Biography
Carla Kessler is a modern and contemporary art historian with experience in the U.S. and U.K. Carla specialises in experimental methods and archives, as well as histories of spectatorship, performance and time-based art, socially engaged art, installation and sculpture, and lens-based media. Before her Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship at The Courtauld, where she earned her PhD and MA, Carla led strategic planning and audience research for museums including The Art Institute of Chicago and The Museum of Modern Art.
Research
Unofficial Evidence: Expanding the Archives of Installation, Performance, and Socially Engaged Art Since the 1970s
Supervised by Dr. Lucy Bradnock, advised by Professor Sarah Wilson, and funded by The Courtauld Doctoral Scholarship.
Although audience experience has been core to art since the 1970s, it remains largely absent from the art historical record. My PhD and current book project argues that methods such as social media analysis and ethnographic interviews can furnish a rich understanding of how people — beyond art professionals — experience artworks. The book will demonstrate how such methods avoid abstractions about ‘the viewer’ in favour of deeper and more polyvocal histories of artworks such as 1) a counter-monument by Marta Minujín 2) Walter De Maria’s large-scale installations on view in New York since the 1970s; 3) a participatory installation by Taryn Simon and 4) a recent durational performance conceived by Ragnar Kjartansson and participants from Detroit to Reykjavík.
Social Media, Artificial Intelligence, and Audience Reception Studies for Art History
My next research project will expand on the methodological imperative to grow and differentiate the study of audiences and participants of modern and contemporary art. It will harness (and critique) the use of AI technologies to study public experiences of artworks on social medias such as Instagram.
Teaching
I have designed curricula for Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, and The Courtauld, where I currently teach modern and contemporary art. I also conceived and delivered the university’s first ‘Art History and Social Justice’ course for undergraduate students. My teaching includes:
- MA Global Conceptualism: The last avant-garde or a new beginning?
- BA and Graduate Diploma dissertation supervision
- Radical Light: the Experimental Moving Image Since 1945
- Beyond Painting and Sculpture: Happenings and Performance through the Twentieth Century
- Art History and Social Justice (1960s-present)
- Frameworks for Interpretation (Methodologies)
- Foundations of Art History (1880s-present)
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Professional Museum Experience - 2015-2019: Strategist, LaPlaca Cohen (strategic planning and audience research clients included the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the San Jose Museum of Art
- 2008-2014: Public Affairs and Visitor Research, The Art Institute of Chicago
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Papers & Publications - ‘The Art Looks Back: Performing, Feeling, and Posting Taryn Simon’s A Cold Hole (2018)’, under review.
- ‘The Object Speaks: Ragnar Kjartansson, Woman in E (2016–2017)’, in preparation.
- ‘The Corrupted Archive: Walter De Maria’s Earth Room and Broken Kilometer (1977–present)’, University of Johannesburg, ‘Snapping to Attention: Vernacular Photographs as Sources and Subject-matter for the Visual Arts’ Conference, November 2025.
- ‘The Art Looks Back: Social Media as Method in Taryn Simon, A Cold Hole (2018)’, Association for Art History Annual Conference, April 2024.
- ‘Emotional Ambiguity: In Conversation with Ragnar Kjartansson,’ Immediations, No. 19, 2022.
- ‘TRANSMISSIONS: Making TV Art History,’ Immediations, No. 18, 2021.
- ‘Plastic-Wrapped Vanitas’. In Daina Mattis: Family Style. New York: High Noon Gallery, 2020.
- ‘Culture Track 2017: A Study of American Cultural Audiences’. Presented at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia; the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York; the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; Brooklyn College, New York; and the Guggenheim Museum Internship Program, New York (2017– 2018).
