Hauser's art history lecture to focus on George Tooker

The work of artist George Tooker, who is the subject of a retrospective exhibition currently on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, will the topic of Skidmore?s annual Art History Lecture, to be delivered Monday, April 13, by Associate Professor of Art History Katie Hauser.

Titled ? ?No Direction Home?: George Tooker, Deviance, and Visibility in 20th-Century America,? the talk will begin at 5:30 p.m. in Emerson Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.  Admission is free and open to the public.

George Tooker?s Waiting Room II (1982) is an extraordinarily early indictment of the Reagan administration?s neglect of both the homeless population and those suffering from HIV/AIDS, according to Hauser. Artists and collectives like Krzysztof Wodiczko and Gran Fury have enjoyed critical success for their projects associated with homelessness and those living with the stigma caused by HIV/AIDS, however they began their projects in the late 1980s.  Hauser argues that Tooker?s sensitivity to both marginalized populations explains this work?s prescient condemnation of Reagan-era negligence.

The author of ?George Tooker, Surveillance, and Cold-War Sexual Politics,? published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies in 2005, Hauser also will present an invited lecture titled ?Made You Look:  George Tooker and Surveillance in Cold-War America? in May at the Columbus Museum of Art, for a symposium titled ?Art of Concern (Art Under Surveillance).?  She has been researching and writing about the artist for the past decade and last year received a Skidmore faculty development grant to conduct research on Tooker at the archives of American art in Washington, D.C.

A member of the Skidmore faculty since 1997, Hauser is especially interested in American and European 20th-century representational art, feminist theory, and mass culture. She earned a B.A. degree at the University of California, Davis, and holds master?s and Ph.D. degrees in art history from the University of California, Los Angeles.