About

Alexander Alberro is the Virginia Wright Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University. Recent lecture courses include "Histories of Photography"; "Early Modernism and the Crisis of Representation"; “In and Around Abstract Expressionism”; and “Contemporary Art.” Graduate seminars taught include "The Infrastructure of Contemporary Art," “Contemporary Caribbean Art,” "Photography and Camera Work"; "Spectatorship, Participation, and Interaction in Contemporary Art"; "Contemporary Art and the Global Turn"; and "Abstract Art and its Legacies in South America." He has recently directed or codirected dissertations on contemporary art in localities such as Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Congo, France, Germany, Iran, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Japan, Nigeria, Senegal, and the United States.

Alexander Alberro's writings have been published in a wide range of journals and exhibition catalogs, and have been translated into numerous languages. He is also the author and editor of multiple books, including Interstices: Negotiations at Contemporary Art's Boundaries (2025), Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth Century Latin American Art (2017), Working Conditions: The Writings of Hans Haacke (2016); Luis Camnitzer In Conversation with Alexander Alberro (2014); What is Contemporary Art Today? (2012); John Miller: The Ruin of Exchange (2012); Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists Writings (2009); Art After Conceptual Art (2006); Museum Highlights (2005); Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (2003); Recording Conceptual Art (2001); Two-Way Mirror Power (1999); and Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (1999). Professor Alberro is also the founding editor of the University of California Press book series “Studies on Latin American and Latinx Art,” which commissions publications on art history and cultural practices emerging from Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the Latin American diaspora in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Alberro has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Howard Foundation, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and numerous other organizations. He has also been a featured speaker at many universities and cultural institutions worldwide and has appeared in several documentary films on contemporary art.

Contact: aa2789@columbia.edu