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Grant Kesterkester

Professor

gkester@ucsd.edu

Website
https://ucsd.academia.edu/GrantKester

Office/Studio
MAN 209

Biography
Grant Kester is Professor of Art History and the founding editor of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism (field-journal.com). Kester is one of the leading figures in the critical dialogue around socially engaged art practice. His publications include Art, Activism and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage (Duke University Press, 1998), Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (University of California Press, 2004, second edition 2013),The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Duke University Press, 2011) and Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art 1995-2010, co-edited with Bill Kelley (Duke University Press, 2017). Kester's essays have been published in Art in Theory: The West in the World-An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Wiley/Blackwell, 2020), A Companion to Public Art (Oxford, 2016), The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945 (Blackwell, 2006), Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1945 (Blackwell, 2004), Poverty and Social Welfare in America: An Encyclopedia (ABC-Clio, 2004), Politics and Poetics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom (St. Martins Press, 1999), and the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 1998). Kester's most recent books include a two-volume study of the history of aesthetic autonomy: The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (Duke University Press, 2023) and Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art (Duke University Press, 2023).