Alexander Alberro's courses and graduate advising is in the area of modern and contemporary European, U.S., and Latin American art, as well as in the history of photography. Recent lecture courses include "Histories of Photography"; "Early Modernism and the Crisis of Representation"; “In and Around Abstract Expressionism”; and “Contemporary Art.” Recent graduate seminars include "Contemporary Photography and Camera Work"; "Spectatorship, Participation and Interaction in Contemporary Art"; "Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity"; and "Abstract Art and its Legacies in Latin America." Professor Alberro's writings have appeared in a wide variety of journals and exhibition catalogues. He is also the author of Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth Century Latin American Art (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming); Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (MIT, 2003), and has edited books on contemporary art including Working Conditions: The Writings of Hans Haacke (MIT, forthcoming), Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists Writings; Art After Conceptual Art (MIT, 2009); Museum Highlights (MIT, 2005), Recording Conceptual Art (University of California, 2001), Two-Way Mirror Power (MIT 1999); and Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (MIT, 1999).
Professor Alberro is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the George A. and Eliza Howard Foundation, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and has taught at the University of Florida and the University of California at Berkeley. He is presently at work on a volume that explores the new forms of art and spectatorship that have crystallized in the past two decades. Prof. Alberro has been a featured speaker at many universities and cultural institutions throughout the world, and has appeared in several documentary films on contemporary art.
“What Is Radical?” ArtMargins, 10:3 (October 2021), 10-12.
“Contemporary Art, Activism, and Symbolic Value,” Journal of Visual Culture (01/17/2021)
“François Morellet’s Concrete Art of the 1950s,” in François Morellet, ed. Béatrice Gross (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 38-45.
“'Like the Skin of A Whale': The Pluri-sensorial Art of Lygia Pape,” in Lygia Pape, ed. Olivier Renaud-Clément (New York, NY: Hauser & Wirth, 2018), 8-25.
“Sculpture Palimpsests: Michael Asher in Münster,” Out of Time, Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017 (Autumn 2016).
“To Find, To Create, To Reveal: Torres-García and the Models of Invention in Mid-1940s Rio de la Plata,” Joaquín Torres-Garcia: The Arcadian Modern (Museum of Modern Art, 2015), 106-121.
“Media, Art, and Politics in the Work of Roberto Jacoby,” October, 153 (Summer 2015), 3-13.
“Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, and Max Jorge Hinderer, The Potosí Principle, 2010,” Mousse, 45:4 (2014), 21-33.
“A Messier Coherence,” Modernism/modernity, 20:2 (April 2013), 371-381.
“Life Models,” Frieze, 148 (June/July/August 2012), 154-159.
“Murder, He Wrote,” John Miller: The Ruin of Exchange (JRP/Ringier, 2012), 11-19.
“Picturing Relations: Images, Texts and Social Engagement in the Work of Barbara Kruger,” Barbara Kruger (Rizzoli, 2010), 193-200.
“Institutions, Critique, and Institutional Critique,” Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings(MIT Press, 2009), 2-19.
“Periodising Contemporary Art,” Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, Convergence, Proceedings of the 32nd Congress of the International Committee for the History of Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Melbourne University Press, 2009), 961-965.
“Mimicry, Excess, Critique,” Museum Highlights: The Collected Writings of Andrea Fraser (MIT Press, 2005), xxi-xxxvii.
“Specters of Provenance: National Loans, the Königsplatz, and Maria Eichhorn’s `Politics of Restitution’,” Grey Room, 18 (Winter 2005), 65-81.
“Beauty Knows No Pain,” Art Journal, 63:2 (Summer 2004), 36-43.
“The Catalogue of Robert Smithson’s Library,” Robert Smithson, ed. Eugenie Tsai (University of California Press, 2004), 244-248.
“Meaning at the Margins: The Semiological Inversions of John Knight,” 870: John Knight (Storm King Art Center, 2002), 16-31.
“Unraveling the Seamless Totality: Christian Philipp Müller and the Reevaluation of Established Equations,” Grey Room, 6 (Spring 2002), 5-25.
“At the Threshold of Art as Information,”Recording Conceptual Art (University of California Press, 2001).
“The Fragment and the Flow: Sampling the Work of Renée Green,” Renée Green: Ombres i senyals, ed. Nuria Enguita (La Fundació Antoni Tápies, 2000), 20-43.
“Blind Ambition: Andreas Gursky’s Big Picture,” Artforum International, 39:5 (January 2001), 104-114.
“Reconsidering Conceptual Art, 1966-1977,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (MIT Press, 1999), xvi-xxxvii.
“Demystifying the Image: The Film and Video Work of Rodney Graham,” in Rodney Graham: Cinema Music Video, ed. Yves Gevaert (Kunsthalle Wien, 1999), 13-29, 73-87.
“A Media Art: Conceptualism in Latin America in the 1960s,” in Rewriting Conceptual Art, eds. Michael Newman and Jon Bird (Reaktion Books, 1999), 140-151, 233-236.
“The Dialectics of Everyday Life: Martha Rosler and the Strategy of the Decoy,” Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World, ed. Catherine De Zegher (MIT Press, 1998), 72-112.
"The Turn of the Screw: Daniel Buren, Dan Flavin, and the Sixth Guggenheim International Exhibition," October, 80 (Spring 1997), 57-84.