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About

Alexander Alberro

Virginia Bloedel Wright '51 Professor, Department of Art History, Barnard College

Governing Board Member, SOF/Heyman, Columbia University (2018–2021)

Headshot of Alexander Alberro

Alexander Alberro's courses and graduate advising is in the area of modern and contemporary European, U.S., and Latin American art, as well as in the history of photography. Recent lecture courses include "Histories of Photography"; "Early Modernism and the Crisis of Representation"; “In and Around Abstract Expressionism”; and “Contemporary Art.” Recent graduate seminars include "Contemporary Photography and Camera Work"; "Spectatorship, Participation and Interaction in Contemporary Art"; " Contemporary Art and the Global Turn"; and "Abstract Art and its Legacies in Latin America."

Professor Alberro's writings have been published in a broad range of journals and exhibition catalogues, and translated into numerous languages. He is the author of Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth Century Latin American Art (University of Chicago Press, 2017); Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (MIT, 2003), and has edited books on contemporary art including Working Conditions: The Writings of Hans Haacke (MIT, forthcoming), Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists Writings; Art After Conceptual Art (MIT, 2009); Museum Highlights (MIT, 2005), Recording Conceptual Art (University of California, 2001), Two-Way Mirror Power (MIT 1999); and Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (MIT, 1999). He is also the founding editor of the University of California Press’ book series “Studies on Latin American Art,” which commissions publications of art history and cultural practices emerging from Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the Latin American diaspora in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Professor Alberro has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Howard Foundation, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and has taught at the University of Florida and the University of California at Berkeley. He is presently at work on a volume that explores the new forms of art and spectatorship that have crystallized in the past three decades as the art world has transformed into a global network. Prof. Alberro has been a featured speaker at many universities and cultural institutions throughout the world, and has appeared in several documentary films on contemporary art.