About
Jennifer Sichel is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory. Her research focuses on 20th-century art, criticism, and visual culture of the United States. Her book, Criticism without Authority: Gene Swenson's and Jill Johnston's Queer Practices, is forthcoming with The University of Chicago Press (fall 2025). It traces how Swenson and Johnston changed the course of artmaking and criticism in the 1960s-70s—as they reimagined subjectivity and sexuality in their writings and actions. A careful archival project, the book argues that Swenson and Johnston’s genre-bending queer practices matter—not just as ancillary supporting documents, but as the art that anchors a monograph.
Dr. Sichel has published scholarly and critical writing in Selva (forthcoming), The Oxford Art Journal, Sculpture Journal, as well as in exhibition catalogues for museums including The Whitney Museum, The Jewish Museum, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. She is the author of “‘Do You Think Pop Art’s Queer?’ Gene Swenson and Andy Warhol” —a key queer intervention that changed art history’s understanding of Warhol’s practice through archival recovery, and established Swenson’s importance as a queer writer and artist. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Clark Art Institute, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Terra Foundation for American Art, and Humanities Division at the University of Chicago.
Across her teaching, scholarship, and organizing, Dr. Sichel works to expand the field of modern and contemporary art history to embrace practices that fall outside traditional genres, as well as queer methodologies. Together with Dr. Miriam Kienle, she developed and organized the symposium Queer Art / Queer Archives (September 20-21, 2024)—a convening of scholars to investigate the theoretical stakes and methodological challenges of doing queer art history. Her recent curatorial projects include it was not written down: Stephen Irwin x Letitia Quesenberry (Cressman Center of Visual Arts, 2024) and Not Yet / Always Been: An Archive of Queer Louisville (Schneider Galleries, 2024)—an exhibition of materials from the Williams-Nichols Collection, curated collaboratively with students in her “Queer Theory and Curing” seminar.
Dr. Sichel’s future work will continue to focus on practices that blur boundaries between art, criticism, and activism. She is beginning research on a new project that investigates how queer theory developed in a “blaze of mourning” (as theorist Eve Sedgwick put it) in the late 1980s and early ’90s during the AIDS crisis, alongside and often indistinguishable from other practices: artmaking, coalition building, eulogizing the dead, protesting, and just getting by. The project will focus on writings and actions that address how it’s possible to keep living amid ongoing conditions of precarity and illness—as they become the norm, not the exception. The project will scour archives and look to art practices and queer theory for lessons on how to survive the slow temporality of an endemic.