Education
Biography
Adrian Anagnost is an art historian whose work explores how artists, architects, and cultural institutions produce and contest ideas of place, and how spatial practices are entangled with political power. Areas of focus include Brazil, the United States, Black and Indigenous geographies of the colonial Gulf South, and global contemporary art.
Anagnost is the author of Spatial Orders, Social Forms: Art and the City in Modern Brazil (Yale University Press, 2022), which examines how artists and architects took the spatial orders of Brazilian cities – and urban sites shaped by colonial histories – as sites for negotiating the social forms of modernity. De-Globalizing the Art World: Contemporary Art and the Case of Documenta 15 (Anthem Press, 2026) asks what becomes visible when the contemporary art world is understood not as a frictionless global network but as a system organized through unequal geographies of mobility, institutional power, and cultural value.
Anagnost’s research and programming on the making and remaking of place across the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico has been supported by the Mellon Foundation (Sawyer Seminar “Sites of Memory: New Orleans and Place-based Histories in the Americas,” co-organized with Mia L. Bagneris) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (Landmarks of American History and Culture Faculty Program “Bʋlbancha Rising: Louisiana Cultural Heritage Sites and Climate Change Challenges,” co-organized with Leslie Geddes). Recent publications include studies of Choctaw beadwork and Indigenous artistic traditions, the 1811 German Coast uprising and contemporary commemoration, and West African architecture and its representation in European museums.
Anagnost’s current research follows contemporary artists into landscapes shaped by extraction, colonialism, and environmental change, from the Amazon to the Gulf South. Moving between contemporary art and the histories of place that contemporary art practices bring into view, recent research examines Lynda Benglis’s experiments with material and embodiment; Amazonian artists and the extractivist structures of global biennials; Indigenous reclamations of histories obscured by colonialist myths across the Americas; and museums, cancellations, and culture wars.
Anagnost is editor of Arris, the journal of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH). At Tulane, Anagnost serves on BA, MA, MFA, and PhD committees and welcomes prospective graduate students working in contemporary art, socially engaged art, performance, architecture and urbanism, placemaking, museums and exhibitions, modern art of the Americas, and relationships among art, race, colonialism, and the environment.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2943-9087
Selected Publications
Books
- De-Globalizing the Art World: Contemporary Art and the Case of Documenta 15 . Anthem Press, 2026.
- Spatial Orders, Social Forms: Art and the City in Modern Brazil . Yale University Press, 2022.
Recent Articles and Chapters
- “Making Museums Great Again? Cancellations, Cultural Memory, and the Battle for the Americas,” in Displaying Engagement: The Political (and Politicized) Exhibition in the 21st Century (forthcoming).
- “Contemporary Art as Extractivism: Amazonian Artists at the Venice Biennale,” in The Amazon Beyond Extractivism: Indigenous Perspectives and an Aesthetics of Resistance, ed. Patrícia Vieira (University Press of Florida, forthcoming 2027).
- “Bodies and Breath: Brazilian Experimental Poetics of the 1950s,” Forma (2026).
- “Afro-Brazil and Indigeneity from Pau Brasil to Antropofagia,” Luso-Brazilian Review 62, no. 1 (2025): 25–48.
- “Crafting Territory in the Choctaw Homelands: Isht ʋskufʋchi Beadwork Sashes,” American Art 39, no. 3 (2025): 2–25.
- “Woven, Inscribed, Enfolded, Encased: Adinkra at the British Museum,” British Art Studies 28 (2025).
- “Antisocial Housing: Migration and Temporary Architectures in Berlin,” ASAP/Journal 8, no. 1 (January 2023): 32–39.
- “Pandemic Design: Art, Space, and Embodiment” [co-authored with Manol Gueorguiev], Design Issues 38, no. 3 (2022): 5–19.
- “Dread Scott’s Slave Rebellion Reenactment: Site, Time, Embodiment,” RACAR 46 (2021): 59–74.
- “Decentralize! Art, Power, and Space in the New York Art World,” Konsthistorisk tidskrift / Journal of Art History (Stockholm) 89, no. 2, A Farewell to Critique? (2020): 100–25.
- “Limitless Museum: P. M. Bardi’s Aesthetic Re-education,” Modernism/modernity 26, no. 4 (November 2019): 687–725.
- “Theaster Gates’ Social Formations,” nonsite.org 24, The Neoliberal Coup (Summer 2018).
- “Lygia Pape in Transit: Performing Site in 1960s–1970s Rio de Janeiro,” ASAP/Journal 2, no. 3 (2017): 521–50.
Dissertations and Theses Advised
PhD
- “Out of the fragments…new worlds”: Perspectival Experiments and Spatiality in the Work of Diego Rivera, 1913–1933 (PhD, 2024)
MA
- More than a Tool: Puerto Rican Machetes and Their Adherent Meanings (MA, 2026)
- Seeing, Relatedness, Matière: Ray Johnson’s Queer Formalism & Black Mountain College (MA, 2023)
- Gender and Blackness, Sculpture and Performance: Senga Nengudi in the 1970s–1980s (MA, 2023)
- e(femme)era: Materialized Identity-Making in South Texas-Based Feminist Zines (MA, 2021)
- The Caribbean at an Arm’s Length: American Imperial Spectatorship in the Underwoods’ Stereotour of Puerto Rico +digital component (MA, 2021)
- Acquiring Little Mexico: William Spratling’s Object Collection Practices and U.S. Images of Mexico, 1926 to 1940 (MA, 2020)
- De/Face: Performance and Painting in Chicanx Public Art (MA, 2019)
- “Para el ala y para el vuelo”: Photography and Nation in Revista Alero (MA, 2019)
- Orientalized Indigenism in Chile: Expansionism, Genocide, and Art (1845–1905) (MA, 2018)
BA Honors
- Ruth Asawa Beyond Black Mountain: Materiality, Biomorphism, and Nisei Identity (BA honors, 2022)
- “Les Sud-Américains ont pris Paris”: Kinetic Art and South American Artistic Presence in France in the 1950s–70s (BA honors, 2022; ICAA prizewinner)
- The Modern Irish: Jack Butler Yeats (BA, 2019)
Student Placements
- University of Michigan, Forsyth Postdoctoral Fellow
- Honolulu Museum of Art, Office of Advancement, Development Assistant
- Mákina Editorial (Bogotá), Communications and Appropriation Strategist
- University of Texas Press, Publishing Fellow
- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Curatorial Assistant
- The Studio Museum in Harlem and The Museum of Modern Art, Collaborative Fellow
- PhD programs, Art History: Graduate Center, CUNY; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Chicago; University of Texas; University of Virginia
Courses
- Art History Survey II: Renaissance to the Present
- Art in 20th-century Latin America
- Doing Public Art History
- Exhibiting the World: World Expositions and Biennials
- Global Contemporary Art
- Global Surrealism
- History of Photography
- Monuments and Public Memory
- Performance & the Body in Contemporary Art
- Social Practice Art: Theory & Practice
- Utopias in Modern Art