Luke Naessens

Bio/Description

Profile

Luke Naessens studies post-war and contemporary art. His work focuses on the intersections of art and visual culture with empire and colonialism, and he is interested in materiality, global Indigeneities, anthropology, queer thought, and environmental justice. His dissertation, “Time in Process: Postminimalism, Indigenous Politics, and Colonial Imaginaries, 1969–1984,” traces a series of oblique historical encounters between Postminimalist artworks and Indigenous politics. Situating artistic attempts to reorganize time, space, and vision amidst the liberatory countercultural politics of the 1970s, it examines the way such projects were entangled with the United States’ colonial formations of time and space, which that decade’s movements for Indigenous sovereignty brought into view.

Before coming to Princeton, Naessens was a curatorial assistant at the Barbican Center in London, where he worked on exhibitions, including The World of Charles and Ray Eames and The Japanese House: Art and Life after 1945. Previously, he received a B.A. in art history and English literature from Trinity College, Dublin, and an M.A. in art history from the Courtauld Institute.

Field(s)
Contemporary Art
Modern Art