Joanna Fiduccia
B.A., Stanford University
Ph.D., UCLA
Joanna Fiduccia is a historian of European modern art and the historical avant-garde. Her research and teaching interests include the forms and politics of representation in modern sculpture; phenomenology and existentialism in modern art; scale; the history of attention; ornament and abstraction; visual tropes of borders and territories; gender and sexuality in modern art; automatism; and experimental research practices.
Her first book, Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism (Yale University Press, 2026) considers the neglected decade of artwork that separates Giacometti’s surrealist experiments from his iconic postwar sculptures, revealing homologies between his artistic crisis and crises of national identity in modern Europe. Challenging previous explanations of the artist’s return to figuration, she argues that Giacometti’s figures gave form to the experience of social breakdown during the rise of fascism by responding to the protean, exclusionary, and often incoherent models of selfhood generated by European nationalisms in the 1930s and 1940s.
Her current book project is a study of the evolving relationship between political sovereignty and automatism beginning in the late nineteenth century. It explores how automatism, as an artistic tactic as well as an element of our encounters with artworks, came to channel the moral and legal transformations of state sovereignty in the modern world. Through a series of case studies, it tracks competing fantasies of mastery and submission, spontaneity and intention, agency and the loss of control across the discourse of modernism, refracting modern boundaries between the human and less-than-human and anticipating confrontations with the generative technologies and disputed sovereignties of today.
In addition to her scholarship on modern art, she is the author of essays and reviews on contemporary art for publications including Artforum, East of Borneo, Spike, Even, and Parkett, as well as numerous catalogues, and served as founding co-editor of the journal apricota. She is a member of the research collective ESTAR(SER) and the Friends of Attention, a group of artists, scholars, and activists concerned with forms of attention that resist financialization. Her curatorial projects include “Coquilles Mécaniques” (CRAC Alsace, 2012) and “The Third, Meaning” (Frye Art Museum, Seattle, 2022). Fiduccia has been awarded fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Swiss Confederation, the Society of French Historical Studies, and the Brown Foundation. Prior to joining the Yale faculty, she taught art history and humanities at Reed College.
Fiduccia advises graduate research on topics including, but not limited to: modern European and American art, transnational avant-gardes, twentieth-century sculpture, representations of race and nation in modern art, queer modernism, exchanges between the fine and decorative arts in twentieth-century art, modern art and poetics.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
“Sculpting the Fragment,” in Broken: The Power of the Fragment in Sculpture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2026).
“The Hole and the Mound: Bodies in Allan Kaprow’s Yard,” West 86th St (forthcoming).
“Au Bout du Voyage,” Le Mur d’André Breton (Paris: Centre Pompidou/MdAM, 2024).
“Scale of the Nation: Alberto Giacometti’s Miniature Monument,” Art History, Vol. 45, no. 1 (February 2022): 127–156.
“Diplomacy in Bronze,” Maria Martins: Desejo Imaginante (Sao Paolo: Museu de Arte de Sao Paolo, 2021), 117-127.
“The Fuse; Its Refusal: Notes on the Politics of Burnout,” with the Friends of Attention, October 176 (Spring 2021): 25–27.
“Marthe Donas’s Tactility,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (2020-2021): 56-65.
“Alteration and Alterity in Giacometti’s Mannequin and Walking Woman,” in Alberto Giacometti: L’Oeuvre disparu (Paris: Fondation Giacometti, 2019), 137-151.
“Lacks Worth Having: Pope.L and Land Art.” Shift Journal of Visual and Material Culture. Issue 8 (Fall 2015): 1–22.