Terra Foundation Lectures in American Art 2018: The Body of a Nation: (3) Modernism disfigured: cult and illicit ritual in New Mexico in the works of Georgia O’Keeffe and Martha Graham

Miguel de Baca joins the History of Art Department as the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art in 2017-18 from Lake Forest College, where he is the chair of the Department of Art and Art History.

Miguel studies modern and contemporary American art; he is especially interested in issues of memory-making and the representation of history as they intersect the history of abstraction. Among his other interests are video and digital art, culture jamming, protest, artistic collaborations, and critical studies of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Miguel’s monograph, Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture, was published by the University of California Press in 2015. His current book project, Video Art and Public Culture, is about activist uses of video and digital art from the 1960s forward. Miguel was the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant for his contribution to “Digital Chicago,” a multimedia online platform investigating Chicago’s cultural history from 1892 to 1933. He is an Advisory Editor for the American National Biography online, published by the Oxford University Press with the support of the American Council of Learned Societies, and serves as the Co-Chair of the Association of Historians of American Art.