Campus Directory

Pronouns she/her

Division Arts Division

Department/College/Unit History of Art/Visual Culture

Title Professor

Affiliation Faculty

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

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Areas of Expertise Activism
Art Theory
Contemporary Art
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) D208 Porter College

Office Hours for Students/ Office Hours See faculty webpage

Mail Stop Porter Faculty Services

Biography, Education and Training

Jennifer A. González teaches classes on modern and contemporary art, history of photography, theories of representation, Chicanx art and feminist art. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has published in 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 included in the top art books of the decade by ArtNews in 2020.

Research Interests

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.

Teaching Interests

Contemporary art in the U.S. and Europe, history of the museum, activist art since 1960, history of photography, theories of representation, feminist 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/book-division/books/pepa3n-osorio

Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art

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