Gray Sweeney

J. Gray Sweeney is a nationally recognized leader in the fields of publishing and teaching of American art. He has published more than 200 books, peer-reviewed journals articles, single- and multiple-author catalogues and museum collection catalogue entries. Professor Sweeney produced more than $1 million in private, federal and state funds in support of his publications, exhibitions, and other scholarly endeavors. Professor Sweeney is nationally known as an expert on the art of the American West, the Hudson River School, and American painting in the 19th century. He is frequently quoted in The New York Times and has appeared on PBS's History Detectives.

Professor Sweeney received his doctorate in 1975 from Indiana University. His awards include numerous prestigious fellowships including the Smithsonian Senior Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, where he investigated critical issues in American art. His research has been supported by the Luce Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, The Tweed Foundation, Carnegie, Kress, Ford Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cargill Corporation.

His most recent book, "Fantastic Embodiment: Art, Imagination and the Ecocritical history of Personification," is in final preparation. This book investigates aesthetic conventions of anthropomorphic imagery from the Renaissance to the present. The study investigates the artistic conventions of perceiving fantastic personifications in clouds, rock faces, and gesturing trees in European and American landscape paintings from the Renaissance to the present.

Sweeney's teaching and mentoring philosophy is to help students develop ways of thinking that lead to “critical vigilance.” As art historians, art critics, or studio producers, his ultimate goal is to enable students to produce new methods of “embodying history” for themselves. He applies current theoretical and methodological discourses in my teaching and research. His instruction shows an impressive range and development culminating more than two decades of effort to rethink the belief system of traditional art history. His current focus is on the future of visual arts disciplines, and how they will be transformed by new conceptions, theories, technology, and globalization. He introduced a number of exciting and challenging courses in Methods and Theories of Art History, Visual Culture Studies and Theories of Contemporary Art. His courses deal with issues of critical theory, ideological and institutional critique, class, race and gender. His course on the art and ecology of visual cultures includes issues of “eco-criticism” and sustainability, and connects to his research on vitalistic personifications or anthropomorphic embodiments in the history of art. The focus of his teaching and research, as a publishing scholar, is based on excellence rather than quantity.