IMAGE CREDIT: Martha Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (MIT Press: 2003), Cover image courtesy of MIT Press

Martha Buskirk
(Born Monterey, California; Lives Cambridge, MA)
Nominated by Patricia Johnston

A scholar, educator, and curator, Martha Buskirk has taught art history and criticism at Montserrat College of Art (Beverly, MA) since 1994. She is author of The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (MIT Press, 2003), has served as the Managing Editor of October magazine, and co-edited the publication The Duchamp Effect (MIT Press, 1996). Buskirk earned her Ph.D. in art history from the City University of New York Graduate Center (New York, NY) in 1998 and was also a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Cambridge, MA) in 2000-2001.

As a 2004 Fellow at the Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, MA) and a 2006 Senior Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute (Leeds, UK), Buskirk pursued work on a new book, Seeing through the Museum: Art, Life, Commerce, in which she examines intersections between museum history and contemporary artistic practices that evoke conventions associated with the collection, souvenir, relic, and archive. Buskirk's recent 2006 HallSpace exhibition (Boston, MA), Information, Insight, Interruption—featuring the work of photographers Barbara Bosworth, Liselot van der Heijden, E. E. Smith, and Shellburne Thurber—will be shown at the Danforth Museum of Art (Framingham, MA) in fall 2007.

Statement

Analyses of telling moments of ambiguity or apparent contradiction have long been central to my interest in exploring contemporary art's fluid yet nonetheless operative boundaries. Questions about photography and the photographic are integral to this investigation. The photograph as document is threaded through contemporary practices, bringing together not only the imaginary museum of extant works, but also all those ephemeral events and situations that claim a place in the historical record through their existence in reproduction. It is equally important to examine how effects identified with photography have been detached and reassembled, as the turn to digital imaging can be understood as both a pivotal development in the history of photography and as merely the final destabilization of a category already called into question by the myriad ways photographic forms have been incorporated into artistic practices of the last four decades.

Patricia Johnston

(Born 1954, New York, lives Reading, MA)

Patricia Johnston was invited to be on the PRC's Board of Directors from 1993 to 1997, after her service on National Board of Directors of the Women's Caucus for Art. In the early 1980s Johnston was the Manager and Acting Director of the Boston University Art Gallery. She is the past national chair of the Visual Culture/Art History Caucus of the American Studies Association. She has been teaching Art History at Salem State College (Salem, MA) since 1987.

Johnston is the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants from organizations such as the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC), the Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Editor of exposure, the Journal of the Society for Photographic Education from 1989 to 1992, Johnston published the award-winning Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising Photography (1997) and more recently edited Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture (2006). Her articles and reviews of photography and contemporary art have appeared in Afterimage, Art New England, Views, exposure, Technology and Culture, and others.

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Statement

Patricia Johnston