Photo by Danielle Ezzo — Charlotte Kent, PhD

Writer & associate professor of visual culture
Photo courtesy of Danielle Ezzo

BOOKS

Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art (forthcoming, 2024)

SAMPLE SCHOLARSHIP & INVITED ESSAYS

ASAP/Journal. (forthcoming) “Extreme Capitalism: The Absurd Performance of Jennifer Lyn Morone, Inc.”

Digital Culture and Society. 2023. “Installation Art in Virtual Reality: Resisting a Corporate Commons.”

Woman’s Art Journal. 2023. Review of Judith Brodsky’s Dismantling the Patriarchy Bit by Bit. Vol 44, no. 1.

Visual Studies. 2023.“Reclaiming Vision: Looking at Berger’s Ways of Seeing and NASA’s Blue Marble,” Vol. 38, no. 1. Published online August 2021.

The Comparatist. 2022. “The Politics of the Absurd in the Obadike’s Blackness for Sale and Dread Scott’s White Male for Sale.” Vol. 46. 65-83.

In Light of Abstraction: Leo Villareal. 2022. Marfa Invitational, ArtBlocks. Spring.

City of Los Angeles, Individual Master Artist Program Catalog. 2022. “The Material Trace: Nancy Baker Cahill.”

Leonardo. 2022. “Beyond Representation in Virtual Reality: The Abstract Art of Jane Hamill and Kevin Mack,” 55.3, p. 240-245.

Proof of Art: A Short History of NFTs from the Beginning of Digital Art to the Metaverse. 2021. Ed. Alfred Weilinger (Distanz Verlag). “Blockchain’s Conceptual Landscape,” p. 144-153. Published following the exhibition Proof of Art at the Francisco Carolinum, Linz, June 10-September 15, 2021, curated by Jesse Damiani, Fabian Müller-Nittel and Markus Reindl.

Tech/Know/Futures. 2021. Ed. Charlotte Kent (Montclair State University and CalArts). “An Odd Assortment of Thoughts on the Monsters, Margins and Media of Our Time,” p. 70-79. Published following the exhibition Tech/Know/Futures at the Segal Galleries, Montclair, NJ, September 14-December 11, curated by Tom Leeser.

Burlington Contemporary. 2021 “Blockchain Manifestos: Fighting for the Imagination of a Culture,” November.

Emotion, Affect, and Rhetorical Persuasion in Mass Media: Theories and Case Studies. 2018. Ed. Lei Zhang. New York: Routledge. “Aestheticizing the Affective Politics of "If You See Something, Say Something." 156-170.

Harvard Design Magazine, To Manifest, manifesto with the Feminist Art & Architecture Collaborative

Charlotte Kent, PhD, is an arts writer and Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Montclair State University. She specializes in 20th and 21st century art, digital culture and emergent technologies, with a focus on situating these within a historical and ecological trajectory of culture and politics. She is co-editor with Katherine Guinness of Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art (forthcoming, Intellect Books).

She is an an Editor-at-Large with a monthly column on Art & Technology for The Brooklyn Rail and writes for assorted culture magazines and academic journals, as well as contributing essays to books and exhibition catalogs. She speaks locally and internationally about contemporary art’s imbrication in social and environmental situations. She is a Google Artist and Machine Intelligence Grant award winner, pursuing research on disciplinary notions of agency as these apply to art and automation. In 2023, she was the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at NXT Museum where she co-curated with Jesse Damiani the first RealTime exhibit, Lilypads: Mediating Exponential Systems.

Beyond topical politics, there are a politics to her style. She often interjects unexpected digressions because to mediate is to be situated liminally, like so many mythological tricksters, weaving connections across divides. Introducing a wry humor offers an alternative affective lens on culture and the contemporary, and so undermines tragedy as a superior mode, one that reproduces a classical hierarchy with alienating socio-political consequences.

She is a graduate of the CUNY Graduate Center, St. John’s College, Phillips Academy Andover, and the Writer’s Institute.

EDITORIAL WORK

Brooklyn Rail, Editor at Large, monthly column on Art & Technology, reviews contributor and New Social Environment interviewer. She was the Guest Editor for the Critic’s Page of the May 2023 issue.

ArtNet, contributor

Art News, contributor

Art Papers, contributor to special issue on AI

Art Review, contributor

BOMB, contributor

Burlington Contemporary, reviews contributor

CLOT Magazine, op-eds and reviews

Fast Company, contributor

Huge Moves, contributor

Hyperallergic, op-eds and reviews

Litro Magazine, feature article

Musée Magazine, feature articles and reviews