Cole Gruber

Biography

Cole is a PhD student working at the intersection of art history, theory, and historiography. Many of his objects of study present themselves as limit cases to the discipline of art history—things that straddle, whether intentionally or not, the amorphous boundary between art and non-art. In particular, Cole finds himself drawn to artworks often placed within the twentieth century’s “conceptual” tradition as well as to the fascinating collection of candidates for the world’s oldest art objects—usually a few small marks in stone or bone made tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago by the hands of various nonextant species of the Homo genus.

Cole received his BA from UChicago and his MA from Williams College.