Erica DiBenedetto

Position
Modern
Bio/Description

Profile

Erica DiBenedetto studies modern and contemporary art. Her interests include the relationships among art, architecture, and language, as well as the reception of earlier art historical moments in 20th-century work. DiBenedetto’s dissertation, “Drawing from Architecture: The Conceptual Methods of Sol LeWitt’s Art, 1960–1980,” examines how LeWitt approached the historical problem of art’s relationship to architecture largely through drawing, with consequences for both artistic and architectural practice. Her work has been supported by a Donald and Mary Hyde Summer Research Award from Princeton University, the Patricia and Phillip Frost Predoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Morgan-Menil Predoctoral Fellowship at the Morgan Library and Museum and the Menil Collection.

DiBenedetto holds a master’s degree from the Williams College Graduate Program in the history of art and an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. Her professional experience includes curatorial positions and graduate internships at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Clark Art Institute, the Williams College Museum of Art, and the Princeton University Art Museum. In 2021, she co-curated Dream Monuments: Drawing in the 1960s and 1970s with Kelly Montana at the Menil Drawing Institute.

Currently, DiBenedetto is a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. She previously worked at MoMA as a Museum Research Consortium Fellow in 2018–2019. In these roles, she has been part of the curatorial teams for exhibitions such as New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century (2019) and Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound (2022).

Selected Publications

“Scripts for the Land: Felice Lucero’s Paintings Layer Her Tongue and Terrain” (co-author Kelly Montana), Art in America, November 2022, 72–77.

“Monumental Dreams: A Story for Houston, ca. 1969,” The Menil Collection Online Publications, published May 17, 2021.

“LeWitt’s Locations, to a Point,” in Locating Sol LeWitt, ed. David Areford (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).

“Pedagogical Perspectives—Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957,” exhibition review, Art Journal 76:2 (Summer, 2017): 162–165.

“Sol LeWitt,” in Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker (De Gruyter, 2015).

“Gridding the Subject: Sol LeWitt’s Autobiography,” in Sol LeWitt: The Well-Tempered Grid, exhibition catalogue, ed. Charles W. Haxthausen (Williams College Museum of Art, distributed by D.A.P., 2012).