Fried and Contemporary Art, nonsite (May 2021)
Deneocolonize Your Syllabus, nonsite (February 2021)
Culture in the Moment of Its Obsolescence, Medium (April 2020)
The Triumphant Middle, Brooklyn Rail (October 2018)
Review of Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test, CAA Reviews (October 2018)
Art and Social Death, Fertile Ground (January 2018). Here is a version with the original illustrations (before the publisher removed them).
Service to Community
Founding Editor of Left Art Review (launching May Day 2024)
Education
Ph.D. 1998, Art History, Cornell University
M.F.A., 1992, Sculpture, Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Fellow, 1990-91, Studio Art, Whitney Independent Study Program, New York
B.A., 1982, Religious Studies, Middlebury College
Selected Presentations
Blake Stimson, What Sort of World is Art History Making Today?, UIC Art History Colloquium, 9 September 2022