Brynn Hatton

Global contemporary art and visual culture, conceptual art, protest art, the Vietnam-American War, social movement mobilization theory, post-colonial and decolonial theory, critical race theory

My current research develops the idea of Vietnam—not Vietnam itself, but the ways in which Vietnam has functioned symbolically in the world for over a half-century—as a conceptual engine and core subject in art and politics from the 1960s to the early 2000s. I am currently writing a book titled The Vietnam Idea which examines works of art and visual culture from North America, Oceania, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America that share a common visual strategy of crafting an image of the political self with the idea of Vietnam principally in mind. The project has been generously supported by the Social Science Research Council, the US Department of Education, and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as university fellowships supporting projects in international studies, general humanities, and art history.

My courses take an interconnected view of disparate geographies, objects, ideas, and methods in global contemporary art and art history. In my classes, students can expect at every level to engage with the broader social and political conditions that inform major artistic developments in the modern and contemporary period.

• PhD, Northwestern University, 2016
• MA, Northwestern University, 2012
• BA, University of California, Berkeley, 2003

• Williams College, 2016-2018
• Clark Art Institute Graduate Program in the History of Art, 2016-2018
• Africa Modern Arts Park (experimental art school and community foundation in Bagamoyo, Tanzania), 2007

“Midtown is always cold.” Strike MoMA Reader, New York, NY: Verso Books (December 2021): 182-183: https://www.strikemoma.org/reader

“On Impossibility: Finding Vietnam in a Jordanian-Soviet Film Archive.” ArtMargins 9.2
(June 2020): 7-32.

“There and Not There.” In Clear-Hold-Build, edited by HEKLER and Shimrit Lee. Philadelphia, PA: Twelve Arts, October 2019: 58-61. 

“L’idée du Vietnam comme conceptualisme résilient.” Marges 27 (December 2018): 48-65.

“Hold Your Gun Arm Steady to Keep the Color of the Flower: The Propeller Group 
and Le Brothers.” journal of visual culture 17:3 (December 2018): 286–298.

“The Image of Difference.” In Imprints of Revolution: Visual Representations of Resistance,  
edited by Lisa Y.B. Calvente and Guadalupe Garcia, London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016, 87-116.

"Rising Up Angry." In The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960–1980, edited by Alison Fisher, Greg Foster-Rice, and Katherine Bussard. Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago and Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015:162.

“Silent Shout | Photography, Women, and the Iranian Rooftop: 1953, 1979, 2009.” Al-Raida 141-142 (2014): 8-26.

“Dream Sequence: The Motorbike as Allegory.” MCA DNA, August 30, 2016.

“Gloria: Robert Rauschenberg & Rachel Harrison at Cleveland Museum of Art.”Artforum International  54:4 (December 2015).

“Titus Kaphar at Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati.” Artforum International 54:1 (October 2014).

• 2014, Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship
• 2013, Crown Family Middle East Research Award
• 2013, Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies Travel Grant
• 2012, U.S. Dept. of Education Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute, University of Wisconsin, Madison
• 2011, Schiff Foundation Fellowship for Critical Architectural Writing, Art Institute of Chicago
• 1999-2003, California Alumni Association Leadership Scholarship, University of California, Berkeley

• Introduction to Global Contemporary Art
• Art and Theory Since 1980
• Art and Theory 1960-1990
• Museum Exhibitions: Design and Rhetoric
• How to Live Now: Creative Ethics and Contemporary Art
• What is Protest Art? Aesthetics of Dissent in Contemporary Art and Theory
• Global Conceptualism 1962-Now
• Methods of Art History