Jane Chin Davidson
Contact
Bio
Jane Chin Davidson is an art historian/curator whose research focuses on transnationalism in relation to Chinese identity, feminism/ eco-feminism, performance/performativity, and global exhibitions of contemporary art. Her recent publications include the forthcoming Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023) co-edited with Amelia Jones, the monograph Staging Art and Chineseness: Politics of Trans/Nationalism and Global Expositions (University of Manchester Press, 2020) and the co-edited volume Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum (Routledge, 2017). Chin Davidson was awarded top honors with the Distinguished PhD Postgraduate at the University of Manchester, a British ESRC Fellowship at the Cultural Theory Institute, and a Getty Research Institute Postgraduate Fellowship. In addition to her monographs, edited books, and peer reviewed journals, such as the Case Studies in the Environment (2022) she contributes to Hyperallergic https://hyperallergic.com/author/jane-chin-davidson/ and to other art criticism.
Education
- UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER, UK, Jun 2007, PhD in Art History and Visual Studies
- REED COLLEGE, PORTLAND, OR, Jun 2001, Bachelor of Arts in Art History
Courses/Teaching
SEE CSUSB COURSE SCHEDULE
Specialization
Contemporary Global Art, Performance art and Performativity in the Arts, Eco-Art, Eco-feminism, Feminist theory, Exhibitionary Complexes – Biennials and Triennials, Museum Studies, Chinese Diasporic Identity and the Arts
EXHIBITIONS - CURATED AND ORGANIZED
2012 Inner Space , Global Matter – Recording from the Structures Within, Geraldine Ondrizek Works from 2008 through 2012, joint exhibitions at NASA Johnson Space Center, University of Houston - Clear Lake, and Florida International University; including associating events such as Dominic Walsh Dance Theater’s 2013 choreographed dance to the sound installation, Sounds of Cells Dividing
2011 Setting the Table: Preparing Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party - 30 Year Anniversary Exhibition at the University of Houston - Clear Lake Gallery; including a video installation of Margarita Cabrera’s 2010 performance/installation Space in Between
Research and Teaching Interests
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
BOOKS
A Companion to “Contemporary Art” in a Global Framework, co-editor with Amelia Jones, London: Blackwell Wiley, 2023 forthcoming
Staging Art and Chineseness: Politics of Trans/Nationalism and Global Expositions, Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2020 (reviewed in Journal of Curatorial Studies, Volume 11, Issue 2, Oct 2022 https://doi.org/10.1386/jcs_00077_5 and reviewed in Art History (Assn of Art Historians journal), May 2022. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12644)
Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum, editor with co-editor Sandra Esslinger of chapters by Donald Preziosi, Claire Farago, Selma Holo, Lothar von Falkenhausen, Catherine Cole, Gemma Rodrigues, and Marla Berns, Routledge Museum Studies Series, London and NY: Routledge, 2017 (Reviewed in CAAReviews, November 2018 crossref DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2018.233)
PEER-REVIEWED JOURNALS
“Cherry River: Art, Music, and Indigenous Stakeholders of Water Advocacy in Montana,” Case Studies in the Environment (UC Press), Vol 6, No. 1 (2022).
Guest Editor with co-editor Alpesh Kantilal Patel, ”Okwui Enwezor, the Art of Curating (1963-2019),” NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art, Vol. 48 (May 2021)
“‘Global’ Discourse and the Transcultural Field of Contemporary Art in China,” Oxford Art Journal, August 2020.
Guest Editor with co-editor Nicola Foster, “Restaging Exhibitions,” special issue, with essay contribution "Restaging Feminism: the Activist Retrospective," Journal of Curatorial Studies, Vol. 8, No.2, 2019
“Performance Art, Performativity, and Environmentalism in the Capitalocene," The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, ed. Paula Rabinowitz, Feb 2019
“Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake,” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA), April 2019
“The Body of the Archive: Chineseness at the Venice Biennale (1993–2005),” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, special issue 'Chineseness' in Contemporary Art Discourse and Practice, ed., Franziska Koch, Vol.3, No. 1-2, 2016
“(Non) Speech Acts: the Performative Power of Silence,” WAGADU: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies, special issue Difference that Makes no Difference, ed., Nikita Dhawan, foreword by Sara Ahmed, Vol. 16, 2016
“Affirmative Precarity: Ai Weiwei and Margarita Cabrera,” Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 12, April, 2013
“Displacements of the Desiring Machine,” Interventions : International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, special issue, “Cinemas of Displacement and Destitution,” Vol. 14, No. 3, 2012
“The Global Artfair and the Dialectical Image,” Third Text, Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture, V.107, November 2010
CHAPTERS IN EDITED BOOKS
“Body, Performance, and Transnational Border Crossings,” eds. Catherine Dormor and Basia Sliwinska, Transnational Belonging and Subjectivity-In-Process: Contemporary Women Artists’ Encounters with Space, London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
“Objective Storytellers – Not Allowed Not to Have a Body,” eds., Alpesh Kantilal Patel and Yasmeen Siddiqui, Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Storytellers of Art Histories, NY: Intellect, 2022.
“Tseng Kwong Chi – 1979 and the Liminal ‘Trans’ of Racial and Sexual Politics” eds. Jen Kennedy, Trista E. Mallory, and Angelique Szymanek, Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960-1985, NY: Routledge, 2021.
“Performative Testimony and the Practice of Dismissal,“ co-written with Deepa Reddy, Written/Unwritten: Tenure and Race in the Humanities, ed. Patricia Matthew, Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2016
“Performance, Postmodernism, and Beyond,” eds. Gabrielle Cody and Meiling Cheng, Reading Contemporary Performance, NY: Routledge, 2015
“The Art Object as Text in the Practice of Comparative Visuality,” World Cinema and the Visual Arts, ed., David Gallagher, London: Anthem Press, 2012
“De-territorializing Bodies: Body Art and the Colonial World Expositions,” Dead History, Live Art? Spectacle, Subjectivity and Subversion in Visual Culture since the 1960s, ed., Jonathan Harris, Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2007