Karen Kurczynski

Karen Kurczynski studied art history as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and continued for an MA and PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She completed her PhD in 2005 on the Danish artist and Situationist Asger Jorn. She has published a scholarly introduction to Jorn's work in English called The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won't Give Up, (Ashgate/Routledge, 2014), and a new evaluation of the Cobra movement, The Cobra Movement in Postwar Europe: Reanimating Art (Routledge, 2020). She teaches courses on Modern Art, Contemporary Art, Postwar European Art, Identity Politics, Methodology, and the Global 1950s. Her research interests include the relationship of art to politics and activism, feminist and critical theory, problems of expression and the social, and the legacy of early-20th-century cultural encounters in contemporary discourses of identity and globalization. Her scholarly book on the Cobra movement entitled The Cobra Movement in Postwar Europe: Reanimating Art will appear in 2020 in Routledge's Research in Art History series. She is also researching a third book project, Drawing in Color. The latter project discusses the rise of drawing as a major medium or “anti-medium” in the contemporary period, ranging from expressive and reproductive practices to the relationship of hand drawing to technology. It examines practices of whiteness and blackness in recent drawing, as well as the intersectionality of race with other categories of identity such as gender and sexuality, investigating why drawing is uniquely able to comment on those today. Students explored these topics and curated their own exhibition on drawing at the University Museum of Contemporary Art in her Spring 2017 and Spring 2018 seminar, "Drawing Connections: Drawing in Contemporary Art." They published the results of their curating and research online on the UMASS blog page "Drawing Connections" (2017) and "Drawing Connections" (2018).

Karen has taught extensively in museums as a former gallery lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. In 2014, she co-curated with Karen Friis Herbsleb of the Museum Jorn, Denmark, an Asger Jorn centennial exhibition entitled ”Expo Jorn: Art is a Festival.” It set Jorn's work in dialogue with artistic inspirations and collaborations from Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró to Karel Appel, Jean Dubuffet, Jacqueline de Jong, and Guy Debord. She also curated a major traveling U.S. exhibition and scholarly catalogue on the Cobra movement entitled "Human Animals: The Art of Cobra.” It opened at the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass in September, 2016, and traveled to the Nova Southeastern University Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, in 2017.

In 2019-20, Karen launched “Making Art Yours,” a collaboration with the University Museum of Contemporary Art that welcomed diverse audiences into the museum space. Read more about this initiative here. Making Art Yours is just one of many pedagogical and community engagement initiatives through which Professor Kurczynski expands her approach to teaching modern and contemporary art according to the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion.