About Jennifer
Chicago, IL
Jennifer Harris is a writer, curator, and doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago. Her research explores global modernism with particular interest in the relationships between abstraction and ornament, dance and visual art, and craft and design. Her dissertation analyzes the influence of dance and movement on the work of American visual artists and institutions between 1930 and 1960. Her writing has appeared in several exhibition catalogues, the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, the Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Artforum, and the New York Times. Harris worked in The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Painting and Sculpture where she contributed to the 2019 reinstallation of the collection galleries and the exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends (2017), and co-organized the exhibition The Shape of Shape, Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman. She has since held curatorial fellowships in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Jenny holds a B.A. in Art History from Wellesley College.
“That Still Moment”: dance, art, and the modern museum, 1930-1960
Harris will work on completing her dissertation, which explores the place of dance in the history of twentieth-century visual art at instances when movement and choreography became key terms and conceptual frameworks for art’s making, display, and distribution. Focusing on the period between the closure of the Ballets Russes in 1929 and the emergence of Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s, the dissertation considers the pressures dance placed on the modernist story of visual art and the role it played as artists probed disciplinary limits. It concludes at the moment when dance re-entered the museum through choreographic works devised to move nimbly within and without its white walls.