Lauren Kroiz

Lauren Kroiz

Associate Professor
20th Century American Art

Lauren Kroiz is Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching focus on art and modernism in the United States during the twentieth century. She is a Faculty Curator of photography, paintings, and works of art on paper at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, as well as affiliate faculty in the American Studies Program and the ...

Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle

Lauren Kroiz
2012
In turn-of-the-century New York, the photographer and modern art impresario Alfred Stieglitz and his allies embraced a racialized aesthetic discourse in their expressions of identity in the modern era. This book examines the often-neglected role played by immigrant artists and critics in the Stieglitz circle, including Japanese-German author Sadakichi Hartmann, Mexican-born caricaturist Marius de Zayas and English Sri-Lankan curator Ananda Coomaraswamy, as well as better-known U.S.-born painters, including Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe. Creative Composites argues for a new...

Cultivating Citizens: The Regional Work of Art in the New Deal Era

Lauren Kroiz
2018
During the 1930s and 1940s, painters Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry formed a loose alliance as American Regionalists. Some lauded their depictions of the rural landscape and hardworking inhabitants of America’s midwestern heartland; others deemed their painting dangerous, regarding its easily understood realism as a vehicle for jingoism and even fascism. Cultivating Citizens focuses on Regionalists and their critics as they worked with and against universities, museums, and the burgeoning field of sociology. Lauren Kroiz shifts the terms of an ongoing...