Louise Siddons, Phd

Biography

Louise Siddons is an art historian specializing in American art and the visual culture of modernity. She teaches courses in American, Native American, Modern and Contemporary art history at OSU. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from Stanford University in 2005, and taught at San Francisco State University and Michigan State University before joining the OSU faculty in 2009. Siddons has maintained an active critical and curatorial practice throughout her career. Prior to coming to Oklahoma State, she was adjunct curator at Michigan State University and the Kresge Art Museum for two years. From 2002-2007, she was a graduate fellow and assistant curator at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Siddons continued to have a museological role at OSU, where she was the founding curator and co-director during development of the Oklahoma State University Museum of Art from 2010-2014. The OSU Museum of Art opened in January of 2014, at which point Siddons returned to her full-time faculty responsibilities. Siddons' research interests focus on the history of printmaking and photography, particularly in relation to representations of race, racialization, gender and sexuality. She is also interested in the history of modernism in the margins, both socially and geographically speaking. Her forthcoming book, Centering Modernism: J. Jay McVicker and Postwar American Art (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), situates Oklahoma modernist J. Jay McVicker within the critical and institutional processes of coastalization, challenging the primacy of New York School artists in the scholarship on postwar American art. Her current book project, tentatively titled Multiple Moderns: Women, Queerness, and Transnationalism in 20th-Century American Art, explores the possibilities opened up by working transnationally for women artists, including Bertha Lum (in Japan and China), Laura Gilpin (in the Navajo Nation), and Janet Scudder ((in France). Siddons is also currently working on an article that examines representations of the American Indian Movement in the Black Panther newspaper. Although Siddons’ research and teaching are centered in the early twentieth century, her theoretical interests in phenomenology, gender and sexuality, medium-specificity and memory have led her to consider the broader genealogies of printmaking and photography. For example, she has written several articles on the ideological connections between mezzotint and power in eighteenth-century Britain, and has curated and written about contemporary artists who work in historic media (photography and craft) in the context of a broader American craze for re-enacting, homesteading, and crafting. Siddons’ concurrent research and practice in dance history and performance contributes to her interest in these theoretical and historical phenomena. Siddons has been the recipient of research and writing support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Newberry Library, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition, and the Oklahoma Humanities Council, among others.

Research Interest

Multiple Moderns: Women, Queerness, and Transnationalism in 20th-Century American Art Book manuscript, in process. “Red Power in the Black Panther: Visual Rhetoric and Intersectional Activism in the 1970s” Article in process. Centering Modernism: J. Jay McVicker and Postwar American Art Forthcoming 2018, University of Oklahoma Press.