Courtney J. Martin
Director of the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA)
 

Courtney J. Martin is the Director of the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA). Prior to the YCBA, she was the Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Dia Art Foundation; an assistant professor in the History of Art and Architecture department at Brown University; assistant professor in the History of Art department at Vanderbilt University; Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley; a fellow at the Getty Research Institute; and a Henry Moore Institute Research Fellow. She also worked in the media, arts, and culture unit of the Ford Foundation in New York.  In 2015, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. 

In 2012, she curated a focus display at Tate Britain, Drop, Roll, Slide, Drip…Frank Bowling’s Poured Paintings 1973-1978.  In 2014, she co-curated the group show, Minimal Baroque: Post-Minimalism and Contemporary Art, at Rønnebæksholm in Denmark. From 2008-2015, she co-led a research project on the Anglo-American art critic Lawrence Alloway at the Getty Research Institute and is co-editor of Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (Getty Publications, 2015, winner of the 2016 Historians of British Art Book Award).

In 2015, she curated an exhibition of the American painter, Robert Ryman at the Dia Art Foundation, entitled Robert Ryman. She is the editor of Four Generations: The Joyner Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art (Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2016).  At Dia she oversaw exhibitions of works by Dan Flavin, Sam Gilliam, Blinky Palermo, Dorothea Rockburne, Keith Sonnier and Andy Warhol.

She received a doctorate from Yale University for her research on twentieth century British art and is the author of essays on Rasheed Araeen, Kader Attia, Rina Banerjee, Frank Bowling, Lara Favaretto, Leslie Hewitt, Asger Jorn, Wangechi Mutu, Ed Ruscha and Yinka Shonibare.

Space and Depth in the World: British Sculpture Abroad in the 1990s

British object makers in the 1990s, such as Mona Hatoum, Anish Kapoor, and Rachel Whiteread, offer distinct examples of what three-dimensional art looked like outside of the country. In this talk, I will examine how sculptural discourse was absent from British art shown outside of Britain in the 1990s, despite the international prominence of two distinct groups of British artists: the so-called Young British Artists (YBAs) and other British artists folded into a postcolonial or identity-based construction.