Lorraine Morales Cox
Associate Professor of Contemporary Art & Theory
Director of American Studies
A.M. & Ph. D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
B.F.A., Virginia Commonwealth University
Office: Visual Arts Building, room 320
Phone: (518) 388-8038
Email: coxl@union.edu
Area of Concentration:
Professor Cox teaches intermediate and advanced courses on 20th and 21st century art of Europe and the Americas, many of which contribute to the Women’s and Gender Studies, American Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Africana Studies programs. She has recently developed a new art history course that is part of the “Entrepreneurial Thinking” cluster titled “The Business of Visual Art and Contemporary Entrepreneurship.”
Publications and Scholarship:
Professor Cox's research focuses largely on emerging artists creating critical art that deals with such issues as race, gender, and ethnic and transcultural identity. Her most recent publications include “A Performative Turn: Kara Walker’s Song of the South (2005),” in Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory (March 2007) and "Transformed Bodies, Colonial Wounds and Ethnographic Tropes: Wangechi Mutu" in n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal (January 2008). Her book chapter titled “Cultural Sampling and Social Critique: The Collage Aesthetic of Chris Ofili” will appear in Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law, edited by Kembrew McLeod and Rudolf Kuenzli, forthcoming in 2010 Duke University Press. She has written several exhibition essays and has two new curatorial projects underway. She is also working on a book that looks at contemporary critical artistic practices engaged with issues of identity and social critique. In this study, she focuses on strategies used by artists including the use of humor, history, performance, collage and empathy in order to stimulate dialogue on such issues as racism, sexism, homophobia and religious intolerance.