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Welcome Dr. Tenley Bick!

Published August 21, 2018

Dr Tenley BickThe Department of Art History is pleased to welcome Dr. Tenley Bick as Assistant Professor of Global Contemporary Art this fall. Dr. Bick received her PhD in Contemporary Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2016. She specializes in modern and global contemporary art, with particular interests in post-WWII European art and contemporary African art (continental and diasporic), and a focus on social art history and cultural geopolitics.

Professor Bick has published her work in African Arts, and Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline, edited by James Elkins and Kristi McGuire, and is currently preparing several articles in and two book projects. The first, titled Figure as Model: Michelangelo Pistoletto and the Italian Avant-Garde in the Global Sixties, examines Pistoletto’s work within its politicized cultural contexts, focusing especially on the artist’s investigation of conventional figuration as a critical model for postwar creative practice. This book offers a counter-narrative to dominant histories of postwar art in and out of Italy, and theorizes a new language of figuration for the broader field of art history. Her second book project deals with African art and Italian colonialism, focusing on African artistic and cinematic practices in the Maghreb, Eastern Horn, and diaspora that negotiate legacies of Italian colonialism.

Professor Bick with Michelangelo Pistoletto

This summer Dr. Bick conducted research in Italy and Ethiopia for these two projects. She interviewed Pistoletto, conducted research in archives, and visited modern and contemporary Italian art exhibitions. She also visited the FSU Study Center in Florence and met with Director Frank Nero (MA 1994).

Dr. Bick was previously Visiting Assistant Professor in the Washington College Department of Art and Art History, where she taught introductory courses in the history of western art, as well as upper-level seminars in Art History and Postcolonial Theory, Women Artists and Gender in Modern and Contemporary Art, The Global Sixties, and Contemporary Arts of Africa and Its Diasporas. In the fall, she will be teaching a graduate seminar on Postwar Italian Art and an undergraduate seminar on Contemporary Art and Artistic Labor (see Graduate Seminars for Fall 2018 and Undergraduate Seminars for Fall 2018).

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