Elizabeth Buhe specializes in art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Europe and America. Her work addresses how art mediates knowledge through its intersections with philosophy, social psychology, and processes of perception. Additional interests include theories of attention and sensation; modes of visual distortion such as camouflage, anamorphosis, and opacity; feminist, queer, and critical race theory; abstraction; transnational modernisms; and contemporary art practices.
At the Centre for American Art, her research explores the productive transfers between discourses of phenomenology, science, and abstract art in postwar France in the work of American artists such as Sam Francis and Claire Falkenstein. Elizabeth is also organising the June 2021 conference ‘Relationality in American Art’ at the Centre for American Art which will foreground the concept of relationality as a mode of critique through which we might learn to encounter difference.
Elizabeth has taught at the Whitney Museum of American Art and at Fordham University, and is a contributing critic for Art in America and the Brooklyn Rail. Her scholarship has received support from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, the Fulbright Commission, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Additional Interests
Education
- 2018, Ph.D. Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
- 2013, M.A., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
- 2010, M.A., The Courtauld Institute of Art
Recent and upcoming presentations
- ‘Sam Francis and the Philosophy of a New Aesthesis’, Centre for American Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art, July 2020.
- ‘Decentred Space in Claire Falkenstein’s Suns’, Material/Immaterial: The Lives (and Afterlives) of Objects, Association for Art History, Newcastle, UK, April 2020 – Rescheduled for AAH 2021 due to Covid-19.