Faculty Directory
- Pronouns she/her
- Title
- Professor
- Division Arts Division
- Department
- History of Art/Visual Culture
- Affiliations History of Consciousness Department, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Latin American & Latino Studies, Feminist Studies Department
- Phone 831-459-2099
- Fax 831-459-3535
- Office Location
- Porter College Academic, D208 Porter College
- Zoom
- Office Hours Wednesdays 9:00-11:00 AM on Zoom by appointment. Please use this URL to sign up: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19JLt4WU37aJ4hFMmVu8cIM-eW_8ZNQT8sDSP7pemsmI/edit?gid=0#gid=0
- Mail Stop Porter Faculty Services
- Mailing Address
- Porter Faculty Services/1156 High Street
- Santa Cruz CA 95064
- Faculty Areas of Expertise Activism, Art Theory, Feminist Theory, Aesthetics, American Studies, Chicana/o Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Critical Theory, Digital Arts
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.
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.
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
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.
