Elissa Auther gave a Brown Bag Lunch presentation on Tuesday, April 28, 2015, from 12 to 1:30pm, at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City. Her talk is entitled “Straddling Worlds: Working Across Art and Craft, and the Museum and the Academy.”

This talk will focus on her current research and curatorial projects that cut across the art/craft divide in the contemporary art world.

Elissa Auther was the Associate Professor of Contemporary Art in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She earned her Ph.D. in History of Art in 2000 from the University of Maryland, College Park, with a specialization in modern and contemporary art. Dr. Auther’s book, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art (Minnesota, 2010), focuses on the broad utilization of fiber in American art of the 1960s and 70s and the changing hierarchical relationship between art and craft expressed by the medium’s new visibility. She co-curated and edited the accompanying catalog for the exhibition West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977 (Minnesota, 2012). Most recently she co-curated the retrospective exhibition of the painter and photographer Marilyn Minter, and she has two new publications on the fiber-based work of artist Josh Faught.