The Spring 2026 Graduate Art guest lecture series, organized by Jack Bankowsky and Jason Smith.

Daniel Spaulding

This event is free and open to the public. RSVPs are not required.

Daniel Spaulding is an art historian and writer concerned with the place of the aesthetic in capitalist modernity. Since 2020, he has been Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he teaches courses on global modernism, contemporary practices, methodology, and critical theory. He received his PhD in art history from Yale University in 2017. Prior to arriving in Madison, Professor Spaulding worked in the curatorial department of the Getty Research Institute and was an organizer of The Public School Los Angeles, a space for radical communal self-education. His first book is Joseph Beuys and History (Princeton University Press, 2026), and two further monographs are in the works: a historiographic study entitled When is an Image an Idea? Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, and the Stakes of Iconology, as well as a project tentatively called The Fate of Semblance: Modernism, Mirrors, Windows, Grids, Holes. He is also co-editing a volume of essays on Romanticism in the visual arts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Prof. Spaulding’s articles have recently appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual, The Journal of Art Historiography, The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, October, Radical Philosophy, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte. Non-academic writings of his have been published in Effects, e-flux, Mute, and Viewpoint Magazine, among other outlets. With Daniel Marcus and Jennifer Nelson, he is a founding editor of Selva: A Journal of the History of Art (selvajournal.org).

Image: Capri Battery (1985), Joseph Beuys.

See the full Spring 2026 Seminar schedule here.

Support for this series is generously provided by the following: Jack Shear, Brenda R. Potter, Brendan Dugan, Lisson Gallery, Beth Rudin DeWoody, BLUM, Hannah Hoffman, David Kordansky, and Jeffrey Deitch.

ArtCenter's Graduate Art program is based on intensive studio practice and rigorous academic coursework. The program is distinguished by its low faculty-to-student ratio that provides students with the attention and feedback they need to refine and achieve their artistic goals. Faculty and students are artists working in all genres—film, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance and installation. A significant number of alumni have achieved national and international acclaim and often return to share their insights and expertise as visiting faculty and guest lecturers.