David J. Getsy is an art historian, curator, and art writer focusing on modern and contemporary art. He has published widely on American and European art from the nineteenth century to the present, and his current projects address queer methodologies, links between transgender studies and art history, and recoveries of suppressed or lost histories of queer and genderqueer performance. His books include Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (2022); Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (2015, reissued 2023); and the widely-read anthology of artists’ writings, Queer (2016). He is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow as well as the recipient of the Robert Motherwell Book Award (2023), an Award for Distinction from the College Art Association (2021), an Award for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities from the University of Virginia, and fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Dedalus Foundation, the Clark Art Institute, the Getty Foundation, the Terra Foundation, and the Graham Foundation. He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he is the inaugural Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History.

News and Events

• I was awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship, becoming part of the 100th class of foundation fellows.

• Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (University of Chicago Press, 2022) was awarded the 2023 Robert Motherwell Book Award for outstanding publication in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts. Download the book’s introduction here, see an excerpt of the concluding pages republished by Burlington Contemporary in May 2023, read a review, or watch the video of a lecture about the book.

• A number of forthcoming publications will appear in autumn 2025, including essays or articles on Alex Da Corte, Scott Burton, Marisol, and the avoidance of queer life in gallery-based art of the 1960s.

• More book news: Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender sold out in hardcover, but it was reissued in paperback in April 2023. On the horizon for early 2026, Ugly Duckling Presse will publish Magic Episodes and Other Synchronicities: The Transhemispheric Correspondence of Scott Burton and Eduardo Costa in the 1970s, which I am co-editing with Patrick Greaney (University of Colorado Boulder).

• Talks in 2024–25 have included a keynote address for the 50th annual conference of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, the Power Institute Lecture at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (with recording here), a lecture for the Scott Burton exhibition at the Pulitzer Foundation, a dialogue with Tom Burr at SculptureCenter, talks at Cornell University and Virginia Commonwealth University, a conference on queer archives, a keynote for a symposium on the work of photographer and social practice artist Barbara DeGenevieve, a conversation with EJ Hill at the Hammer Museum, and co-convening a seminar at the 25th anniversary conference of the Clark Art Institute Research and Academic Program.

• I received a university-wide Award for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities, one of the 2023 Research Achievement Awards from the University of Virginia.

• The article “How to Teach Manet’s Olympia after Transgender Studies” (2022) was recently republished as one of fourteen essays drawn from over forty years of articles from the journal Art History for the compendium issue “Queer Art’s Histories in Art History” (2024).