Women's and Ethnic Studies (WEST)

Elissa Auther is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts

Her first book, String, Felt, Thread and the Hierarchy of Art and Craft, 1960-1980 (forthcoming University of Minnesota Press, 2009), focuses on the innovative use of fiber in American art. This study was supported by a J. Paul Getty Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Art and Humanities in 2004-5. She has also written about and published on the criticism of Clement Greenberg and the history of the decorative, the use of yarn and other types of fiber in feminist anti-war activism, the wallpapers of Andy Warhol, and the contemporary film installations of Isaac Julien. She is the co-editor of the April 2007 special issue on feminist activist art for the National Women’s Studies Association Journal, and the director of Feminism & Co.: Art, Sex, Politics, a program that explores issues of women and gender through creative forms of pedagogy housed at The Lab at Belmar (www.belmarlab.org). Currently, she is working on a book and exhibition about the diverse visual expressions of the counterculture in the American West and Southwest titled The Countercultural Object: Consciousness and Encounters at the Edge of Art, 1965-1975.