Ph.D. Yale University, 2007


Fields:
American Art and Culture, Twentieth-Century European Art and Culture, History of Photography

Professor Curley’s primary interests are twentieth-century American and European art, visual culture, and politics. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2007, where he wrote his dissertation on the work of Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and the politics of visual perception during the cold war. This work received the Francis Blanshard Prize for outstanding History of Art dissertation at Yale.

By considering the relation between artistic modernisms and social modernization, his work pinpoints contested sites where artists intervene within a broader nexus of visuality and politics, especially during the cold war. Other specific research interests include Willem de Kooning, Minimalism, Life magazine, and postwar German art and visual culture.

Professor Curley’s research has been supported by a number of fellowships and grants, including the American Council for Learned Societies and the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst.

At Washington University, he will be teaching a survey course “Photography in America,” which will consider the medium both in terms of its main practitioners and its social uses from the 19th century until the present. He is also teaching a seminar focusing on the interactions between American art and so-called “low” forms of cultural expression.

Selected Publications:
“Gerhard Richter’s Cold War Vision” in Gerhard Richter: A Symposium eds. Jon Seydl, et. al. (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2008). Forthcoming.

“Fuzzy Language: Joseph Kosuth’s Titled (Art as Idea as Idea), Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 2005, 125-129.

“Pure Art, Pure Science: The Politics of Serial Drawing in the 1960s,” in Infinite

Possibilities:Serial Imagery in 20th-Century Drawing (Wellesley, MA: Davis Museum and Cultural Center, 2004), 24-36.