Devlin Hall 432
Telephone: 617-552-2237
Email: lotery@bc.edu
Modern Art & the Avant-Garde, 1900-1945
Postwar: Art After 1945
Introduction to Contemporary Art, 1975-the Present
Artists' Design Exhibitions: Installation Art & Exhibition Making in Modern & Contemporary Art
Memory Work
Interactions between art, science, and technology
Exhibition histories
Theories of utopia and creativeness
Jewish diaspora in art, film, literature, and criticism
Memory and mourning
Kevin Lotery is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art in Europe and the Americas. His research has focused on interactions between art, architecture, and forms of technological and philosophical research. His first book, The Long Front of Culture: The Independent Group and Exhibition Design (MIT Press/October Books, 2020), examines the collaborative exhibition design projects of the unruly cadre of artists, architects, curators, and writers known as the Independent Group or IG in 1950s Britain. The first book-length study of the IG’s exhibition designs, the book argues for exhibition design as a crucial cross-disciplinary and global mode of aesthetic production and image distribution at mid-century, one that resonates with much contemporary art today.
His current research explores the last works of artists, writers, and especially, filmmakers and film writers whose work stemmed, at least in part, from the experience of the Holocaust and its generational transmission, such as Chantal Akerman, Miriam Hansen, Eva Hesse, Siegfried Kracauer, Claude Lanzmann, and Primo Levi.
Before coming to Boston College, Lotery was Lecturer in the Fine Art Department at the School of Arts and Cultures at Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He was previously a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at Columbia University, and his research has been supported by grants from the Hauser & Wirth Institute, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and the Institute for Historical Research, University of London.
Books
The Long Front of Culture: The Independent Group and Exhibition Design. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press/October Books, 2020.
Articles and Book Chapters
“‘Great Historians Are Biological Freaks’: Siegfried Kracauer’s Philosophy of History,” October 185 (Summer 2023): 139-167.
“Introduction to Collective Reception,” co-author with Trevor Stark and Hyewon Yoon, October 185 (Summer 2023): 3-4.
“Dance Double: Alex Katz’s Scenography,” Alex Katz: Gathering (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2022), 284-291.
“Left to His Own Devices: Richard Hamilton, Introspectre,” Bricks from the Kiln #5 (December 2021), 164-180.
“Folds in the Fabric: Robert Morris in the 1980s,” October 171 (Winter 2020): 77-114.
“The Hamilton Variations,” in Reaper: Richard Hamilton & Sigfried Giedion. JRP Ringier/ETH Zürich, 2017: 103-136.
“Rooms: Richard Hamilton and Postmodernism,” October 159 (Spring 2017): 55-85.
“‘What is happening’: Notes on the Scenographic Impulse in Modern and Contemporary Art,” Routledge Companion to Scenography, ed. by Arnold Aronson. Routledge, 2017: 135-150.
“an Exhibit/an Aesthetic: Richard Hamilton and Postwar Exhibition Design,” October 150, special issue, Artists Design Exhibitions (Fall 2014): 87-112.
“Artists Design Exhibitions: Introduction” co-author with Claire Grace, in October 150, special issue, Artists Design Exhibitions (Fall 2014): 3-8.
Ten extended catalogue entries in This Will Have Been: Art, Love, & Politics in the 1980s, ed. by Helen Molesworth (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art; New Haven: Yale, 2012): “Jennifer Bolande,” “Eric Fischl,” “Robert Gober,” “Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” “Cady Noland,” “Gerhard Richter,” “David Robbins,” “James Welling,” “Krzysztof Wodiczko.”
Two catalogue entries in Guggenheim Museum Collection: A to Z, ed. by Nancy Spector (New York: Guggenheim, 2009): “Bill Viola” and “Rachel Whiteread”
Edited Volumes
Co-edited with Trevor Stark and Hyewon Yoon, Collective Reception: Essays in Honor of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, special issue, October 185 (Summer 2023).
Co-edited with Claire Grace, “Artists Design Exhibitions,” special issue, October 150 (Fall 2014).
Exhibition and Book Reviews
“Trevor Paglen: A Study of Invisible Images,” Enclave Review 16 (Winter/Spring 2018): 22-24.
“Tacita Dean: Buon Fresco,” caa.reviews, Artists’ Books section (2 April 2018).
“Marilyn and the Museum with Walls: Rachel Harrison at Greene Naftali, New York,” Texte zur Kunst 107 (Semptember 2017): 198-201.