1980s Gallery Talk: Amy Mooney

Audio

About

Each month, artists and scholars lead gallery conversations based on the major themes of This Will Have Been: Art Love and Politics in the 1980s. Mooney will discuss the artworks in “Democracy,” which explore the renewed interest on the part of artists with working in the street, the impact of the mass media, the increasing prominence of Central American artists and artists of color, and the commitment to the political that shaped the period.

Amy M. Mooney is an Associate Professor of Art History at Columbia College Chicago and the Critical Encounters Fellow for 2011-2012. This fellowship supports the development of civic engagement projects such as Potluck: Chicago connecting students with local and global partners who share a vision for social change. Her publications include a monograph on Chicago painter Archibald J. Motley, Jr., as well as articles such as “'Empty Shells and Hollow Forms': The High Politics of an African American Abstract Paradigm,” in Romare Bearden in the Modernist Tradition (2009). She is a recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Currently, she is at work on her second book, Portraits of Noteworthy Character, a project that investigates how the portrait was utilized by social reformers to assimilate migrant and immigrant populations in the US from the 1890s through the 1950s. Her pedagogical interests include collaborations with the Chicago Teachers' Center, DePaul Center for Urban Education, and the Terra Foundation for American Art to increase visual literacy in Chicago Public Schools.