The Institute of Fine Arts Faculty
Catherine Quan Damman
Valeria Napoleone Linda Nochlin Professor; Assistant Professor in Modern and Contemporary Art
I work on modern and contemporary art with a specialization in feminist and queer studies. A central preoccupation is the relationship between the history of art and history proper. Broadly, my research considers how works of art index the social crises and conditions of U.S. empire from within and beyond its borders. Ranging across the twentieth century, I am especially interested in problems of periodization, theories of the avant-garde, and Marxian interrogations of form, labor, and value.
In the 1970s, performance gained widespread purchase as a discrete artistic category and lens of scholarly analysis. At the same time, its discourses were roiled with irresolution. My first book, Performance: A Deceptive History (forthcoming 2027, Princeton University Press) argues that these twinned phenomena issue from performance’s formal capacity to register contradictions at the level of political economy. I take artists as among the first and best theorists of the decade’s sharp rise in waged affective labor as it collided with longstanding social mandates for authenticity—both deeply gendered and racialized—to offer a new historical account of performance’s dogged resistance to straightforward definition. This research has received support from the Getty Research Institute, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), among others.
My interests often orbit around attempts to give form to counterhegemonic political commitments and their uneasy extrusion through institutional infrastructures; frictions and fissures within feminist, queer, and other coalitionist projects; and visual art’s relationship to histories of experimental film, theater, music, and dance. As my work on performance may suggest, my approach to gender, sexuality, and race is not additive. For example, an article on the sculptor Carl Cheng reconsiders late 60s and early 70s discourses about “art and technology” by foregrounding the racialization of Asian American labor as economically efficient and unusually productive. Current research projects address conceptual art and counterinsurgency; photography, carcerality, and Asian American art in the AIDS era; and the “Black Internationalism” of painter Vivian E. Browne, the last of which received a 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
I am a Contributing Editor at BOMB and a former frequent contributor to Artforum (2014-2023). My writing can also be found in Bookforum, 4Columns, Frieze, Art in America, Art Journal, The Germanic Review, ASAP/Journal, Panorama, and Women & Performance, as well as in commissioned catalog essays and exhibition texts for the New Museum, the Walker Art Center, the ICA London, the Hammer Museum, LACMA, and MoMA PS1, among others. Before joining the Institute faculty, I taught at Wesleyan University and did my PhD at Columbia University. I enjoy working with students on a wide range of topics in modern and contemporary as well as collaboratively advising on questions of gender and sexuality across time periods and geographic regions. In addition, I direct the IFA’s Great Hall Exhibition series.
Grants, Awards, and Fellowships
NYU Teaching Innovation Award, 2025
The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, 2024
The Center for Ballet and the Arts Residential Fellowship, 2024–2025
Getty Research Institute Mellon Feminist Performance Initiative Visiting Scholar, 2023
American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship, 2022–2023
CriticalMinded Critics of Color Grant, 2020
Terra Foundation for American Art Research Travel Grant, 2020
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University, 2018–2020
Twenty-Four-Month Chester Dale Predoctoral Fellowship, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art, 2016–2018
Select Publications
“Black Physicality: Visual Representations of Dance” in Volume 6: A Cultural History of Dance in the Age of Modernity and Extremes, ed. Marion Kant (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2026).
“Tuan Andrew Nguyen and His Collaborators, Caught in the Throat,” in Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance, exh. cat, eds. Vivian Crockett and Ian Wallace (New York: New Museum, 2023), 52–67.
Julia Bryan Wilson’s Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face,” Artforum 62, no. 1 (September 2023): 57–58.
“Alternative Investments: Sung Tieu and The Art of Derivative Critique,” Artforum 61, no. 8 (April 2023): 132–139.
“Art, Technology, Crisis: The Work of Carl Cheng,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 7, no. 1 special issue “Asian American Art: Past and Futures” (Spring 2021)
“Happier Endings: On My Barbarian,” Artforum 60, no. 3 (November 2021), 158–163.
Interview with Candice Lin, BOMB 157 (Fall 2021): 74–87.
“Tiffany Sia: Slippery When Wet” at Artists Space, Artforum 59, no. 7 (Summer 2021): 75–76.
“Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” curated by Nicole Fleetwood at MoMA PS1, Frieze 218 (April 2021): 134–135.
“Risk Everything: The Art of Lorraine O’Grady,” Artforum 59, no. 5 (March 2021): 118–125.
“Roundtable on Ligia Lewis,” with Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo and Tina Post, ASAP/Journal, vol. 6, no. 1 (January 2021): 79–94.
Interview with Carolyn Lazard, BOMB 153 (Fall 2020): 118–129.
“Paul McCarthy: Reach and Spread,” in Paul McCarthy: Head Space Drawings, 1963–2019, eds. Cornelia Butler and Aram Moshayedi, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: The Hammer Museum, 2020), 103–109.
“Nina Menkes’s Queen of Diamonds,” BOMB 152 (Summer 2020): 12–13.
Interview with Ligia Lewis, BOMB 147 (Spring 2019): 65–72.
“Kinetic Elegy: On Them (1986), by Chris Cochrane, Dennis Cooper, and Ishmael Houston-Jones,” Artforum 57, no. 3 (November 2018): 198–201.
“Presence at the Creation: Judson Dance Theater,” Artforum 57, no. 1 (September 2018): 222–231.
“See Change: Remembering Trisha Brown,” Bookforum (Summer 2017): 31.
“Body Adjuncts,” in Notes on Performance: Greater New York, with Mark Beasley, David Grubbs, and Thomas J. Lax, exh. cat. (New York: MoMA PS1, 2017), 20–24.
“Dance, Sound, Word: The ‘Hundred-Jointed Body’ in Zurich Dada Performance,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 91, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 352–366.
“Control Group,” in Jared Bark: Photo Booth Works, 1969–1976 (New York: Hunters Point Press / D.A.P, 2016), 44–48.