Allison Myers

Allison Myers is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art and critical theory. Her research focuses on cultural stereotypes and the ways they shape artistic exchange and reception, particularly in North America and France. Her most recent publication examined the French painting group Supports/Surfaces and their attempts to align Western abstract painting with Maoist politics. She is currently working on an article that discusses the role of “broken English” in the cryptographic drawings of LA-based French artist Guy de Cointet. Her current book project, tentatively titled American Art and the Protestant Work Ethic, examines the self-image of the “honest laborer” in the United States and the impact it had on the development of process-oriented and materials-based artistic practices in the United States from the 1940s to the 1980s.

Before coming to Cal Poly, Dr. Myers was Visiting Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Richmond. She has also held curatorial positions at the Menil Collection, the Blanton Museum of Art, and the Visual Arts Center at UT Austin, where she curated two exhibitions: Everyday Ogres: Tania Mouraud and Fool’s Romance: Books from Aeromoto. In 2017 she fell in with the letterpress crowd and founded Breach Press—a bilingual small press dedicated to translation work.
 

Allison Myers

Education

• PhD – University of Texas at Austin, 2018
• MA – University of Texas at Austin, 2009
• BA – Webster University, 2007

Courses

• ART 213: Modern Art, 1900-1945
• ART 315: Art Since 1945

Teaching and Research Interests

• Modern and Contemporary Art History
• Critical Theory
• Translation Studies
• Abstraction
• Conceptual Art

Recent Publications

• “Materialist Translations of Maoism in the Work of Supports/Surfaces,” in Maoism, Art, and the New Chinese World Order, edited by Noemi de Haro García, Jacopo Galimberti, & Victoria HF Scott. (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2019), pp. 149-164.
• “Tender Things,” in Ingrid Tremblay: Nice is Not Enough (Richmond, VA: Sediment Arts, 2019).
• “Alan Ruiz: Infrapolitics,” Art Papers 43 (2) (Fall 2019): 42-43.
• “Louise Bourgeois,” and “Peter Wüthrich,” in Paper in Profile: Mixografia and Taller de Gráfica Mexicana (Athens, GA: Georgia Museum of Art, 2016), pp. 56-61; 246-248.