Amelia Jones Biography
Amelia Jones originally from Durham, North Carolina is an American art historian, art theorist, art critic, author, professor and curator. Her work specializes in feminist art, body art, performance art, video art, identity politics, cultural biases, and Dadaism. Early in her career, she was associated as a feminist scholar, later she broadened her focus on other social activist topics including race, class and identity politics. Amelia has contributed significantly to the world of art as a teacher, researcher, and activist.
She is the daughter of Virginia Sweetnam Jones and Edward E. Jones, a Princeton Psychology professor. She studied art history as an undergraduate at Harvard University and completed her M.A. at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in 1991. Her dissertation was later turned into a published book, Postmodernism and the Engendering of Marcel Duchamp (1994). After completing her education, Jones began to focus on her career and starting a family. On March 7, 1987, Jones married Anthony Sherin a film editor. The two later divorced in 2005. In 2007 following her divorce, Jones married artist Paul Craig Donald. She has two kids, Evan and Vita. Jones currently resides in Los Angeles, California.
Amelia Jones Age
Amelia was born on July 14, 1961, in Durham, North Carolina, United States. She is 57 years old as of 2018.
Amelia Jones Career
After completing her Ph.D., Jones left Los Angeles to teach at universities throughout the United States as well as in Manchester, England and Montreal, Canada. She has taught art history at University of California, Riverside and the University of Manchester, where she served as the Pilkington Chair of the department.
She also served as the Grierson Chair in Visual Culture at McGill University in Montreal and has held visiting professorships at Maine College of Art, Texas Christian University, University of Colorado, Boulder, and Washington University, St. Louis. She is also the Robert A. Day Professor and Chair of Critical Studies at the USC Roski School of Art and Design, where she also served as Vice Dean of Research.
Jones has also curated a number of exhibitions, including Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art History (1996) at the Hammer Museum, The Politics of Difference: Artists Explore Issues of Identity (1991) at the Chandler Art Museum at University of California, Riverside, and Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art (2013) at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery at Concordia University in Montreal.
She also independently organizing a retrospective exhibition on the work of American performance artist Ron Athey. Amelia Jones has spoken out against cultural biases through art history, related to gender and race during her career.
She has challenged the most authoritative voices for insistently promoting a straight-white-male perspective. Her work is committed to representing female, color, and queer artists. She has dedicated her worked to accurately acknowledging artists’ career and work.
Amelia Jones Books
Along with being a professor, Jones is the author and editor of numerous books and anthologies on art history, performance studies, queer studies, and visual culture. She currently serves as co-editor of the Manchester University Press series Rethinking Art’s Histories with Martha Meskimmon.
The following is a selection of works written or edited by Amelia Jones:
- Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
- Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party’ in Feminist Art History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
- Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1998.
- Warr, Tracey and Amelia Jones (eds.). The Artist’s Body. London: Phaidon, 2000.
- The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003.
- Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004.
- Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject. New York: Routledge, 2006.
- “The Artist is Present”: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence. TDR, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Spring 2011), p. 16-45. Posted Online February 16, 2011.
- Heathfield, Adrian and Amelia Jones (eds.). Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
- Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts. New York: Routledge, 2012.
“Sexuality” London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2014. - Silver, Erin and Amelia Jones (eds.). Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015.
Amelia Jones Seeing Differently
This book offers a history and theory of ideas about identity in relation to visual arts discourses and practices in Euro-American culture, from early modern beliefs that art is an expression of an individual, the painted image a “world picture” expressing a comprehensive and coherent point of view, to the rise of identity politics after WWII in the art world and beyond.
The book is both a history of these ideas (for example, tracing the dominance of a binary model of self and other from Hegel through classic 1970s identity politics) and political response to the common claim in art and popular political discourse that we are “beyond” or “post-” identity.
In challenging this latter claim, Seeing Differently critically examines how and why we “identify” works of art with an expressive subjectivity, noting the impossibility of claiming we are “post-identity” given the persistence of beliefs in art discourse and broader visual culture about who the subject “is,”.