Joanna Fiduccia
B.A., Stanford University
Ph.D., UCLA
Joanna Fiduccia specializes in European and American modernism and the historical avant-garde, with a focus on the forms and politics of representation in twentieth-century sculpture. Her research and teaching interests include scale; the history of attention; ornament and abstraction; visual tropes of borders and territories; twentieth-century representations of gender and race; technologies of modeling and simulation; and experimental research practices. Her current book project Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism traces the convergence of aesthetic and political crises in Europe in the 1930s and ’40s. It explores how Giacometti’s heterodox return to figuration relates to breakdowns in the representation of citizens and nation-states in France and Switzerland. By redefining figuration to encompass a set of practices including political rhetoric, representational democracy, and forms of social presentation, Fiduccia illustrates a vibrant field of connections springing between interwar art movements and political positions.
Fiduccia 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 founding co-editor of the journal apricota. She is also 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 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 was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History & Humanities at Reed College (2017–2019).
Fiduccia advises graduate research on topics including, but not limited to: modern European and American art, transnational avant-gardes, twentieth-century sculpture, rhetorics of race and nation in modern art, modern art and (technological, social, biological) reproduction, queer modernism, exchanges between the fine and decorative arts in twentieth-century art, modern art and poetics.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
“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 Kittiwake Dossier: Object-Oriented Aggregation and the Missiological Efforts of the Order Among the Parisian Surrealists, 1932–1941,” In Search of the Third Bird: Exemplary Essays from the Proceedings of ESTAR(SER) 2001-2020 (London: Strange Attractor/MIT Press, 2021), 527-558.
“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.
“Questionnaire on Monuments,” October 165 (Fall 2018): 37–39.
“Lacks Worth Having: William Pope.L and Land Art.” Shift Journal of Visual and Material Culture. Issue 8 (Fall 2015): 1–22.