Mark Cheetham
15 King's College Circle, Toronto ON M5S 3H7
Campus: St. George
My research centers on art writing and visual culture from the mid 18th century to the present in Britain, Europe, the USA and Canada. I have written books and articles on the history, theory, and current practice of abstract art, the reception of Immanuel Kant’s thinking in the visual arts and the discipline of art history, on art historical methodology, on ecological art, and on recent art in Canada and internationally. The historiography and methodology of art history and the field of Visual Culture Studies are ongoing research interests, as is contemporary art in Canada and abroad, from both curatorial and academic perspectives.
I was the Project Director of a 3-year SSHRC initiative called CACHET (Canadian Art Commons for History of Art Education & Training), 2013–16, which linked five institutions and 20 researchers. I am also part of a national research project addressing settler-colonial practices in the art history of Canada (Unsettling Canadian Art History).
My book Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the ‘60s was published by Penn State UP in 2018. I curated the exhibition Struck by Likening: The Power & Discontents of Artworld Analogies at the McMaster University Museum of Art in 2017. My exhibition Ecologies of Landscape (2018–19) explored the ongoing potency of landscape presentation in contemporary art.
My current research is in three areas: contemporary ecological art, the practices of Ecocritical Art History, the use of analogy in art history and museums (forthcoming as a guest-edited issue of the journal Word and Image in 2023), and the image cultures of 19th-century Arctic voyaging from the Anglosphere (part of a co-curated exhibition forthcoming at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library). I co-convene the Jackman Humanities Institute Working Group on visual cultures of the circumpolar north.
My teaching focuses on art, art theory, and visual culture from the mid 18th century to the present in Europe, the USA, and Canada. I supervise doctoral and postdoctoral projects across these geographical, cultural, and temporal coordinates.
- Hons. BA (Philosophy), University of Toronto, University College
- MA (Philosophy), University of Toronto
- PhD (History of Art), University College London
Aesthetics, Art Historiography, Book History, Eco-Art, Photography, Post-colonialism/Decolonization, Images and Narratives of the Circumpolar North, Ecocritical Art History (Eurosphere, Anglosphere, Nordic), Contemporary Art & Art Theory (Eurosphere and Anglosphere), Curatorship: theory and practice, Modern Art c. 1700–1989 (Eurosphere and Anglosphere), Art in Canada since the 1960s
- Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the ‘60s. Penn State UP. 2018.
- Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain: The “Englishness” of English Art Theory since the 18th Century. Routledge: British Art: Global Contexts series. 2012.
- Remembering Postmodernism: Trends in Canadian Art, 1970–1990. Second, revised ed. OUP, 2012
- Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure since the ’60s. Cambridge UP, 2006.
- Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of Discipline. Cambridge UP, 2001. [Paperback ed., CUP, Feb. 2009; Chinese trans., Nanjing: Jiangsu Fine Arts Publishing House, 2010.]