The College Arts + Humanities Institute and the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society are delighted to present a Meet the Author talk by Faye Gleisser, Associate Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at IU Bloomington. Professor Gleisser will discuss her recent book, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987 (University of Chicago Press).
Risk Work tells the story of how artists’ experimentation with physical and psychological interference from the late 1960s through the late 1980s reveals the complex and enduring relationship between contemporary art, state power, and policing in the United States. Focusing on instances of arrest or potential arrest in art by Chris Burden, Adrian Piper, Jean Toche, Tehching Hsieh, Pope.L, the Guerrilla Girls, Asco, and PESTS, Faye Raquel Gleisser analyzes the gendered, sexualized, and racial politics of risk-taking that are overlooked in prevailing, white-centered narratives of American art. Drawing on art history and sociology as well as performance, prison, and Black studies, Gleisser argues that artists’ anticipation of state-sanctioned violence invokes the concept of “punitive literacy,” a collectively formed understanding of how to protect oneself and others in a carceral society.
Faye Gleisser (she/her) is Associate Professor of Art History and Critical Theory at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she is an interdisciplinary art historian and curator of 20th and 21st century art, specializing in visual and material histories of racial formation, surveillance, and lawfare. Her first book, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987 (University of Chicago Press, 2023; ASAP Book Prize winner), examines guerrilla art, policing, and state power. Elsewhere, Gleisser's scholarship has appeared in Art Journal, Artforum, Journal of Visual Culture, Aperture, Women & Performance, and ASAP/J, and is forthcoming in October and the Journal of Curatorial Studies. In 2023, she was awarded a Kinsey Institute Research Fellowship, in support of her current book project, “The Color of Hormones,” which investigates medical risk management, hormonal knowledge, and somatic abolitionist praxis in contemporary art.
The College of Arts