FACULTY


Irene V. Small
Assistant Professor
Art History: Modern and Contemporary Art

ismall@illinois.edu | CV

Teaching areas:

20th and 21st century art of the United States, Latin America and Europe, Critical Theory, Historiography

Research areas:

Historical and neo-avant-gardes; Modernism in a global context, particularly Brazil and Latin America; abstraction; problems of methodology and interpretation; relationality and the social implications of form.

Degrees:

B.A. Brown University, M.A. Yale University, Ph.D. Yale University

Irene V. Small is Assistant Professor of Art History and a specialist in Modern and Contemporary Art. Her current book project centers on the experimental practice of the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro, London and New York in the 1960s and 70s. In particular, the book examines relations between discourses of developmentalism and organic processes of emergence as they intersect in the articulation of a participatory art paradigm in mid-1960s Brazil. Her research has been supported by a number of fellowships and grants including the Getty Research Foundation and the Dedalus Foundation. Her doctoral dissertation, upon which the current book project is based, was awarded the Frances Blanshard Prize for outstanding dissertation in the History of Art at Yale University.

Selected Work

  • "Believing in Art: The Votive Structures of Conceptual Art" Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics Vol 55/56 (Spring/Fall 2009) special issue on "Absconding", ed. Francesco Pellizzi, Jonathan Hay, Wu Hung (in press).

  • "Site and Sociality: Joseph Beuys and the Relics of Modernist Sculpture" in Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (November 2009) special issue on "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" (in press).

  • "Morphology in the Studio: Hélio Oiticica at the Museu Nacional" Getty Research Journal No 1 (February 2009).

  • "One Thing After Another: How We Spend Time in Hélio Oiticica's Quasi-Cinemas" Spectator: USC Journal of Film and Television Criticism, special issue on "The Instant", ed. René T. Brucker Vol 28 No 2 (Fall 2008).

  • "Piranesi's Shape of Time" Image [&] Narrative, special issue on "Thinking Pictures", ed. Hanneke Grootenboer No 18 (September 2007).

Classes

Undergraduate: Twentieth Century European Art, 1880-1940; When is Art?; Art at its Limits: The 1960s in Brazil, Argentina and the US; Art Since 1940

Graduate: Participatory Art; The Life of Forms