Michael Corris is an artist,

art historian Art history is the study of aesthetic objects and visual expression in historical and stylistic context. Traditionally, the discipline of art history emphasized painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and decorative arts; yet today ...

and writer on

art Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...

. He is Professor Emeritus of Art, Division of Art, Meadows School of the Arts,

Southern Methodist University , mottoeng = "The truth will make you free" , established = , type = Private research university , accreditation = SACS , academic_affiliations = , religious_affiliation = United Methodist Church , president = R. Gerald Turner , prov ...

, Dallas, Texas, United States. Previously, Corris held the post of Professor of Fine Art at the Art and Design Research Center,

Sheffield Hallam University Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) is a public research university in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. The university is based on two sites; the City Campus is located in the city centre near Sheffield railway station, while the Collegiate Cr ...

(

Sheffield Sheffield is a city status in the United Kingdom, city in South Yorkshire, England, whose name derives from the River Sheaf which runs through it. The city serves as the administrative centre of the City of Sheffield. It is Historic counties o ...

, United Kingdom). From 2005-6, he was a Visiting Professor of Art Theory at the Bergen Art Academy (

Bergen Bergen (), historically Bjørgvin, is a city and municipality in Vestland county on the west coast of Norway. , its population is roughly 285,900. Bergen is the second-largest city in Norway. The municipality covers and is on the peninsula of ...

, Norway).

Life and career

Corris received his baccalaureate and master's degrees in the United States, studying studio art and art history at

Brooklyn College Brooklyn College is a public university in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York. It is part of the City University of New York system and enrolls about 15,000 undergraduate and 2,800 graduate students on a 35-acre campus. Being New York City's first publ ...

under Harry Holtzman,

Jimmy Ernst Hans-Ulrich Ernst (June 24, 1920 – February 6, 1984), known as Jimmy Ernst, was an American painter born in Germany. Early life Jimmy Ernst was born in 1920 in Cologne, Germany, the son of German Surrealist painter Max Ernst and Luise Str ...

Walter Rosenblum Walter A. Rosenblum (1919–2006) was an American photographer. He photographed the World War II D-Day landing at Normandy in 1944. He was the first Allied photographer to enter the liberated Dachau concentration camp. He received several militar ...

Sylvia Stone Sylvia Stone (1928 – September 5, 2011) was a Canadian sculptor. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She was a tenured professor at Brooklyn College and a notable ...

, Philip Pearlstein and

Carl Holty Carl Robert Holty (1900–1973) was a German-born American abstract painter. Raised in Wisconsin, he was the first major abstract painter to gain notoriety from the state. Harold Rosenberg described Holty as "a figure of our art history," known ...

; and later, painting and art theory at the Hoffberger School of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art under Grace Hartigan and the poet, Emmanuel Navaretta. In 1970, Corris was awarded a scholarship to attend the prestigious summer program in art at the

Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture is an artists residency located in Madison, Maine, just outside of Skowhegan. Every year, the program accepts online applications from emerging artists from November through January, and selects 65 t ...

, where he had contact with

Kenneth Noland Kenneth Noland (April 10, 1924 – January 5, 2010) was an American painter. He was one of the best-known American color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was though ...

Jacob Lawrence Jacob Armstead Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an American painter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", although by his own ...

Brice Marden Brice Marden (born October 15, 1938) is an American artist generally described as Minimalist, although his work may be hard to categorize. He lives and works in New York City; Tivoli, New York; Hydra, Greece; and Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania. Life ...

and David Diao. For his research on the work of Ad Reinhardt, Corris was awarded a PhD in the History of Art in 1996 by University College London. Corris began working in late-1971 with the Conceptual art group,

Art & Language Art & Language is a conceptual artists' collaboration that has undergone many changes since it was created in the late 1960s. The group was founded by artists who shared a common desire to combine intellectual ideas and concerns with the creati ...

, in New York; his work was published in 1973 in the group’s journal, Art-Language. With Mel Ramsden, Ian Burn, Joseph Kosuth, Sarah Charlesworth and others, Corris was a founding editor of ''The Fox;'' an artists-run journal that addressed the political and social dimensions of contemporary artistic practice. Following the dissolution of Art & Language in New York in late 1976, Corris continued to pursue his artistic practice, dividing his energies between the production of artist's books inspired by typographic design and lecturing and writing on

contemporary art Contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the second half of the 20th century or in the 21st century. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic com ...

and art theory

As a member of Art & Language and as an individual artist, Corris's work has been widely exhibited internationally and is part of the permanent collection of, among others, the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

(

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

), the

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

(

), the

Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...

(

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

), Le Consortium (

Dijon Dijon (, , ) (dated) * it, Digione * la, Diviō or * lmo, Digion is the prefecture of the Côte-d'Or department and of the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region in northeastern France. the commune had a population of 156,920. The earlies ...

) and the J. P. Getty Museum (

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

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Corris lectures and publishes on the subject of late-modern and contemporary ar

Corris’s art criticism has been widely published in journals and magazines devoted to modern and contemporary art, such as Art Monthly,

Artforum ''Artforum'' is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ x 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notabl ...

, FlashArt, Art History, art+text and Mute. In addition, his critical writings have been included in several collections, most notably Alex Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds),

Conceptual Art Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art, sometimes called insta ...

: A Critical Anthology (MIT Press

and John Roberts (ed), Art Has No History! (Verso Press). Corris's most recent publications include: Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 200

monographs on David Diao (TimeZone8 Books, Beijing, 2005) and

Ad Reinhardt Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt (December 24, 1913 – August 30, 1967) was an abstract painter active in New York for more than three decades. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) and part of the movement centere ...

(Reaktion Books, London, 2008), Non-Relational Aesthetics (Artwords Press, 2008)(with Dr Charlie Gere), and Art, Word and Image: 2,000 Years of Visual/Textual Interaction (Reaktion Books, London, 2010)(with John Dixon Hunt and David Loma

http://arthistorynewsletter.com/blog/?p=3608]. In an October 2008 interview with Joan Waltemath published in '' The Brooklyn Rail'', Corris discusses his book, ''Ad Reinhardt'', which was an extension of his doctoral work, investigating the artist's relationship to the American Communist movement and focusing "on the period 1935-1950 in Reinhardt’s life, detailing his relationship to the politics of the left and providing the first comprehensive survey of his political illustrations and cartoons for publications like '' New Masses'' and '' Soviet Russia Today''." In April, 2010, Corris founded the Free Museum of Dallas; a project and exhibition space that occupied the Chairperson's office at SMU (2010-2014

Corris was Reviews Editor for the College Art Association publication, Art Journal (2013-2016) and is presently series editor for "Art since the '80s", Reaktion Books, London. A selection of his writings on art is published by Les Presses du Réel (Dijon), 2016.

Notes

References

;Books *Charles Harrison, Essays in Art & Language. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991 *Greg Sholette and Blake Stimson, eds., Collectivism After Modernism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006 *Paul Wood, Conceptual Art. London: Tate Publishing, 2002 *David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent During the McCarthy Period. Cambridge Studies in American Visual Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 *Blake Stimson, “The Promise of Conceptual Art,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art. London: Phaidon Press, 1998 *John A. Walker, Cultural Offensive: America’s Impact on British Art Since 1945. London: Pluto Press, 1998 *Thomas Dreher, Konzeptuelle Kunst in Amerika und England Zwischen 1963 und 1976. Frankfurt: Lang, 1992 *Deborah Wye, Committed to Print. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988 *Clive Phillpot, The Art Press. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1976 ;Journal articles *Sanda Miller, Review: Ad Reinhardt, The Burlington Magazine, no. 1264 (July 2008) *Chris Gilbert, “Review: Blurting in Art & Language Online,” MUTE, no. 25 (November 2002-May 2003): 131-32 *Alex Alberro, “The Fox: One Year Under the Mast,” Artforum (Summer 2003): 162-42, 206

Other Resources

* hdl:10020/cifa2003m32, Michael Corris papers of the Art & Language New York group, 1965-2002, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession No. 2003.M.32. The collection documents the activities of the conceptual art group Art & Language New York. {{DEFAULTSORT:Corris, Michael Living people American art critics American art historians Southern Methodist University faculty Year of birth missing (living people) Art & Language Brooklyn College alumni Academics of Sheffield Hallam University Academic staff of the Bergen Academy of Art and Design