香蕉秀

Kevin Lotery is a historian of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and media, with a particular focus on cross-disciplinary, hybrid practices such as exhibition making, installation, and forms of artistic research. A frequent contributor to the journal October, Lotery鈥檚 writing has also appeared, or will soon appear, in journals such as British Art Studies, caa.reviews, Selva, and Texte zur Kunst. He has contributed to exhibition catalogues published by, among others, ETH Z眉rich, the Guggenheim Museum, ICA Boston, and the Queens Museum.听

One strand of Lotery鈥檚 work examines interactions between forms of artistic and scientific research. His first book, The Long Front of Culture: The Independent Group and Exhibition Design (MIT Press/October Books, 2020), investigates the collaborative exhibition design projects of the unruly cadre of artists, architects, curators, and writers known as the Independent Group or IG in 1950s Britain. In exhibitions like Growth and Form (1951), Parallel of Life and Art (1953), or Man, Machine and Motion (1955), for example, IG members sought out generative, critical points of interchange between technological and artistic production. The first comprehensive study of the IG鈥檚 exhibition designs, the book argues for exhibition design as a crucial cross-disciplinary and global mode of aesthetic production and image distribution at mid-century, one that resonates with much contemporary art today. Lotery continues to research, publish, and speak on the work of the IG and its various members, Richard Hamilton in particular. In 2025, he was featured in a documentary about Hamilton produced by the National Gallery, London. The film, which draws on Lotery鈥檚 published scholarship, can be viewed

A second strand of Lotery鈥檚 research focuses on the relationship between the making of art and the production and transmission of historical memory. His current book project鈥擳he Last Ones: Horizons of Postmemory in Art, Film, and Criticism鈥攅xamines the very last projects of three key figures in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, film, film writing, and post-Holocaust memory culture at large: Siegfried Kracauer, Claude Lanzmann, and Chantal Akerman. In the last works鈥�"the last ones鈥濃�攐f this decidedly international, intergenerational constellation of film artists and writers, the book uncovers a shared fascination with the question of lastness in its many guises鈥攁s a philosophical, eschatological, historical, and most importantly, aesthetic category. The primary goal: to theorize for the first time, with the help of my three protagonists, an aesthetic of lastness, one conditioned by the experience of being at the end鈥攐f one鈥檚 life, of one鈥檚 generation, or of time itself. A major portion of the book was published in October in 2023. A parallel project investigates the role of fascism in contemporary art and politics and will culminate in 鈥淣ational Sentiments: Nativism and Modernism in the History of American Art,鈥� an upcoming co-edited special issue of the online, open-access journal Selva.听

Before coming to Boston College, Lotery was Lecturer in the Fine Art Department at the School of Arts and Cultures at Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He was previously a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at Columbia University, and his research has been supported by grants from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Hauser & Wirth Institute, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and the Institute for Historical Research, University of London.