A recipient of a CAA/Luce Foundation fellowship from 1995 to 1998 and a fellow at the Clark Art Institute in 2004, Blake Stimson is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches postwar and contemporary art, critical theory, and the history of photography. Stimson earned his PhD in art history in 1998 from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, his MFA in sculpture in 1992 at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, and he was a fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York from 1990 to 1991. His book, The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation, was published in 2006 by MIT Press and Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, which he co-edited with Gregory Sholette, has just been published by University of Minnesota Press. Stimson and Alexander Alberro, editors of Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (1999), are working on a second book, entitled Institutional Critique: A Critical Anthology (forthcoming in 2008).
In 2007, Blake Stimson was invited to give a lecture at MACBA in the context of the seminar The Metropolis in the Photographic Era. This lecture was entitled 'Photography of the Social Forms.' An earlier version of this text was published as “The Artiste” in Oxford Art Journal, vol. 30, num. 1 (March 2007), pp. 101-115.
