Campus Directory

Pronouns she/her

Division Arts Division

Department/College/Unit History of Art/Visual Culture

Title Professor

Affiliation Faculty

Other UCSC Campus Affiliation History of Consciousness Department
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Latin American & Latino Studies
Feminist Studies Department

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Areas of Expertise Activism
Art Theory
Feminist Theory
Aesthetics
American Studies
Chicana/o Studies
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Critical Theory
Digital Arts

Primary Office Location Porter College Academic
D208 Porter College

Additional Location(s) Zoom

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Biography, Education and Training

Jennifer A. González, Professor of the History of Art and Visual Culture, is affiliated with the History of Consciousness, Latin American/Latinx Studies, and Feminist Studies. She also teaches annual seminars at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has published widely in journals such as Camera Obscura, Bomb, Open Space, Art Journal, Aztlán the Journal of the Archives of American Art and in numerous exhibition catalogs, most recently in Diego Riveras America, SFMOMA (2022) and Amalia Mesa Bains, Archeology of Memory (2023). Her first book Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (MIT Press, 2008) was a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. Her second book focused on the MacArthur-award-winning artist Pepón Osorio (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). She is the chief editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press, 2019) which was named one of the top art books of the decade by ArtNews in 2020.

Summary of Expertise

Jennifer Gonzalez writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on installation art, digital art and activist art. She is interested in understanding the strategic use of space (exhibition space, public space, virtual space) by contemporary artists and by cultural institutions such as museums. More specifically, she has focused on the representation of the human body and its relation to discourses of race and gender.

Research Interests

Currently, Professor Gonzalez is writing about contemporary art and relations among speech, voice and the politics of migration. 

Teaching Interests

Professor Gonzalez teaching classes on contemporary art in the U.S. and Europe, the history of the museum, activist art since 1960, the history of photography, theories of representation, feminist, abolitionist, and critical race theory.

Selected Publications

Books:

Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology

https://www.dukeupress.edu/chicano-and-chicana-art

Pepon Osorio

https://www.upress.umn.edu/search-grid/?keyword=osorio

Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/subject-display