Bibiana Obler

Bio

Professor Obler's research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary art and craft from the late nineteenth century to the present, with emphases on twentieth-century avant-gardes, theories of gender and cross-cultural representation, photography, and disability studies. Her book Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky and Münter, Arp and Taeuber (Yale University Press, 2014) investigates the role of artist couples in the emergence of abstract art. Obler’s writing has been featured in American Art, Art Bulletin, Artforum, caa.reviews, The Journal of Modern Craft, and Sculpture Journal. Her research has been supported by a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and a James Renwick Fellowship in American Craft at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.

Museum experience includes internships at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. More recently, Obler co-curated, with Phyllis Rosenzweig, the exhibition “Fast Fashion / Slow Art,” organized by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine.

Current Research

Obler is working on a book manuscript, titled Anti-Craft, which will examine the relation of art and craft in the late twentieth century through a series of case studies: Al Loving’s fabric constructions, Rebecca Horn’s bodily extensions, and Lynda Benglis’s ceramics.

Professional Organizations

Obler is the arts editor of the interdisciplinary journal Feminist Studies.

Publications

Books:

Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky and Münter, Arp and Taeuber (Yale University Press, 2014)
Fast Fashion / Slow Art, exhibition catalogue co-edited with Phyllis Rosenzweig (Scala, 2019)

Selected articles:

• "The Imperious Brush: Interrogating Expressionist Relations," in Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider, ed. Natalia Sidlina (London: Tate, 2024), 78-85, 225-26
• "Not Your Grandmother’s Labor," in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction ed. Lynne Cooke (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2023), 194-209, 249-51
• "Al Loving Looks at Quilts," in Boundary Trouble: The Self-Taught Artist and American Avant-Gardes, ed. Lynne Cooke (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, distributed by Yale University Press, 2022), 178-95
• "Lynda Benglis: Jack of All Trades" (survey essay), in Lynda Benglis (London: Phaidon Contemporary Artist Series, 2022), 35-65
• "Fifty Years of Art in Feminist Studies: A Retrospective," Feminist Studies 48, no. 3 (2022): 675-698
• "Lynda Benglis Recrafts Abstract Expressionism," American Art 32, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 2–23
• "Reflections on Lucy Lippard’s ‘Turning the Mirrors Around,’" invited contribution to 30th Anniversary Issue of American Art 31, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 10-12
• "Craft as a Response to War" in Nation Building: Craft and Contemporary American Culture, ed. Nicholas Bell. Bloomsbury, 2016.
• "Taeuber, Arp, and the Politics of Cross-Stitch," Art Bulletin 91, no. 2 (June 2009): 207–29
• "Examining a Literal Genealogy: The Case of Kiki and Tony Smith," Sculpture Journal 15, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 68–91

Classes Taught at GW

• The Art of the Exhibition
• Art and Craft from William Morris to DIY
• Curating a Collection
• Critical Practices (Studio Arts)
• Dada
• Disability, Accessibility, & the Arts
• Early Twentieth-century Art
• Engendering Modernism
• Fast Fashion / Slow Art
• History of Photography
• Later Twentieth-century Art
• Modern Art Worldwide
• Primitivism and Its Discontents
• Problems in African-American Art History
• War and Visual Culture
• Writing Art History

Education

BA in History and History of Art and Architecture, Brown University
MA in History of Art, University of California at Berkeley
PhD in History of Art, University of California at Berkeley