Art and Art History

Joanna Matuszak

Title: Assistant Professor of Art History
Department: Art and Art History
Building: ARC 117
Email: jmatuszak@uttyler.edu
Phone: 903.566.7398

Degrees

• Ph.D. (Art History) Indiana University, Bloomington, United States

• Magister (Art History) University of Łódź, Poland

• Magister (English Philology) University of Łódź, Poland

Biography

Dr. Matuszak specializes in Contemporary Art with a focus on Performance Art, popular culture, and visual culture of the Global East. She received her PhD in Art History from Indiana University, Bloomington in 2017 and has been teaching a wide range of courses in Art History at institutions of higher education in both Poland and the United States since 2016. Dr. Matuszak’s instructional experience also includes teaching English to non-native speakers, which has informed her ability to communicate and relate to students from a variety of backgrounds. Before joining UT Tyler, Dr. Matuszak has held teaching positions at New Mexico State University (Las Cruces), Southern Utah University (Cedar City), Ivy Tech College (Bloomington), Bucknell University (Lewisburg), Wabash College (Crawfordsville), and Indiana University (Bloomington). Dr. Matuszak’s journeys in teaching have inspired her to design numerous unique courses in art history including From Dada to Pussy Riot: The History of Performance Art, Visual Cultures of the Cold War, and Women and Art Behind the Iron Curtain, in addition to leading art history courses with interstate and international travel components (to Los Angeles, New York City, and London).

Museum exhibitions have also figured prominently in Dr. Matuszak’s recent career as she has curated a number of contemporary and historical art exhibitions for university museums, enriching her multi-disciplinary pedagogical approach between classroom and public displays. Her exhibitions include “Ad Infinitum: Artists Against War and Imperialism” at the New Mexico State University Art Museum in Las Cruces, New Mexico (2023); “Reclaiming Agency: Ukrainian Women Photography Today” at the Southern Utah Museum of Art in Cedar City, Utah (2022); and “What’s New On The Walls?” at the Bucknell University President’s House in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania (2018).

Dr. Matuszak’s research has been funded by the American Councils and Fulbright-Hays Fellowships, which took her to various cities—provincial and central—in Russia where she conducted her doctoral research on post-Soviet performance art. During her sojourn in Russia, she became a reperformer at Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present exhibition in Moscow. This occasion was an opportunity to experience performance work in a more holistic, multi-faceted way—not only from the position of a viewer but also as a viewed one. In addition to studying performance art itself, Dr. Matuszak’s research and writing draws from a wide variety of primary sources including interviews she has secured with living artists (Aleksandr Brener, Elena Kovylina, Oleg Kulik, Liza Morozova, Marina Perchikhina, among others), memoirs, interpersonal correspondences, original gallery and exhibition didactics and catalogues, period-specific newspaper reports, and other media publications as well as secondary resources on the subject. Since then, her research on Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish as well as US American contemporary art has appeared in journals such as Third Text, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Performance Research, and Art Inquiry: Recherches Sur Les Arts.

I am interested in two interrelated domains: performance art and the performative nature of the contemporary art system. The art world’s various agents use the power of language to create the desired reception of art and to constitute the world of art itself. My recent projects are focused on the conceptual packaging of the arts of the former Soviet Union and Communist bloc for Western European and North American art institutions and viewers. I investigate this conceptual framework that uses linguistic tactics, such as coined art historical terms and exhibition themes, to reveal the perpetuation of Western Modernist paradigms and the center-periphery relation between the West and the Global East. My current writing projects analyze the material/visual remains and written historiography of Russian and Eastern European cultural politics to examine their reflections within central-peripheral relations and the ways in which these contexts contributed to the production of art and art knowledge. Because such constructs parallel globally relevant center-peripheral hierarchies across geographies and populations, my research contributes to larger discussions of contemporary post-colonial power dynamics and the role of art within societies in flux.