Department of Art History

Theorising the Artist Interview, fresh off the press from Routledge, features a chapter, as well as cover art created, by college and doctoral alumna Zsofi Valyi-Nagy. Edited by UK-based art historians Lucia Farinati and Jennifer Thatcher, the volume’s essays theorize the artist interview as a form of cultural production and embrace it as a critical practice co-constructed by interviewer and interviewee. Zsofi's chapter, "Herstory or mine? Writing feminist histories of art with self-mythologies in mind," theorizes the use of oral history interviews in art historical monographs of living artists. This text grew out of methodological challenges she tackled in her dissertation on the Hungarian-born French artist Vera Molnar. It is also the culmination of Zsofi’s work on Speaking of Art: Artist Interviews in Scholarship and Practice, a workshop she co-founded in 2018 with fellow graduate students in art history and CMS in response to the need for practical instruction in oral history and the necessity to reflect on the role of interviews in art historical practice. Speaking of Art ran from 2018 to 2022; selected workshops are archived with Knowledge@UChicago, accessible to on-campus users only.