Richard Meyer will deliver a lecture titled Quarantined: Alice Austen and the Secret History of Photography as part of the Multiple Feminisms Lecture Series. The art-historical study of photography has typically focused on photographs that were published or exhibited in their contemporary moment. This focus has largely excluded private, underground, and subcultural materials as well as vast expanses of photography produced outside the context of the professional art world. By attending to the amateur photographer Alice Austen (1866-1952) and to pictures that were little known or shown at the time of their making, this talk argues for an alternative approach to the history of photography.

Meyer teaches art history courses at the University of Southern California, where he directs The Contemporary Project and the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate program. He is the author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art and co-authored Weegee and Naked City with Anthony W. Lee. With Catherine Lord, Meyer recently completed the survey text, Art and Queer Culture, 1885 to the present (forthcoming from Phaidon). He is currently writing a short history of contemporary art in the United States titled What Was Contemporary Art?

Meyer was the curator of Warhol's Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered, which was shown at The Jewish Museum in New York and, in expanded form, at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. He currently serves as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

Lecture Video

Multiple Feminisms Lecture Series

Feminism—and its multifaceted influence in today's world—is constantly evolving. The term "Multiple Feminisms" questions traditional notions of gender, race, and sexuality while calling for a politics of inclusion. These lectures bring new voices to Washington University's campus in an attempt to expand the conversation about what it means to be a feminist, establishing a forum to bridge disciplines within the humanities by investigating ongoing cultural debate over sexuality and gender and its effects upon modern art, visual culture, and academic practices.

The Multiple Feminisms Lecture Series is organized by Patricia Olynyk, director of the Graduate School of Art, in conjunction with the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, and made possible by a grant from Washington University's Diversity Initiative.