Sarah E. Kleinman

art historian and curator
I am an art historian and curator specializing in modern and contemporary art, museum studies, and diaspora studies. I teach at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia and the Metropolitan State University of Denver in Denver, Colorado. My subfields include Minimalism, Conceptualism, Neo-Dada, and Institutional Critique, with a particular interest in the work of Caribbean, diasporic, and expatriate artists and curators. My research and teaching interests encompass themes of exile, migration and movement, personal history, identity, materiality, and postcolonial/decolonial theory in transcultural contexts of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century art. I received my PhD from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2024 from the Department of Art History. 

My teaching seeks to foster a supportive environment where students can feel comfortable learning art history by doing and sharing art history, encourage students to place personal experiences in the context of the field of art history, offer course content that has the lowest possible barriers to access, empower students to stay curious, and foster dispositional curiosity.

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Currently, I am in the early stages of adapting my doctoral dissertation into a book manuscript, In Favor of One’s Time: Locating the Curatorial Practices of Kynaston McShine, under contract with the University of Arkansas Press. This monograph provides the first critical study of Kynaston McShine (1935–2018), the first Black curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), examining his formative yet understudied contributions to exhibition histories and the visual lexicons of his time. By considering McShine’s life and landmark exhibitions as points of convergence between discourses of art, curating, and diasporic thought, my research underscores the Caribbean’s vital role in shaping histories of modernism. This project contributes to urgent conversations about authorship, exhibition histories, representation, and gradations of identity in curatorial studies, museum studies, and contemporary art history. 

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Curriculum Vitae

Academia.edu

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