Art, Art History, and Film Faculty

Kevin Lotery

Assistant Professor, Modern and Contemporary Art

Profile

Kevin Lotery is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art in Europe and the Americas. His research has focused on interactions between art, architecture, and forms of technological and philosophical research. His first book, The Long Front of Culture: The Independent Group and Exhibition Design (MIT Press/October Books, 2020), examines the collaborative exhibition design projects of the unruly cadre of artists, architects, curators, and writers known as the Independent Group or IG in 1950s Britain. The first book-length study of the IG鈥檚 exhibition designs, the book argues for exhibition design as a crucial cross-disciplinary and global mode of aesthetic production and image distribution at mid-century, one that resonates with much contemporary art today.

His current research explores the last works of artists, writers, and especially, filmmakers and film writers whose work stemmed, at least in part, from the experience of the Holocaust and its generational transmission, such as Chantal Akerman, Miriam Hansen, Eva Hesse, Siegfried Kracauer, Claude Lanzmann, and Primo Levi.

Before coming to Boston College, Lotery was Lecturer in the Fine Art Department at the School of Arts and Cultures at Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He was previously a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at Columbia University, and his research has been supported by grants from the Hauser & Wirth Institute, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and the Institute for Historical Research, University of London.