Alan W. Moore – Personal Statement

I am delighted to be here at the University of South Florida. The opportunities seem excellent in this institution which so cherishes research, and sharing them with the students I meet will be a great pleasure.

The conditions of creative production – the artist’s job – have changed dramatically in recent times. Artists are moving to the center of western knowledge economies. In order to assert their core values of creative expression, to create the changes we all want to see, and to build the other world that is possible, artists need to learn tactics that will help them retain their autonomy. My belief is that knowledge of art’s histories can give artists a toolkit to devise the strategies they will need.

Much of my conviction of the necessity of art history’s “local” tasks comes from my experience in 2005-06 at Kennesaw State University, where over the course of a year brave undergraduates built a website describing the “Artworlds of Atlanta.” (I reflected on this project as pedagogy at last year’s “Trans” Visual Culture conference at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.)

Students in my courses this year in Tampa will build a website which illuminates the University of South Florida’s continuous and crucial role in the artworlds of the Tampa Bay region.

For next semester’s graduate seminar, I will focus on my research area, which is the history of artists’ collectives. We will annotate the tremendous list of international artists’ groups compiled by Temporary Services, liaise with Basekamp’s Plausible Artworlds,  and the Art Spaces Archives Project, and read the late work of medievalist Donald Drew Egbert (1902-1973).

My research and teaching responds to a new wave of collectivity in the world of art. It is an exciting moment, and I am excited to be here in Tampa to work on it.

For background, see:

“General Introduction to Collectivity in Modern Art,” paper for Critical Mass exhibition, Smart Museum, University of Chicago, April 2002

Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, editors, Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (University of Minnesota Press, 2007)

I was a member of these groups in New York: Collaborative Projects, aka Colab, and ABC No Rio. I manage the MWF Video Club archive. My professional resume is here.