In everyday language “I see” often means “I understand.” Investigating the mechanisms and implications of that colloquial idea is what I do. The themes that run through my studies of twentieth-, twenty-first-, and occasionally early modern European and American visual culture are derived from the combination of foundational art historical questions with Foucauldean frameworks: What is an artist’s life? How are styles related to their cultures? How are visual ideas transmitted are reframed as power/knowledge/self constructions? Insisting that images are as, if not more, meaningful than text and on a very broad definition of art, I ask what can be seen and why?
