Christopher Ketcham
Visiting Lecturer, History of Art
- email cketcham@massart.edu
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education
- 2018 - PhD, History and Theory of Art, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- 2009, MA, Art History, Tufts Universiaty
Christopher Ketcham is an art historian, writer, and teacher based in Boston. His research focuses on the urban histories of American art in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a particular interest in sculpture. His writing has appeared in Public Art Dialogue, European Journal of American Culture, Curator, and elsewhere.
Christopher has researched and published extensively on the work of Tony Smith, including significant contributions to The Tony Smith Sculpture Catalogue Raisonné (2024), The Tony Smith Architecture Catalogue Raisonné (2025), and the companion volume Against Reason: Tony Smith, Architecture, and Other Modernisms (2025). He has taught at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Tufts University, and MIT.
Industry Experience
Selected Publications:
“A valid confrontation: Tony Smith and the socio-geometries of urban space,” in Against Reason: Tony Smith, Architecture, and Other Modernisms, ed. Sarah Auld and James Voorhees (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2025).
Co-author, with John Keenan, Tony Smith Architecture Catalogue Raisonné, ed. Sarah Auld and James Voorhees (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2025).
“The sculpture of Tony Smith: urban, suburban, and speculative,” in Tony Smith Sculpture Catalogue Raisonné, ed. Sarah Auld and James Voorhees (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2024).
“Tony Smith,” interview by Dan Golden, Curator (August 2023), https://curator.guide/tony-smith.
“Dennis Oppenheim and the Cartographic Expansion of American Sculpture,” European Journal of American Culture 39, no. 1 (March 2020).
“Tony Smith, Bryant Park, and Body Politics in John Lindsay’s New York,” Public Art Dialogue 7, no. 2 (Fall 2017).
Selected presentations and conferences:
“Henry Moore: The Humanity of Urban Space in the Postwar United States,” November 2024, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
“Infrastructural Aesthetics,” February 2022, College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference.
“Blight Sculpture: Speculative Aesthetics, Real Estate, and Urban Crisis in 1970s New York,” February 2021, College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference.
“The Negotiated Spaces of Zoning,” February 2020, College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference.
“Speculations in Real Estate and Sculpture: Arts Patronage and Spatial Authority in New York City after John V. Lindsay,” June 2019, Arts Patronage in Modern America, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford.
“Sculpture and Urban Authority in John V. Lindsay’s New York,” June 2018, Making Culture With/Out Uncle Sam: Public-Private Patronage in the 1960s, Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS) Annual Conference.
“Dennis Oppenheim’s Road Works,” May 2018, The Cartographic Imagination: Art, Literature and Mapping in the United States, Centre for American Studies at the University of Kent/Départment d’Etudes Anglophones at University of Strasburg.
Awards
Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art, 2015-16
