Cary Levine
Professor, Contemporary Art History
Director of Undergraduate Studies for Art History
clevine@unc.edu
Cary Levine is Professor of Contemporary Art History. He received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and was a recipient of a year-long J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. His first book, Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon (University of Chicago Press, 2013) examines the work of these artists in terms of post-60s politics, popular culture, mass media, and strategies of the grotesque. His second book, The Future is Present: Art, Technology, and the Work of Mobile Image (with Philip Glahn), focuses on an important telecommunications art collective and the intersections of art, politics, and technology. He was a 2020 recipient of the Art Journal Award and a 2014 recipient of the Hettleman Prize for Scholarly Achievement at UNC. He has lectured nationally and internationally, has written for various magazines and museum catalogues, and previously worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Selected Publications:
The Future is Present: Art, Technology, and the Work of Mobile Image (with Philip Glahn). MIT Press, 2024.
Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon. University of Chicago Press, 2013.
“Satellite Arts: A Television of Attractions” (with Philip Glahn), Parallax, vol. 26, no. 1, Sept 2020.
“The Future is Present: Electronic Café and the Politics of Technological Fantasy” (with Philip Glahn), Art Journal, Fall 2019.
“Interrogating Invention: Electronic Café and the Politics of Technology” (with Philip Glahn), Panorama, vol. 1 no. 3, June 2016.
“Between Nothing, Nowhere and No One,” in Guy Yanai: Ancienne Rive, exhibition catalogue, Yundler Brondino Verlag, 2015.
“Worried Man,” in Mark Mothersbaugh: It’s a Beautiful World, exhibition catalogue, ed. by Adam Lerner, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, 2014.
“Wedge Woods,” in Jason Middlebrook: My Landscape, exhibition catalogue, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 2014.
“A Gaping Hole,” in Beyond the Anti-Aesthetic (Stone Art Theory Institutes), ed. by James Elkins. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013.
“Transgression,” The Brooklyn Rail, June 2013.
“Under Cover Of Darkness: Jenny Holzer’s Endgame Paintings,” in Jenny Holzer: Endgame, exhibition catalogue, Skarstedt Gallery, 2012.
“Dana Schutz: It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” in Dana Schutz: If the Face Had Wheels, exhibition catalogue, Neuberger Museum of Art (Prestel Verlag), 2011.
“Manly Crafts: Mike Kelley’s (Oxy)Moronic Gender Bending,” Art Journal, vol. 69, no. 1, Spring 2010.
“You Are What (and How) You Eat: Paul McCarthy’s Food-Flinging Frenzies,” Invisible Culture, Issue 14, Spring 2010.
“Culture Morte: Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life Parodies,” in Tom Wesselmann: The Figurative Impulse, exhibition catalogue, Städtische Gallerie Ravensburg, 2008.
“Logical Conclusions: 40 Years of Rule-Based Art,” The Brooklyn Rail, April 2005.
“A Flatland of Forms: Thomas Nozkowski’s Paintings,” Art in America, October 2004.
“A Diderot of the Low: Mike Kelley’s Foul Perfection and Minor Histories,” Art in America, February 2004.
Header image credits: 1. Mobile Image, Satellite Arts (The Image as Place), 1977 (the Sherrie Rabinowitz & Kit Galloway Archive. 2. Mobile Image, Hole in Space (A Public Communication Sculpture), 1980 (the Sherrie Rabinowitz & Kit Galloway Archive). 3. Mobile Image, Electronic Café, 1984 (the Sherrie Rabinowitz & Kit Galloway Archive)