Louise Siddons, PhD

Stanford University

Assistant Professor and
Curator of Collections
Office:(405) 744-6016
Fax:(405) 744-5767

Email: louise.siddons@okstate.edu

 

Louise Siddons is an art historian specializing in American art and the visual culture of modernity. She teaches courses in American, Native American, Modern and Contemporary art history at OSU. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from Stanford University in 2005, completing a dissertation entitled "The Future of the American Race: Reproducing the Racialized Nation in Print Media, 1925-1940." She joined the OSU faculty in 2009.

Before coming to Oklahoma State, Siddons was a visiting assistant professor and adjunct curator at Michigan State University and the Kresge Art Museum for two years. Prior to that, she was an assistant curator of works on paper at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco for several years. Siddons continues to have a museological role at OSU, where she is curator of an art collection that has particular strengths in twentieth-century and contemporary American art. She is currently involved in the planning process for a new museum of art at the university.

Siddons' research interests focus on the history of printmaking and photography, particularly in relation to representations of race, racialization, sexuality and the family. Current projects include preparation of a book manuscript based on her dissertation research as well as articles on Bertha Lum's printmaking in Japan and China, John Winkler's WWI images of San Francisco Chinatown, and the studio work of Harlem photographer James VanDerZee. Her research and teaching are centered in the early twentieth century, but her theoretical interests in phenomenology, gender and sexuality, medium-specificity and memory have led her to consider the broader genealogies of printmaking and photography. For example, she is currently working on a study of the ideological connections between mezzotint and maternal power in eighteenth-century Britain; and her next book-length project will examine the work of contemporary photographers who work in historic photographic media.

Siddons has been the recipient of research and writing support from the Oklahoma Visual Arts Council, the Newberry Library, and the Terra Foundation for American Art, among others.

Recent and forthcoming publications include:

“African Past or American Present? The Visual Eloquence of James VanDerZee’s Identical Twins,”African American Review (forthcoming, Spring 2011)

“Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950” (exhibition review). CAA.reviews (September 1, 2010), http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/1511

“Luminously Playful (a review of Jason Peters: Anti.Gravity.Material.Light)” Review (April 8, 2010), http://ereview.org/2010/04/08/luminously-playful/

“Teaching American Art History With Social Dance,” in The Country Dance and Song Society Newsletter (March/April 2009).

“The Joy of Vision: California Watercolor Painting, 1900-1945,” in Pacific Light: California Watercolour Refracted, 1907-2007 (Skärhamn: Nordic Watercolor Museum, 2008).