Alexis Boylan
Director of Academic Affairs
UConn Humanities Institute Associate Professor, Art + Art History Department and Africana Studies Institute
Primary Research Theme
Secondary Research Themes
Research Interests
Alexis Boylan studies and writes about visual culture and is interested in how urban spaces both invite and exclude sight. This can mean what visual environment is created by advertisements, graffiti, commercial sites, architecture, crowds, and public art or, conversely, what or whom is prohibited or denied visibility in urban spaces. In short, Alexis Boylan is interested in what cities look like, why they look the way they do, and how what we see (or what is hidden) in those spaces shapes our understanding our ourselves, others, and the potentials of land- and urban-scapes.
Recent Cities-related Projects
- Not an Art Museum: The Visual Culture of the American Museum of Natural History, 1900-2017: A consideration of the visual culture of the AMNH and how knowledge about art and science was created and then how this contest over making knowledge intersected with the politics, personalities, institutions, and geographies of New York City in the 20th century.
- Southwest by Southeast: The James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art and the Politics of Regional Colonialism: This project concerns how art tourism impacts cultural notions of geography, race, and ownership in city spaces.
Selected Urban-Related Publications
Alexis L. Boylan, Anna Mae Duane, Michael Gill, and Barbara Gurr, Furious Feminisms: Alternate Routes on Mad Max: Fury Road, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota, 2020.
“Don’t Read This: Thinking about Fun Home as Contemporary Visual Culture,” in Approaches to Fun Home edited by Judith Kegan Gardiner (New York: Modern Language Association, 2019): 113-116.
Ashcan Art, Whiteness, and the Unspectacular Man, New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. (The Ashcan Circle were urban painters, so book about race and urban gender constructions.)
“What’s Love Got to Do with It: Crowdsourcing, Curating, and the Neoliberal Museum,” Journal of Curatorial Studies (Special Issue on Affect) 4 no. 3 (October 2015): 393-412.
Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall, edited and with introduction by Alexis L. Boylan, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.
