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 (2023), 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. This supports work on my new book project Street Addresses: Performing the Queer Life of the Street in 1970s New York. Read about the award here.

• 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, read a review, or watch the video of a lecture about the book.

• Fall 2025 will see the arrival of many forthcoming publications, including essays on Alex Da Corte, Marisol, and Scott Burton; contributions to Sixties Surreal at the Whitney Museum and Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum; and an article for the journal American Art. On the horizon for 2026 is the book Magic Episodes and Other Synchronicities: The Transhemispheric Correspondence of Scott Burton and Eduardo Costa in the 1970s (co-edited with Patrick Greaney for Ugly Duckling Presse).

• 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.

• This autumn’s public appearances include lectures at the Art Institute of Chicago, New York University, ZeM, the University of Rochester, and the American Studies Association. Spring 2026 includes talks at the University of Vienna, the Ludwig Foundation, the College Art Association, and Dia:Chelsea.

• Some recent talks have online recordings, including “Unnatural Relations: Stories of Queer Abstraction in American Art” for the Universität Bonn/ZeM online series “Abstraction Today” as well as a different version of this talk that was my Power Institute Lecture at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (with recording here).

• 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).