Katy Siegel works on post-war art; her interests include the relationship between art history and criticism, and the practice of contemporary artists in the social field. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas-Austin. She studied with Richard Shiff, and wrote her dissertation on the preference for discontinuity in figuring post-war art history and criticism: its emphasis on historical beginnings and endings, generational conflict, and artistic breakthroughs. She taught at the University of Memphis after graduating, and has also been a Luce Fellow at Brandeis University, a senior critic at the Yale graduate school, and a visiting professor at Princeton University. She also teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Prof. Siegel regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate surveys of contemporary art figured by mediums, concepts, and conditions of particular urgency, often relating to current exhibitions and debates; theory and criticism seminars organized a different theme each semester, like the artist’s self or life and death; and special topics courses such as “Contemporary Art in the Age of Extremes.” She has supervised a wide range of M.A. theses, including monographic writing on Cady Noland, Norman Lewis, and Kim Soo ja; institutional studies on the MoMA Projects series and museums’ incorporation of digital art; and historiographic work on the American reception of Gerhard Richter.
Siegel’s own work include a co-written book on the relationship between art and the market, with a focus on very recent art, Art Works: Money (Thames & Hudson, 2004). She is a contributing editor for Artforum magazine, and has published criticism and essays there for years, including reviews of the Venice Biennale and Carnegie International, as well as writing on Andreas Gursky, Lee Lozano, and Kerry James Marshall. She has written numerous catalog essays for institutions including the Whitney, LA MoCA, SF MoMA, Musee d’Art moderne de la ville de Paris, and Hannover Kunsteverein on artists including Takashi Murakami, Lisa Yuskavage, Rineke Dijkstra, and Richard Tuttle. She has curated a number of exhibitions, most recently High Times Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967-75, touring six cities and four countries, which has been widely reviewed and won a prize from the International Association of Art Critics. She was also the lead essayist and editor of the catalog (DAP, 2006). She is the primary author for the Jeff Koons catalog raisonne (Taschen, 2008). Her current project is a book called Art Since ’45, which details the broad changes in contemporary art entailed by the intersection of the history of European modernism and that of America (Reaktion: 2009).
