Dr. Karen Gonzalez Rice is a contemporary art historian and Associate Professor of Art History at Connecticut College
Her research examines how endurance art, an extreme form of performance art that holds a prominent place in contemporary art history, engages in cross-disciplinary debates about the ethical stakes of representation. Further, it examines the political possibilities of performance through the artist’s body and their lived experience as the material and visual artwork.
Karen Gonzalez Rice’s book Long Suffering: American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016) explores the intersection of twentieth-century American avant-garde performance art with traditions of prophetic religious discourse in the United States.
Recently, her multidisciplinary roots have been informed by her experience as a Mellon New Directions Fellow at Gallaudet University, pursuing training in Deaf and Disability studies. Her participation in Deaf communities generated new perspectives on performance art and the need to challenge the ableist foundations of art history.
Her campus leadership includes experience as Faculty Presider, Department Chair, Associate Director of the Museum Studies Certificate Program, long-time Faculty Fellow, and now Faculty Coach with the Center for Teaching & Learning at Connecticut College.
Karen is an accredited life coach who works with individual faculty and institutions to help academics create more satisfying lives in higher education.
Education
PhD
Duke University, Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Dissertation: Enduring Belief: Performance, Trauma, Religion
Advisor: Kristine Stiles
MA
The University of Texas at Austin, American Studies
Thesis: Art / Worship / Laughter / Death: Religion, Art, and Social Activism in Audience Experience at the Rothko Chapel in Houston
Advisor: Robert Abzug
BA
The University of Texas at Austin, Art History / Plan II, with Highest Honors
Book: Long Suffering
American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness
“Art historian Karen Gonzalez Rice’s Long Suffering: American Endurance Art as Prophetic Witness (2016) is an important addition to this growing bibliography. Gonzalez Rice examines the relations between the artistic and religious lives of performance artists Ron Athey, Linda Montano, and John Duncan, finding that their backgrounds in Pentecostalism, Catholicism, and Calvinism, respectively, shaped their approaches to endurance, the body, and ultimately suffering and potentially healing. Gonzalez Rice’s work is especially key as she shifts interest in religion away from what the artists believed, pointing instead toward the practices of art, the bodily-based disciplines, sufferings, and desires.”
S. Brent Plate in the Los Angeles Review of Books
Hamilton College
Organizations
College Art Association
Association of Art Historians
Performance Studies International
American Academy of Religion
American Studies Association
Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education (POD Network)
International Coaching Federation
“Art History is often perceived as old fashioned, stuffy, elitist. The kind of art history I do isn’t necessarily beautiful. It’s challenging, meaningful, and about profound humanity, radical critique, and wonderful speculative possibilities. Opening that sense of wonder and possibility around art history. The visual is powerful. Art history is crucial to the way we understand the world.”
Karen Gonzalez Rice
Karen Gonzalez Rice 