History of Art and Architecture

Jennifer Josten

Associate Professor

Area of Specialization

Modern and Contemporary Art
Advisees:

Biography

Jennifer Josten's research charts the flow of artists, forms, and ideas among and between Latin America, Europe, and the United States since 1940. Her interests include the art and architecture of greater Mexico and Latin America; transatlantic and inter-American artist-based networks of the Cold War era; and the presence of the pre-Columbian past in modern and contemporary art and architecture. Josten's 2018 book Mathias Goeritz: Modernist Art and Architecture in Cold War Mexico examines the dramatic cultural and political transformations of the 1940s–1970s in and beyond Mexico through the lens of the polyvalent artistic and critical practice of Mexico-based German artist Mathias Goeritz (1915–1990). (Preview here on Google books.) She has collaborated on a number of exhibition projects, and has recently contributed essays to the catalogues for Art_Latin_America: Against the Survey (Davis Museum at Wellesley College, 2019), Pop América: 1965–1975 (Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, and McNay Art Museum, 2018), Lucio Fontana: Ambienti/Environments (Pirelli HangarBicocca, 2017), and Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985 (LACMA, 2017), among others. In this video on LACMA's Facebook page, she discusses a few of the artworks that were on view in Found in Translation.

Josten spent the 2019–20 academic year in residence at UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) as an Institute of American Cultures Visiting Scholar. While based in Los Angeles, she drew on the holdings of the CSRC and other area repositories and resources to advance her current book project, which examines regional exchange networks for graphic and environmental design that extended from post-revolutionary Cuba and Mexico to participants in the U.S.-based Chicano and Black Power movements during the long 1960s. 

Education Details

M.A. and Ph.D. Yale University

M.A. University of Essex

B.A. Wellesley College

Selected Publications

See link below for Professor Josten's publications:

https://pitt.academia.edu/JenniferJosten

Selected Awards

Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring, 2020  

ALAA-Arvey Foundation Book Award for Mathias Goeritz, 2020 

Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant for Mathias Goeritz: Modernist Art and Architecture in Cold War Mexico, 2016 

Association for Latin American Art (ALAA) Dissertation Award, 2013

Postdoctoral Fellowship, Getty Research Institute, 2012–13

Frances Blanshard Fellowship Fund Prize for an outstanding dissertation submitted to the History of Art Department, Yale University, 2012

Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Award (institutional affiliation: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), 2008–09

Rotary International Foundation Ambassadorial Scholarship, 2003–04