Welcome (Room 121)
Laurie Beth Clark is Professor in the Art Department where she teaches studio courses as well as graduate seminars on topics in Visual Culture and Performance Studies. Clark’s career merges theory and practice. Her creative projects have been shown in theatres, galleries, museums, gardens, forests, and public and private spaces in more than 150 shows in 35 countries on six continents. Extensive documentation of her creative work can be found at lauriebethclark.art. Clark’s writing has been published in journals (AJS Perspectives, Ecosystems and People, Encounters: Journal of Tourism and Transnational Studies, Global Performance Studies, High Performance, , Lateral, Performance Paradigm, Performance Research, TDR, Theatre Topics, Tourism and Transnational Studies, Visual Culture) and anthologies (A Performance Cosmology, Blaze: Discourse on Art, Companion to Site-Specific Performance, Companion to Visual Culture, Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape, Estudos Performantivos: Global Performance, Guerilla Performance and Multimedia, Intermediality, Marketing Memory in Latin America, Memory and Postwar Memorials: Confronting the Past as Violence, MISperformance: essays in shifting perspectives, Performance and the Public Sphere, Performing the Edible, Place and Performance, Political Performance, The Art of Truthtelling After Authoritarian Rule, The Object Reader, Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma, What’s Cooking? Food, Art and Counterculture).
Jill Casid is Professor in the Art History Department and she is also an artist-theorist and historian, Jill H. Casid holds the position of Professor of Visual Studies with a cross-appointment in the Departments of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Casid pursues a research practice across writing, photography, and film that is dedicated to queer, crip, trans*feminist, and decolonial interventions. Casid exhibits their artwork nationally and internationally, including in recent exhibitions at Signs and Symbols and the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York and Documenta fifteen. Casid’s current projects concern the question of doing things with being undone in the Necrocene and what aesthetics can do in confronting the political problem of form in the situation of crisis ordinary.
Casid is the author of Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2005) which received the College Art Association’s Millard Meiss award and Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minnesota, 2015) — now in Spanish translation (Metales Pesados, 2022). Casid also co-edited the collection Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Yale, 2014).
Recent essays and articles have appeared in journals ranging from Texte zur Kunst, Art in America, and Panorama to Photography and Culture, Women and Performance, TDR, and the Journal of Visual Culture, among others. Casid has contributed chapters to, among other collections, Natura: Environmental Aesthetics after Landscape (Diaphanes/Johns Hopkins, 2018), Migration and the Contemporary Mediterranean (Oxford, 2018), The Philosophical Salon (Open Humanities Press, 2017), and Architecture is All Over (Columbia, 2017). A widely published art writer and theorist, Casid dedicates a significant part of their practice to thinking with and writing on crip, queer, and trans*feminist art and aesthetics.
Casid was the Clark-Oakley Fellow at the Clark Art Institute and the Oakley Humanities Center at Williams College (2018–19). Casid serves on the governing board of the International Association of Visual Culture and on the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Culture. Casid is the honored recipient of numerous awards for research and teaching, including the Kellett Mid-Career Award (2023), the Chancellor’s Inclusive Excellence in Teaching Award (2015), the Vilas Research Investigator Award (2014), the H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship (2011), and the Hamel Faculty Fellowship (2009).