Michael Corris
Encyclopedia
Michael Corris is an artist, art historian
Art history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...
and writer on art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
. He is currently Professor and Chair of the Division of Art, Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University
Southern Methodist University
Southern Methodist University is a private university in Dallas, Texas, United States. Founded in 1911 by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, SMU operates campuses in Dallas, Plano, and Taos, New Mexico. SMU is owned by the South Central Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church...
, Dallas, Texas. Previously, Corris held the post of Professor of Fine Art at the Art and Design Research Center, Sheffield Hallam University
Sheffield Hallam University
Sheffield Hallam University is a higher education institution in South Yorkshire, England, based on two sites in Sheffield. City Campus is located in the city centre, close to Sheffield railway station, and Collegiate Crescent Campus is about two miles away, adjacent to Ecclesall Road in...
(Sheffield, UK). From 2005-6, he was a Visiting Professor of Art Theory at the Bergen Art Academy (Bergen, Norway).
Corris received his baccalaureate and masters degrees in the United States, studying studio art and art history at Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York, United States.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New...
under Harry Holtzman
Harry Holtzman
Harry Holtzman was an American artist and founding member of the American Abstract Artists group.-Early life:At the age of fourteen, Holtzman visited the Société Anonyme’s 1926 “International Exhibition of Modern Art” at the Brooklyn Museum and developed an early interest in advanced art with the...
, Jimmy Ernst
Jimmy Ernst
Jimmy Ernst was an American painter born in Germany.-Early life:Jimmy Ernst was born in 1920 in Cologne, Germany, the son of surrealist painter Max Ernst and Luise Straus, a well-known art historian and journalist. His parents divorced in 1922 and Ernst staying with his mother in Cologne...
, Walter Rosenblum, Sylvia Stone, Philip Pearlstein
Philip Pearlstein
Philip Pearlstein is an American painter, and part of the contemporary Realist school.-Biography:Pearlstein was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and received his Masters in art history at New York University. He was a friend of Andy Warhol from...
and Carl Holty
Carl Holty
Carl Robert Holty 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 for his use of color, shape and form.-Personal life and...
; and later, painting and art theory at the Hoffberger School of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art
Maryland Institute College of Art
Maryland Institute College of Art is an art and design college in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. It was founded in 1826 as the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, making it one of the first and oldest art colleges in the United States. In 2008, MICA was ranked #2 in the nation...
under Grace Hartigan
Grace Hartigan
Grace Hartigan was an American Abstract Expressionist painter of the New York School in the 1950s.-Biography and early career:...
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, where he had contact with Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland was an American abstract 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 thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School...
, Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence was an American painter; he was married to fellow artist Gwendolyn Knight. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", though by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem.Lawrence is among the best-known twentieth...
, Brice Marden
Brice Marden
Brice Marden , is an American artist, generally described as Minimalist, although his work defies specific categorization. He lives in New York and Eagles Mere.Marden is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery.-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
Art & Language is a shifting collaboration among conceptual artists that has undergone many changes since its inception in the late 1960s. Their early work, as well as their journal Art-Language, first published in 1969, is regarded as an important influence on much conceptual art both in the...
, in New York; his work was published in 1973 in the group’s journal, Art-Language. With Mel Ramsden, Ian Burn, Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...
, Sarah Charlesworth
Sarah Charlesworth
Sarah Charlesworth is a well-known American conceptual artist and photographer. She was born in East Orange, New Jersey. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Barnard College in 1969 and now lives in New York City...
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
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
and art theoryhttp://research.ncl.ac.uk/fineartvisitingspeakers/infoCorris.html. 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
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
(New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
), the Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...
(New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
), the Victoria and Albert Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...
(London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
), Le Consortium (Dijon
Dijon
Dijon is a city in eastern France, the capital of the Côte-d'Or département and of the Burgundy region.Dijon is the historical capital of the region of Burgundy. Population : 151,576 within the city limits; 250,516 for the greater Dijon area....
) and the J. P. Getty Museum
Getty Center
The Getty Center, in Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, is a campus for cultural institutions founded by oilman J. Paul Getty. The $1.3 billion center, which opened on December 16, 1997, is also well known for its architecture, gardens, and views overlooking Los Angeles...
(Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
)http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt8489r9cw/.
Corris lectures and publishes on the subject of late-modern and contemporary art http://research.ncl.ac.uk/fineartvisitingspeakers/infoCorris.html. Corris’s art criticism has been widely published in journals and magazines devoted to modern and contemporary art, such as Art Monthly, Artforum
Artforum
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...
, 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
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
: A Critical Anthology (MIT Press) http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=4020 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, 2004)http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item1150368/?site_locale=en_GB, monographs on David Diao (TimeZone8 Books, Beijing, 2005) and Ad Reinhardt
Ad Reinhardt
Adolph Frederick Reinhardt was an Abstract painter active in New York beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and was a part of the movement centered around the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as Abstract Expressionism...
(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 Lomas)http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/book.html?id=383http://arthistorynewsletter.com/blog/?p=3608.
In April, 2010, Corris founded the Free Museum of Dallas; a project and exhibition space occupying his office at SMU http://www.freemuseumofdallas.com.
External links
- www.freemuseumofdallas.com
- Michael Corris Papers of the Art & Language New York Group, 1965-2002. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California. The collection documents the activities of the conceptual art group Art & Language New York.