Kent Mitchell Minturn

Kent Mitchell Minturn

Ph.D., Columbia, 2007

Biography

Former Director of Columbia University’s MA Program in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies (MODA), Kent Minturn is an art historian, critic, translator, and theorist of modern and contemporary art. Minturn’s teaching, research, and writings focus on connections between Paris and New York in the immediate post-WWII period, the artist Jean Dubuffet and postwar French philosophy (especially the work of Hubert Damisch), as well as art brut and outsider art. He has also taught courses at Columbia on the interdisciplinary relationship between cinema and painting. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in OctoberArtforum, Art JournalArchives of American Art JournalArchitectural ReviewVisual Resources, and Res, and in the exhibition catalogs, Seeing Differently (Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.), Anti-Cultural Positions (Acquavella Galleries, New York), The Incursions of Art Brut in America (American Folk Art Museum, New York), and Brutal Beauty (The Barbican, London). At present he is working on a book-length project, Jean Dubuffet and Postwar French Thought, and other essays on, “Mal Orthographié: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Dubuffet,” “Art Brut and Gender,” and “Robert Motherwell’s Reception in France.” Before this, Minturn was Visiting Assistant Professor at The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. 

Recent Talks

“Brutal Aesthetics,” with Hal Foster and Eleanor Nairne (Courtauld Institute, London).

“Robert Motherwell and Meyer Schapiro,” (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.).

“Adolph Gottlieb,” with Sanford Hirsch (Pace Gallery/ Adolph Gottlieb Foundation, New York).