Doctoral Candidate Cindy Evans Accepts Tenure-Track Position at Southern Utah University

Doctoral candidate Cindy Evans has accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Art & Design at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah. Cindy joins the faculty this fall as an assistant professor.

Cindy specializes in modern and global contemporary art. Her interests include postwar art in Germany and the Balkans, with a focus on social art history and cultural geopolitics. She is completing her dissertation, “Political Playgrounds: The Effekt Gruppe’s Interactive Art in Postwar West Germany and Yugoslavia,” under the direction of Dr. Tenley Bick, who writes,

Cindy’s dissertation makes a major historical and methodological intervention in the discourse on art of the Sixties and broader Cold War era. She is the first to conduct sustained scholarly research on the Effekt Group, a Munich-based artist collective connected to the trans-European “New Tendencies” circuit established in Zagreb in the early 1960s. Supported by her extensive fieldwork in Germany and Croatia, including her collection of landmark oral histories with surviving artists and documentation of artworks otherwise at risk of being lost, Cindy’s captivating history on Effekt finds and examines their artistic strategies (immersive exhibition formats, experiments with ephemeral materials, and network aesthetics) as an imagined “third way” solution for the divisive era of the 1960s. She is therefore emerging as the leading authority on this work and its connections to Yugoslav avant-gardes and “non-aligned” politics of the period. Distinguished by her bilingual command of German, work with living artists, and sophisticated understanding of under-studied international modernisms and Cold War politics, she is the first to bridge the growing scholarship on non-aligned Eastern European modernism with existing studies on art of postwar Germany, both East and West. In addition to her extensive teaching experience, Cindy brings an exciting research program and publication slate to the position at Southern Utah University.

Of her time at FSU, Evans writes:

FSU has been my home for the past several years providing me with friends who have become family, and a community who motivates me to be the best historian I can be. My education at FSU has strengthened my foundation in art history and expanded my vision of how it can impact our understanding of our global community.

I am particularly grateful for the mentorship of Dr. Tenley Bick and all the other professors and staff I have been able to work with while at FSU. Their diligence and insights have taught me to be persistent in my research and committed to my teaching. Their guidance has been instrumental in the development of my confidence as a researcher and with their encouragement, I have achieved goals I would not have thought possible.