Mark A. Cheetham
Title: Professor
Mark A. Cheetham’s research centres on the imbrications of artwriting and art making in the modern and contemporary periods. He has written books and articles on abstract art, the reception of Immanuel Kant’s thinking in the visual arts and the discipline of art history, on art historical methodology, and on recent Canadian and international art. The historiography and methodology of art history and the emerging field of Visual Culture is an ongoing research interest, as is contemporary art in Canada and abroad, from both curatorial and academic perspectives. His current work is on English cosmopolitanism in art theory since the 18th century and on GeoAesthetics.
Cheetham is the recipient of a John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a Sterling & Francine Clark Art
Institute Fellowship, a University of Toronto Connaught Research
Fellowship, several Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada research grants, the Edward G. Pleva Award for Excellence
in Teaching (University of Western Ontario, 1998), and the Northrop
Frye Award for teaching (University of Toronto, 2006). In 2006, he
received the Art Journal Award from the College Art Association of
America for “Matting the Monochrome: Malevich, Klein, & Now.”
In 2008 he takes up the Chancellor Jackman Research Fellowship in the Humanities.
Degrees and Institutions from which they were received:
BA, Philosophy, University of Toronto
MA, Philosophy, University of Toronto
PhD, History of Art, University of London
Areas of Academic Interest:
Art Theory, Modern, Contemporary, and Canadian Art.
Recent Publications:
Books
Editing the Image: Strategies in the Production and Reception of the Visual. Mark A. Cheetham, Elizabeth Legge, Catherine M. Soussloff, Co-editors. University of Toronto Press 2008
Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance and Cure since the '60s Cambridge UP, 2006
Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of Discipline, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspective, Cambridge University Press, 1998, co-editor.
Disturbing Abstraction: Christian Eckart, exhibition and catalogue, 1996-98
Alex Colville: The Observer Observed, ECW Press, 1994.
Remembering Postmodernism: Trends in Recent Canadian Art, Oxford University Press, 1991.
The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Theory Between the Disciplines: Authority \ Vision \ Politics, University of Michigan Press, 1990, co-editor.
Articles
"The Transformative Abstraction of Robert Houle," In Carol Podedworny, Troubling Abstraction. Exh. Cat. McMaster University Art Gallery, Robert Mclaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), 2007:41-55
"Alienated Cosmopolitans." The Walrus, May 2007:76-79
“Natural Anxieties.” The Walrus. April 2006: 82-87.
“White Accents.” Catalogue essay in C.
Wells, White Roma /White Pelee. Art Gallery of Hamilton, Feb. 2006.
"Abstraction as Infection and Cure."
Discrepant Abstraction. Ed. Kobena Mercer. Institute for
the International Visual Arts, London. 2006:116-33
“Matting the Monochrome: Malevich, Klein, & Now.”
Art Journal. Winter 2005. This article received the
2006 Art Journal award from the College Art Association of America,
presented to the author of the most distinguished contribution
(article, interview, conversation, portfolio, review, or any other
text or visual project) published in the Art Journal during the
penultimate calendar year.
“Visual studies, Historiography and Aesthetics.” With Michael
Ann Holly & Keith Moxey,
Journal of Visual Culture 4/1 Spring 2005: 1-16.
“From Isolation to Circulation: Canadian Accents in the
Language of Abstraction.”
The Shape of Colour: Excursions in Colour Field Art
1950-2005: 32-35. Exh. Cat., Art Gallery of Ontario, June 2005
Awards:
Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2008)
The Curatorial Writing Award for Essay (Long), 2008, from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries, for “The Transformative Abstraction of Robert Houle,” In Carol Podedworny, Troubling Abstraction. Exh. Cat. McMaster University Art Gallery, Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), 2007.
The Chancellor Jackman Research Fellowship in the Humanities University of Toronto, 2008
The Art Journal award from the College Art Association of America, presented to the author of the most distinguished contribution (article, interview, conversation, portfolio, review, or any other text or visual project) published in the Art Journal during the penultimate calendar year. Warded for the article "Matting the Monochrome."
The Northrop Frye Award (May 2006). The
Northrop Frye Award underlines “the important link between Teaching
and Research at the University of Toronto and recognizes those who
have gone above and beyond the University’s standard of excellence,
setting themselves apart through innovation in teaching and
commitment to conveying the excitement and importance of research
to undergraduate and graduate students.”
Connaught Research Fellowship in the Humanities University
of Toronto 2002-03
SSHRCC Research Grant, 1987-88, 1991-94, 1994-97, 1998-2002, 2004-07
Clark Art Institute Fellowship in Williamstown, Massachusetts, Fall 2000
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 1994
Pleva Award for Excellence in University
Teaching from the University of Western Ontario, 1998