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| Art historian Dr. Robert Hobbs holds the Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair at Virginia Commonwealth University and is a visiting professor at Yale University. Before coming to VCU he served as a lecturer at Yale and later became an associate professor at Cornell University. In addition, he has held posts at the University of Iowa where he was Director of the University’s Museum of Art and at Florida State University where he was an associate professor. |
| Recognized as both an academic and a museum curator, Hobbs specializes in both late modern and post-modern art. His work joins social history with literary criticism, aesthetics, and feminist and postcolonial theory. He has published widely and has curated dozens of exhibitions, many of which have been shown at important institutions in the U.S. and abroad. His specific research areas span the twentieth- and twentieth-first centuries, and his publications include monographs on Milton Avery, Alice Aycock, Edward Hopper, Lee Krasner, Mark Lombardi, Robert Smithson, and Kara Walker. In addition to working on mainstream modern and post-modern artists, his published research includes in-depth studies of regional, self-taught, and Native American artists as well as investigations of contemporary and traditional craft media. Hobbs is a member of the Editorial Board of the Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, published by Oxford University Press. |
| In 1978 Hobbs worked as Chief Curator of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art and director of the Farabi University affiliated museum program while on leave from Cornell University. In 1982 he was appointed the U.S. Commissioner for the Venice Biennale for his exhibition “Robert Smithson: Sculpture,” which had previously been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1996 he curated two exhibitions “Souls Grown Deep: African-American Vernacular Art of the South” and “Thornton Dial: Remembering the Road” for the Cultural Olympiad, an affiliate of the Atlanta Summer Olympics. In 2002 he served as the U.S. Commissioner for the São Paulo Bienal for which he curated “Kara Walker: Slavery! Slavery!” His most recent curatorial endeavor was the Mark Lombardi retrospective, which traveled to eight venues during 2003-2004. His exhibitions have been shown at such institutions as the AGO in Toronto, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Drawing Center (New York City), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art. |
| roberthobbs@roberthobbs.net |
| © Robert Hobbs, 2008 |
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