Rhea Anastas

Rhea Anastas is a scholar of contemporary art and independent curator based in Los Angeles. With eleven artists and filmmakers (including Moyra Davey, Andrea Fraser, Christian Philipp Müller, Jeff Preiss, R. H. Quaytman, Karin Schneider, and Jason Simon), she was a cofounder of Orchard, a cooperative gallery on New York’s Lower East Side with a predetermined three-year lifespan (2005–8). Anastas received her BA (1990) and MA (1995) in art history from Columbia University; she received her PhD (2004) in art history from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Anastas makes exhibitions, researches, and writes on twentieth- and twenty-first-century postwar modern and contemporary visual art, including works in Minimal and Conceptual Art, video, performance, and film. Her interests include the understudied role that artists, especially women and Black artists, have played as self-organizers—that is, as presenters and theorists of their own art or of others’ art. Anastas’s scholarship often involves extensive primary research in artists’ studios and visual-art archives, as well as editorial work with artists’ writings and other primary-source texts.

Among Anastas’s first primary-research and editorial projects is the acclaimed Witness to Her Art: Art and Writings by Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell, and Eau de Cologne (Annandale-on-Hudson: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2006). This volume of contemporary feminist art, coedited with critic Michael Brenson, emphasized questions of sexual difference, critical intelligence, distance, and absence in the decisions a group of artists and one gallerist made in producing and exhibiting and publishing their art.

Recently, Anastas has edited Adrian Piper: Performing Objects I Have Been; Selected Audio Recordings and Writings, 1972–96, a comprehensive collection of documents relating to Piper’s performance Some Reflective Surfaces (1975–76), along with other writings spanning Piper’s work from 1975–96 (Amsterdam: If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution, 2021).

Over 2018 through 2021, Anastas collaborated with artist Cady Noland on THE CLIP-ON METHOD, a self-published artist’s book (and the first book of any kind) devoted to Noland’s work and writing. Anastas served as curator, coeditor, and copublisher with Noland on this project, which was published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title at Galerie Buchholz, New York, June 17–September 11, 2021.

From 2022 through April 2026, Anastas worked in Conceptual artist Christine Kozlov’s archive (Christine Kozlov Estate, London) with artist Nora Schultz to co-teach a class and curate the first large-scale survey exhibition of Kozlov’s artwork and collaborations in visual art, performance for video, and artist’s video and film. Two exhibitions at Arts and Letters New York and Raven Row London were the first ever to present Conceptual Art pioneer Kozlov’s activities in experimental art in depth.
 

Books

Rhea Anastas and Leigh Ledare. Double Bind. New York, NY: A.R.T. Press, 2015. Book-length Dialogue by Rhea Anastas and Leigh Ledare; Introduction, Anastas; Preface, Ledare; Photography by Ledare.

Allan McCollum, JRP Ringier, 2012. Editor; Author of a new essay, “In Every Act of Approaching a Painting.” 

Witness to Her Art: Art and Writings by Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell and Eau de Cologne, Editor, with Michael Brenson, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2006, distributed by D.A.P. Editor; Author of the introduction to the anthology.

Dan Graham: Works 1965-2000, Co-editor of the book, with Marianne Brouwer, Richter Verlag, 2001. French edition 2001; German edition 2002. Editor, Author of Chronology of Works and Writings, 1965-2000.

Selected publications in-progress

Being the Opposite: Dialogues and Other Writing from Orchard, Edited by Rhea Anastas and Nicolàs Guagnini.
Forthcoming self-theory of Orchard, the experimental Lower East Side New York gallery Orchard that operated from 2005-2008, co-founded by Anastas, Andrea Fraser, R. H. Quaytman, Nicolás Guagnini, and eight other artists and writers.

Recent essays

“Language is the social dress.” In Josephine Pryde, The Enjoyment of Photography. Zurich: JRP Ringier and Kunsthalle Bern, 2015.

“Models of the Feminist Everyday.” In untitled monograph on the complete work of Jennifer Bornstein. Berlin: Berliner Künstlerprogram der DAAD, 2015.

Selected panels

“Histories and Economies of Contemporary Art,” Society of Contemporary Art Historians, College Art Association, February 11, 2015. Panelists Anastas, Howard Singerman, Katy Siegel, Nato Thompson.

“Out of Alternatives,” presented by Common Practice New York and Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College at Artists Space Books and Talks, New York, May 18, 2014. Participants include Rhea Anastas, Katherine Brewer Ball, David Joselit, Ralph Lemon, Stephen Levin, Park MacArthur, Nadja Millner-Larsen, and Andrea Fraser and Lise Soskolne for Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), with additional presentations and support from CCS Bard students Sabrina Blaichman, Neringa Cerniauskaite, Andrew Kachel, Clara Lopez, Cloé Perrone, and Carla Acevedo-Yates.

Panel organizer and presenter, “Acts of Politics and Becoming”: Rhea Anastas, Huey Copeland, Malik Gaines, and Fred Moten. The Hammer Museum of the University of California Los Angeles, May 13, 2014. Panel in conjunction the with the exhibition, “Take It Or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology,” Hammer Museum, February 9 – May 18, 2014.

“Mike Kelley and Class”: Rhea Anastas, Thomas Crow, John Miller, MoMA PS1, February 2, 2014. 

Selected publications since 2010

“The Artist Is a Currency,” Rhea Anastas, Gregg Bordowitz, Andrea Fraser, Jutta Koether, Glenn Ligon. In Reading/Feeling, eds. Tanja Baudoin, Frédérique Bergholtz and Vivian Ziherl. Amsterdam: If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, 2013. Reprint of 2006 roundtable for Grey Room no. 24 and Documenta 12.

“Scene of Production.” Artforum Vol. 52 no. 3 (November 2013): pp. 235-236, 310.

“Of the Numbers Shows Being Made,” Review of Cornelia Butler and other authors, From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows, 1969-74,” Exhibition Histories, Afterall Books 2012, Texte zur Kunst 87 (September 2012): pp. 170-175.

“A Nude Poses in the Whitney Museum Holding a Cigarette,” Parkett no. 90 (2012): pp. 101-107 (108-115 German).

“Individual and Unreal: Agnes Martin’s Writings in 1973,” in Agnes Martin, eds. Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly and Barbara Schröder. New Haven: Yale University Press and the Dia Art Foundation, New York, 2011, pp. 132-152.

“American Fine Arts Laboratory of Exhibition and Idea: A Close-to-Your-Chest Goof,” Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 49: 3-4, issue themed “Bohemians,” (Fall 2010): pp. 60-63.

Selected curatorial projects

“New Cuts, K8 Hardy,” January 10-March 20, 2015, University Art Galleries, Clare Trevor School of the Arts, University of California, Irvine.

Art in Embassies Exhibition, Curator, with Barbara Piwowarska, U.S. Embassy Residence, Warsaw, Poland (for Ambassador Lee A. Feinstein), October 2010 through 2011. Artists exhibited: Jo Baer, Melvin Edwards, Louise Lawler, Zoe Leonard, Jadwiga Maziarska, Lorraine O’Grady, Włodzimierz Pawlak, R. H. Quaytman, Allan Sekula, Jack Whitten, Petra Wunderlich.

Orchard, 2005-2008, Co-founder, organizer of various exhibitions and programs. Orchard was an experimental gallery founded by Anastas, Andrea Fraser, Nicolàs Guagnini, R. H. Quaytman, Jeff Preiss and seven others on New York’s Lower East Side that operated between May 2005 and May 2008. With over twenty-seven exhibitions and dozens of performances, screenings, lectures, and other events, the gallery tested a model of critical art and an ethics of receiving and producing in the politically complicated moment of the second Bush term, the ongoing Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the booming global art market. http://www.orchard47.org/
-About Orchard: Orchard Dossier, various authors, ed. Branden W. Joseph, Grey Room no. 35 (Spring 2009): pp. 90-127.

Visiting scholar/fellow

Fall 2011/12, Nominated and Awarded Otis Visiting Fine Arts Critic in Residence Fellowship, Fine Arts Department, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA. Senior Critic and lead scholar for the Fine Arts Critic in Residence undergraduate course. Lecture: “Four Kinds of Pragmatism,” Santa Monica Broad Theater, Santa Monica, CA.

Fall 2012, Invited Senior Critic and lead scholar in graduate seminar, “Orchard,” a course centered on the experimental artist-run gallery taught by Noah Simblist, Associate Professor of Art, Southern Methodist University, Meadows School of the Arts, Dallas, TX (September 23-29).