That art is not sui generis is no secret. My research examines the significant contributions of technical practitioners to the production and display of modern and contemporary art. Technical practitioners, technical systems, and technical knowledges, though ubiquitous throughout our contemporary cultural landscape, go largely unseen within it. In my research, I am interested in how figures like engineers, fabricators, riggers, construction workers, and contractors, to say nothing of the tools and systems they use and devise, have historically negotiated both the world of modern and contemporary art and the very construct of Art as such.

My first book project, Engineering Art, explores these concerns as pertains to the engineering of contemporary art. As contemporary art has grown ever more technically complex and architectural in its scale, engineers have become a mainstay presence in its production. At the same time as this, architectural shifts and advances in preventive conservation have seen to the overwhelming technologization of the museum environment, a fact that, similarly, places engineers at the center of its design. These two spheres of art’s engineering, as I explore in the book, are extensively implicated in one another, forcing a way of thinking about art that concretely exceeds the parameters of artist- and object-centered narratives. Drawing on interviews and archival research, and tracing a history of art, architecture, and engineering that extends from the mid-twentieth century to the present, my book charts the profound cultural influence of engineers across these interconnected domains of art’s production and display.

What does it mean to “own” a work of art? How can history inform new ownership practices across museums and the private sector?