Amelia Jones

Last updated
Amelia Jones
Born (1961-07-14) July 14, 1961 (age 62)
Durham, North Carolina, United States
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater University of California, Los Angeles
Known forArt History and Art Theory
Awards Guggenheim Fellowship (2000)
Distinguished Feminist Award (2015)
National Endowment for the Humanities (2000-01)
Fellow of American Council of Learned Societies (1994-95)

Amelia Jones (born July 14, 1961), originally from Durham, North Carolina, is an American art historian, art theorist, art critic, author, professor and curator. Her research specialisms include feminist art, body art, performance art, video art, identity politics, and New York Dada. Jones's earliest work established her as a feminist scholar and curator, including through a pioneering exhibition and publication concerning the art of Judy Chicago; later, she broadened her focus on other social activist topics including race, class and identity politics. Jones has contributed significantly to the study of art and performance as a teacher, researcher, and activist. [1] [2]

Contents

Education and personal life

She is the daughter of Virginia Sweetnam Jones and Edward E. Jones, a Princeton Psychology professor. [3] She studied art history as an undergraduate at Harvard University and completed her M.A. at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in 1991. Her dissertation was later turned into a published book, Postmodernism and the Engendering of Marcel Duchamp (1994). On March 7, 1987, Jones married Anthony Sherin, a film editor. They divorced in 2005. In 2007, Jones married artist Paul Donald. She has two children, Evan and Vita, from her first marriage. Jones currently resides in Los Angeles, California. [4]

Career

After completing her PhD, Jones left Los Angeles to teach at universities throughout the United States as well as in Manchester, England and Montreal, Canada. She has taught art history at University of California, Riverside and the University of Manchester, where she served as the Pilkington Chair of the department. [5] She also served as the Grierson Chair in Visual Culture at McGill University in Montreal and has held visiting professorships at Maine College of Art, Texas Christian University, University of Colorado, Boulder, and Washington University in St. Louis. She is currently the Robert A. Day Professor and Chair of Critical Studies at the USC Roski School of Art and Design, where she also serves as Vice Dean of Research. [6] She is affiliated faculty in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. [7]

In addition to her work in academia, Jones has also curated a number of exhibitions, including Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History (1996) at the Hammer Museum, The Politics of Difference: Artists Explore Issues of Identity (1991) at the Chandler Art Museum at University of California, Riverside, and Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art (2013) at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery at Concordia University in Montreal. [8] [9] She is also independently organizing a retrospective exhibition on the work of American performance artist Ron Athey. [6] [10]

Through art history, Amelia Jones has spoken out against cultural biases related to gender and race during her career. She has challenged most authoritative voices for insistently promoting a straight white-male perspective. Her work is committed to representing artists who are women, queer or people of color.

Books

Jones is the author and editor of numerous books and anthologies on art history, performance studies, queer studies, and visual culture. She currently serves as co-editor of the Manchester University Press series Rethinking Art's Histories with Martha Meskimmon. [11] Jones has edited A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945, a collection of art history and criticism by contributors who write on such topics as technology, formalism, public space, diasporas, culture wars, the avant-garde, and the society of the spectacle. She has also edited The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, the seven part work of Provocations, Representation, Difference, Disciplines/Strategies, Mass culture/Media interventions, Body, and Technology.

The following is a selection of works written or edited by Amelia Jones:

Awards

Throughout Amelia Jones' career she has been recognized for her valuable contributions to the art world. She has also been recognized for her progressive work with feminist ideas. She was award the Distinguished Feminist Award in 2015 which honors art, scholarship, or advocacy advancing the cause of equality for women in the arts. Previous winners of the award include The Guerrilla Girls, Lucy Lippard and Lorraine O’Grady. [7] Jones received a few awards prior that acknowledge her success as an art historian and feminist activist.

Awards Amelia Jones received:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lorraine O'Grady</span>

Lorraine O'Grady is an American artist, writer, translator, and critic. Working in conceptual art and performance art that integrates photo and video installation, she explores the cultural construction of identity – particularly that of Black female subjectivity – as shaped by the experience of diaspora and hybridity. O'Grady studied at Wellesley College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop before becoming an artist at age forty-five. Regarding the purpose of art, O'Grady said in 2016: "I think art’s first goal is to remind us that we are human, whatever that is. I suppose the politics in my art could be to remind us that we are all human."

Suzanne Lacy is an American artist, educator, writer, and professor at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. She has worked in a variety of media, including installation, video, performance, public art, photography, and art books, in which she focuses on "social themes and urban issues." She served in the education cabinet of Jerry Brown, then mayor of Oakland, California, and as arts commissioner for the city. She designed multiple educational programs beginning with her role as performance faculty at the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles.

Faith Wilding is a Paraguayan American multidisciplinary artist - which includes but is not limited to: watercolor, performance art, writing, crocheting, knitting, weaving, and digital art. She is also an author, educator, and activist widely known for her contribution to the progressive development of feminist art. She also fights for ecofeminism, genetics, cyberfeminism, and reproductive rights. Wilding is Professor Emerita of performance art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lee Marrs</span> American cartoonist and animator

Lee Marrs is an American cartoonist and animator, and one of the first female underground comix creators. She is best known for her comic book series The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp, which lasted from 1973 to 1977.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Griselda Pollock</span>

Griselda Frances Sinclair Pollock is an art historian and cultural analyst of international, postcolonial feminist studies in visual arts and visual culture. Since 1977, Pollock has been an influential scholar of modern art, avant-garde art, postmodern art, and contemporary art. She is a major influence in feminist theory, feminist art history, and gender studies. She is renowned for her innovative feminist approaches to art history which aim to deconstruct the lack of appreciation and importance of women in art as other than objects for the male gaze.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mira Schor</span>

Mira Schor is an American artist, writer, editor, and educator, known for her contributions to critical discourse on the status of painting in contemporary art and culture as well as to feminist art history and criticism.

Mary Kelly is an American conceptual artist, feminist, educator, and writer.

Harmony Hammond is an American artist, activist, curator, and writer. She was a prominent figure in the founding of the feminist art movement in 1970s New York.

Rachel Lachowicz is an American artist based in Los Angeles, California. She is primarily recognized for appropriating canonical works by modern and contemporary male artists such as Carl Andre and Richard Serra and recreating them using red lipstick.

Persimmon Blackbridge is a Canadian writer and artist whose work focuses on feminist, lesbian, disability and mental health issues. She identifies herself as a lesbian, a person with a disability and a feminist. Her work explores these intersections through her sculptures, writing, curation and performance. The novels she has written follow characters that are very similar to Blackbridge's own life experiences, allowing her to write honestly about her perspective. Blackbridge's struggle with her mental health has become a large part of her practice, and she uses her experience with mental health institutions to address her perspective on them. Blackbridge is involved in the film, SHAMELESS: The Art of Disability exploring the complexity of living with a disability. Her contributions to projects like this help destigmatize the attitudes towards people with disabilities. Blackbridge has won many awards for her work exploring her identity and the complexities that come with it.

Feminist art criticism emerged in the 1970s from the wider feminist movement as the critical examination of both visual representations of women in art and art produced by women. It continues to be a major field of art criticism.

Cassils is a performance artist, body builder, and personal trainer from Montreal, Quebec, Canada now based in Los Angeles, California, United States. Their work uses the body in a sculptural fashion, integrating feminism, body art, and gay male aesthetics. Cassils is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Grant, a United States Artists Fellowship, a California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship (2012), several Canada Council for the Arts grants, and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship. Cassils is gender non-conforming, transmasculine, and goes by singular they pronouns.

Cristina Carrera, otherwise known as Cristy C. Road is a Cuban-American illustrator, graphic novelist, and punk rock musician whose posters, music, and autobiographical works explore themes of feminism, queer culture, and social justice. She primarily works as an illustrator and graphic novelist, but also published a long-running zine about punk music and her life as a queer Latina. She performed on the Sister Spit roadshow in 2007, 2009, and 2013 and was the lead vocalist and guitarist for the queercore/pop-punk band, The Homewreckers. She currently sings vocals and plays guitar in Choked Up. She has published three books and one collection of postcards, as well as numerous concert posters, protest flyers, book covers, and logos. Road has worked as a professor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nao Bustamante</span>

Nao Bustamante is a Chicana interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator from the San Joaquin Valley in California. Her artistic practice encompasses performance art, sculpture, installation, and video and explores issues of ethnicity, class, gender, performativity, and the body. She is a recipient of the 2023 Rome Prize.

Ann Luja Cvetkovich is a Professor and former Director of the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University in Ottawa. Until 2019, she was the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she had been the founding director of the LGBTQ Studies Program, launched in 2017. She has published three books: Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003); and Depression: A Public Feeling (2012). She has also co-edited Articulating the Global and Local: Globalization and Cultural Studies (1996) with Douglas Kellner, as well as Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication (2010) with Janet Staiger and Ann Reynolds. Furthermore, Cvetkovich has co-edited a special issue of Scholar and Feminist Online, entitled "Public Sentiments" with Ann Pellegrini. She is also a former co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies with Annamarie Jagose.

Lisa E. Bloom is an American cultural critic, educator and feminist art historian specializing in polar studies, contemporary art, environmental art, history of photography, visual culture and film studies and is known for her books and essay contributions to these areas.

Ruth Weisberg is an American artist and Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, where she is also former dean of the USC Roski School of Art and Design. Weisberg's work is influenced by her Jewish heritage and its traditions, the human body, and feminist themes. She works primarily in painting, and her recent work is produced in scroll formats.

C. Riley Snorton is an American scholar, author, and activist whose work focuses on historical perspectives of gender and race, specifically Black transgender identities. His publications include Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Snorton is currently Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. In 2014 BET listed him as one of their "18 Transgender People You Should Know".

Edie Fake is an American artist, illustrator, author, and transgender activist. Fake is known for their comics/zines, gouache and ink paintings, and murals. Fake has an award winning comic-zine series about Gaylord Phoenix, a bird-like man that travels to different environments and has various lovers. He is currently based in Joshua Tree, California, after previously residing in Chicago and Los Angeles.

Queer art, also known as LGBT+ art or queer aesthetics, broadly refers to modern and contemporary visual art practices that draw on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and various non-heterosexual, non-cisgender imagery and issues. While by definition there can be no singular "queer art", contemporary artists who identify their practices as queer often call upon "utopian and dystopian alternatives to the ordinary, adopt outlaw stances, embrace criminality and opacity, and forge unprecedented kinships and relationships." Queer art is also occasionally very much about sex and the embracing of unauthorised desires.

References

  1. ↑ "Amelia Jones: The Politics of Identity". Artillery Magazine. 2015-11-03. Retrieved 2017-11-13.
  2. ↑ Bishop, Jacqueline (2016-01-21). "Renowned Feminist Art Historian Amelia Jones Believes that the Discipline of Art History Should be Restructured to Embrace New Narratives and Diverse Voices". Huffington Post. Retrieved 2017-11-13.
  3. ↑ "Dr. Edward E. Jones, Social Psychologist, 66". The New York Times. 1993-08-04. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2017-11-13.
  4. ↑ "Gale - Product Login". galeapps.galegroup.com. Retrieved 2019-03-21.
  5. ↑ "Amelia Jones > Department of American Studies and Ethnicity > USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences".
  6. 1 2 "Amelia Jones | Roski School of Art and Design".
  7. 1 2 de Leve, Samantha (2015-01-28). "USC Roski professor to be honored for advancing the equality of women in the arts". USC News. Retrieved 2017-11-13.
  8. ↑ PREZIOSI, DONALD (1996-05-13). "'Sexual Politics' an Important Show". Los Angeles Times. ISSN   0458-3035 . Retrieved 2017-11-13.
  9. ↑ "Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery". Archived from the original on 2015-09-28. Retrieved 2015-09-27., "Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art" at Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Montreal.
  10. ↑ November 3; Features, 2015 · in (2015-11-04). "Amelia Jones: The Politics of Identity". Artillery Magazine. Retrieved 2019-03-21.
  11. ↑ , Rethinking Art's Histories at University of Manchester Press
  12. ↑ Jones, Amelia (27 February 2004). Irrational Modernism. MIT Press. ISBN   9780262101028 . Retrieved 2017-11-13.
  13. ↑ , TDR at MIT Press Journals
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.