Laurel Jean Fredrickson
Laurel Jean Fredrickson is an art historian of contemporary and modern art with a global emphasis. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on cross-cultural and transnational intersections of experimental art and political dissent from the 1960s to the present. Her book Jean-Jacques Lebel and French Happenings of the 1960: The Erotics of Revolution, the first book-length study of the anticolonial art and politics of Jean-Jacques Lebel (1936, France), an artist who interconnected political, philosophical, literary, and artistic avant-gardes internationally and bridged the historical and postwar avant-gardes, published by Bloomsbury Academic Press (March 2021). Her current research on transnational women artists follows on her publication “The Politics of Gender and Deterritorialized Identity in the 59th Annual Venice Biennale Installations of Sonia Boyce, Zineb Sedira, and Latifa Echakhch,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, November 2023.
Education:
- Ph.D., Duke, 2007
- MA, University of Illinois Chicago, 1997
- MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1987
- BFA, Washington University, St Louis, MO
Recent Publications:
"Jean-Jacques Lebel's Revolution: The French Happening, Surrealism, and the Algerian War," in France and the visual arts since 1945: Remapping European Postwar and Contemporary Art, ed. Catherine Dossin. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2018.
"Zineb Sedira: Decolonization and Creative Acts." Femmes Cré(act)ives, L’Esprit Créateur, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.
"Life as Art, or Art as Life: Robert Filliou and the Eternal Network." Theory, Culture and Society: Explorations in Critical Social Science, 2018.
"Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta." Review Article. (Exhibition catalog).Woman's Art Journal (Spring/Summer 2017).
"The Politics of Gender and Deterritorialized Identity in the 59th Annual Venice Biennale Installations of Sonia Boyce, Zineb Sedira, and Latifa Echakhch," Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, November 2023.
Research:
She has also begun preliminary research for, Deterritorialized Identity: Transnational Women Artists and French Colonialism. This project explores the art of women who interrogate the postmodern condition of deterritorialized identity through video, installation, and performance, to visualize intersections of present-day and historical political realities and traumatic memory and engaging a body-politics shaped by displacement, refugee status, and the frontier as site of obstruction and passage.