About

Alexander Alberro is the Virginia Wright Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University where he teaches modern and contemporary European, U.S., and Latin American art, as well as 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.” Graduate seminars taught include “Contemporary Caribbean Art”; “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.” Recent dissertations that he has directed or codirected have focused on the contemporary art context of a wide variety of localities, including Iran, India, Iraq, Algeria, Japan, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, Germany, France, and the United States.

Alexander Alberro’s writings have been published in a broad range of journals and exhibition catalogues, and translated into numerous languages. He is also the author and editor of numerous books, including Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth Century Latin American Art (2017), Working Conditions: The Writings of Hans Haacke (2016); Luis Camnitzer In Conversation with Alexander Alberro (2014); What is Contemporary Art Today? (2012); John Miller: The Ruin of Exchange (2012); Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists Writings (2009); Art After Conceptual Art (2006); Museum Highlights (2005); Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (2003); Recording Conceptual Art (2001); Two-Way Mirror Power (1999); and Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (1999). Professor Alberro is presently completing a book-length study, “The Shape of Contemporary Art,” that focuses on the transformation of the infrastructure of art in the new geography of globalization. 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, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and others. He has also been a featured speaker at many universities and cultural institutions throughout the world, and has appeared in several documentary films on contemporary art.

Contact: aa2789@columbia.edu