David J. Getsy is an art historian, curator, and art writer focusing on modern and contemporary art. He has published widely on American and European art from the nineteenth century to the present, and his current projects address queer methodologies, links between transgender studies and art history, and recoveries of suppressed or lost histories of queer and genderqueer performance. His books include Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (2022; winner of the 2023 Robert Motherwell Book Award); Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (2015, reissued 2023); and the widely-read anthology of artists’ writings, Queer (2016). He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he is the inaugural Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History.

News and Events

• Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (University of Chicago Press, 2022) was awarded the 2023 Robert Motherwell Book Award for outstanding publication in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts. Download an excerpt from the book’s introduction here, see the excerpt of the concluding pages republished by Burlington Contemporary in May 2023, or watch the video of a lecture about the book.

• I received a university-wide Award for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities, one of the 2023 Research Achievement Awards from the University of Virginia.

• More book news: Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender sold out in hardcover, but it was reissued in paperback in April 2023. On the horizon for 2025, Ugly Duckling Presse will publish Magic Episodes and Other Synchronicities: The Transhemispheric Correspondence of Scott Burton and Eduardo Costa, 1970–1989, which I am co-editing with Patrick Greaney (University of Colorado Boulder).

• Lectures in 2023–24: University of Florida (9/28), Vassar College (10/11), the American Studies Association Conference (11/5), Stanford University (11/16), Artists Space, New York (12/15), University of Pennsylvania (1/25/24), Ulrich Museum of Art (2/22/24), Johns Hopkins University (3/27/24), Hammer Museum (8/13/24)

• A recent focus of my writing has been to assist in bringing perspectives and methods from transgender studies into the art history classroom. With Che Gossett, I co-wrote a “Syllabus on Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art and Art History,” which was initially published in Art Journal (Winter 2021) and republished online and open access by Art Journal Open. It received the College Art Association Award for Distinction (honoring the best article published in Art Journal in 2021). The second such open access resource was the article “How to Teach Manet’s Olympia after Transgender Studies” in Art History (April 2022). This article was recently republished as one of fourteen essays drawn from over forty years of Art History for the journal’s compendium issue “Queer Art’s Histories in Art History” (2024).

• Other recent publications include articles or essays on Geoffrey Hendricks, Fluxus performance, and queer visibility in Art Bulletin (September 2022); Martin Wong’s queer paintings for a major European retrospective (2023); Colette’s performance art and its relation to feminism (Oct 2023); three lesbian abstract painters in the 1970s (2023); Ever Baldwin’s first solo museum exhibition (2023); an interview with Angelo Madsen Minax (2024); and an essay on Lynda Benglis (2024).

• From February to April 2023, I co-organized for the University of Virginia’s Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures a lecture series on “Global Histories and Transgender Studies in the Humanities,” which featured Erica Rand, Jules Gill-Peterson, Laura Horak, Marcia Ochoa, and Toby Beauchamp.