Mary Anne Staniszewski - Faculty and Staff

Staniszewski (center) with Professors Kathy High (left) and Pauline Oliveros (right).
photo credit: Don Moore

Mary Anne Staniszewski, Associate Professor,
Ph.D., Art History, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Mary Anne Staniszewski investigates art, media, and culture in relation to political and social perspectives.  Her work takes the form of writing, editing, collaborative curatorial practices, and, more frequently in the past, collaborative artists projects.  Her major research and writing projects form a "trilogy" of interdisciplinary investigations of modern art and culture as articulations of the modern self. Staniszewski is currently working on the third area of investigation, a multi-volume work, which is an analysis of the historical and contemporary sense of self in the United States, featuring three key themes: race; sex (gender); and life and death.

The first book, Believing Is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art (Penguin USA, 1995; Korean editions, Hyunsil Cultural Studies, Hyun Sil Moon Hwayonju, 2000 and 2007) frames art as we know it--that is art for art's sake--as an "invention" of the modern era and a manifestation of the age of the individual and the liberal, democratic, capitalist state. In the second book, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (The MIT Press, 1998; paperback 2001; Korean translation, designLocus, 2007), installations are not only analyzed as contexts for works of art--but for those who view them. Museums are portrayed as sites for collective rituals that enhance particular notions of subjecthood--in MoMA's case, a U.S. liberal, democratic, capitalist one. The book is also a critique of the discipline of art history and the emphasis on the autonomy of the individual artwork. The Power of Display is intended to frame exhibition design as a discipline and integrate the installations of the international avant-gardes within the discourse of modern art. These installations are key to understanding what develops later in the century as multimedia and installation-base art.

Staniszewski is also the Director of a "Curatorial Incubator" at Exit Art, New York, which gives young and emerging curators, artists, and scholars opportunities to produce exhibitions dealing with critical issues not being adequately addressed by the mainstream art world. The first exhibition, Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now, curated by Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee, was presented at Exit Art from September 20 to December 6, 2008, http://www.exitart.org/site/pub/exhibition_programs/signs_of_change/index.html and The Arts Center of the Capital Region, co-sponsored by iEAR Presents! and Humanites@Rensselaer (April 5 to June 5, 2009). http://www.arts.rpi.edu/pl/iear-events/signs-change-social-movement-cultures-1960s.  A catalogue is forthcoming co-published by Exit Art and AK Press. The second exhibition, Corpus Extremus (LIFE+), was curated by Boryana Rossa. This exhibition deals with issues of biotechnology and questions of life and death and was presented at Exit Art from February to April 18, 2009. http://www.exitart.org/site/pub/exhibition_programs/corpus_extremus/index.html

Staniszewski has written for a diverse range of academic, art world, and general interest publications for more than twenty-five years. A recent article "Intimacy, Barbarism and Delusion," for the inaugural issue, of Where We Are Now (WWAN), issue 1, Summer 2009, is available at wherewearenow.org/06/intimacy/intimacy-barbarism-and-delusion/

Research areas: art history and criticism; curatorial and museum studies; cultural studies; media criticism and theory; design and architectural history; feminist, gender and race studies; and areas related to activism and a variety of human rights and social justice issues.