Willamette University

Art History

Abigail Susik
  • Abigail Susik
  • Assistant Professor of Art History
  • Modern and Contemporary Art History
  • Art Building 205
  • 503-370-6124

Abigail Susik

Education

  • B.A., Barnard College, Columbia University
  • M.A., Ph.D., Columbia University

Research and Teaching

Professor Susik's area of expertise is Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory, with a research focus on issues of culture and aesthetics in the European avant-gardes between the World Wars. After a decade of teaching experience in New York City and elsewhere, Dr. Susik offers courses at Willamette University related to nineteenth- through twenty-first-century Art History, The History of Photography, Methodologies of Art History, and specialized topics in Modern and Contemporary Art.

Her interdisciplinary work traces metahistorical shifts and transference across material, textual and visual cultures in European and American contexts in between the 19th and 21st centuries. A current book project, The Vertigo of the Modern: Surrealism and the Outmoded (in progress) examines the modern condition of obsolescence as it appears in three surrealist image-books from the 1920s and 1930s. A second book project, Screen Politics: A Culture of Projection (in progress), deals with the evolution of projection practices as a result of changing technology and the ethics of a rising projection culture in both contemporary art and advertising.

Selected Awards

  • Mellon-funded Liberal Arts Research Collaborative (LARC), “Remediation,” Willamette
    University, 2013
  • Atkinson Faculty Development Award, Research in Europe, Willamette University, 2011-2012
  • Millsaps College Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2009-2011
  • Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Fellowship, Columbia University, 2005-2006                
  • Columbia University Presidential Fellowship, 2000-2005

Selected Recent and Forthcoming Publications

“Rothko, Mark,” Oregon Encyclopedia, 2012. Web. Forthcoming.

“Documenta 13, Kassel,” Journal of Curatorial Studies (Canada), vol. 1, no. 3, 2012. Print.

“2012 Mapping Festival, Geneva,” The Senses & Society (Canada), vol. 7, no. 3, 2013. Print.

“Consuming and Consumed: Woman as Habituée in Eugène Grasset’s Morphinomaniac (1897),” forthcoming chapter in the book edited by Marja Härmänmaa and Christopher Nissen, Decadence, Degeneration and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle (Cambridge Scholars, 2013). Print.

"André Breton's Textual Collection: Nadja," forthcoming in Dada/Surrealism, special issue on 'Dada/Surrealist exhibits,' ed. Pierre Taminiaux and Kathryn Floyd, spring 2013. Web.

“Beyond Mimesis, Toward Awareness: Coding, Prototyping and Interactivity in Contemporary Art,” forthcoming chapter in the book edited by Carla Taban, Meta- and Inter-Images in Contemporary Visual Art and Culture (Leuven University Press, 2012). Print.

“Surrealism and Jules Verne: Navigating Context, Intertext and Subtext for a Collage by Max Ernst,” forthcoming chapter in the book (Title TBA) edited by Gavin Parkinson (Penn UP). Print.

“The Screen Politics of Architectural Projection,” Public: Art, Culture, Ideas (York University, Canada), vol. 45, “Civic Spectacle,” spring 2012. Web and print. 106-119.

“Sky Projectors, Portapaks and Projection Bombing: the Rise of a Portable Projection Medium,” Journal of Film and Video (University of Illinois), special double issue on video history, vol. 64, nos. 1-2, spring/summer, 2012. 79-92. Web and Print.

“Convergence Zone: The Aesthetics and Politics of the Ocean in Contemporary Art and Photography,” feature essay in Drain Magazine, vol. 15, “Supernature,” spring 2012. Web.

“Remarks on the Commodity Status and Critical Applications of the Surrealist Outmoded" in The Great Divide? High and Low Culture in the Avant-Garde and Modernism, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, vol. 2 (De Gruyter, 2011). Print.

“‘The Man of these Infinite Possibilities’: Max Ernst’s Cinematic Collages,” Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture (University of Pittsburgh), vol. 1, summer 2011. Web.

“Cy Twombly: Writing after Writing,” Rebus: A Journal of Theory and Art History (University of Essex, England), no. 3, winter 2009, 1-28. Web.

“Considerations on the Everyday as an Aesthetic Category,” Inferno: Postgraduate Journal of Art History & Museum Studies (University of St. Andrews, England), vol. XIII, summer 2009. Print.

“Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris and the Buried History of Buttes-Chaumont Park,” Thresholds (MIT), no. 35, winter 2009. Print. Web version forthcoming.