About

Anastasia Aukeman earned her Ph.D. in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (2013). Her dissertation, The Rat Bastard Protective Association: Bruce Conner and His San Francisco Cohort, 1958–1968, became the basis for Welcome to Painterland.

She has taught art history and visual culture at Parsons School of Design since 2003. Her research focuses on artistic collaborations, the role of the arts in social change, performance art, and dance.

Curatorial

She began at the Aperture Foundation, then held posts at the Dia Art Foundation (Assistant Curator), Artists Space (Curator), and Curt Marcus Gallery (Director). She was Newhall Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, 2007–2008.

She organized two exhibitions on the Rat Bastard Protective Association — at The Landing, Los Angeles (2016–17) and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York (2017) — the first RBPA shows since the group's 1958 exhibition at Spatsa Gallery, San Francisco.

Publications & awards

Welcome to Painterland (University of California Press, 2016) received the Wyeth Foundation for American Art publication grant and the Meiss/Mellon Author's Book Award, and is in its second printing. She was also awarded a Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art.

She has written for Art in America, Art on Paper, ARTnews, and Elephant, and contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogs.