Karen Gonzalez Rice is an Associate Professor of Art History at Connecticut College.
She gives talks about contemporary art and offers professional development workshops for faculty. She hosts The Good Enough Professor podcast.
Workshop Topics
- Freedom at Mid-Career
- Satisfaction and Sustainability in the New Semester
- Cultivating Rest in a Busy Time
- Building Networks of Support in Academia
- When Getting It Right Gets in the Way
- Compassion for your Inner Critic
- Playful Academia
- Dreaming Big & Getting What You Want This Summer
- Kaleidoscope Shifts: Tiny Changes that Make a Big Difference in Your Academic Life
The Good Enough Professor Podcast
Talks and Presentations by Year
2025
Speculative Futures for Deaf Studies & Art History in Six Troublesome Images
Presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the 17th Annual Nordic Network on Disability Studies Research
Helsinki, Finland
Read the abstract
The disciplines of Deaf Studies and Art History are concerned with the histories and mechanisms of visual communication, visual cultures and identities, and power and representation. Yet scholars only rarely have interwoven their subjects, theories, and methods. In this paper, I explore six images that exceed disciplinary capacities and demand the engagement of both Deaf Studies and Art History for meaning-making. I examine the dynamics of sight, visibility, access, and privilege through a series of juxtapositions: an iconic photograph of Jean Francois Mercurio smashing hearing aids with a sledgehammer (1990) and Rafael Ortiz’s Piano Destruction Piece (1966); Nancy Rourke’s mural of indigenous signing figures for the exhibition We, Native Deaf People, Are Still Here! at Gallaudet University (2024) and Kent Monkman’s mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) (2019) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; a photograph of a 19th-century art class at a Pennsylvania Deaf school and a news image of protestors at the 2017 Whitney Biennial blocking audiences from seeing white artist Dana Schutz’s Open Casket, a painting of the battered body of Emmet Till. Drawing on Christine Sun Kim’s articulation of Deaf rage, Leonard Davis’s theory of the “Deafened moment,” and DeafBlind aesthetics as well as performance art histories, I consider (visual) meaning-making as embodiment, how sensory activity generates collective meaning, and the power of images to create new communities and new imaginaries, and I speculate on the possibilities for intertwined futures across Deaf Studies and Art History.
2023
Reclaiming the Good Life: Empowering Mid-Career Faculty to Thrive
Presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the 48th Annual POD Network Conference
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Read the abstract
Institutions have long known the perils of mid-career, when faculty may feel unsettled, isolated, and uncertain, now amplified by the pandemic. Yet mid-career has the potential for deep satisfaction, rewarding relationships, and creative fulfillment. This session explores how CTLs can empower mid-career faculty to reclaim the good life with programming focused on community, well-being, and empowerment. We will explore how white supremacy culture and ableism shape mid-career mentalities and take an anti-racist, disability-justice, trauma-informed approach to designing mid-career programming. Participants will leave the session with a repeatable, step-by-step process for creating their own meaningful programming for mid-career faculty.
Birds of a Feather: Building a Coaching Community in Higher Ed
Co-Convener, 48th Annual POD Network Conference
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Read the abstract
Coaching strategies uniquely empower educators and offer educational developers new possibilities for cultivating equity, holistic well-being, and thriving within our institutions. In this Birds of a Feather session, we will discuss the current status of coaching in higher education, share existing structural models for coaching programming, and address the challenges of internal coaching within our centers. We invite credentialed coaches, those pursuing coaching training, and anyone interested in implementing coaching techniques in higher education to join us in building a cohesive coaching community within educational development. Come share your insights, experiences, and collaborative solutions for enhancing coaching practices in our field and promoting a coaching culture within educational institutions.
Bridging the Personal & the Professional: A Holistic Approach to Cultivating Community and Individual Wellbeing on Campus & Beyond
Presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice, Michael Reder, and R. Danielle Egan for the American Association of Colleges and Universities 2023 Annual Meeting
San Francisco, California
Read the abstract
We can no longer ignore how the personal and the professional are intertwined on our campuses. In this interactive session, run by a Dean of the Faculty, Director of a Faculty CTL, and a faculty member, we will argue that institutions must take a holistic approach to supporting both faculty and staff, enabling them to sustain their work for and with our students and making it more powerful. We will share two interventions: the first a campus-wide series on fostering a “community of care,” the second a group of workshops to help individuals find meaning and purpose in their work and lives. We share our lessons learned, principles for doing this work, and offer tools for thinking about whole-person approaches to supporting colleagues on your own campus. Participants will leave with a list of resources, including descriptions of the workshops and events.
2022
Re-Connecting as Whole People: Life Coaching & The ‘Rhythms of Academic Life’ Workshop Series
Presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the (Re)Imagining Your Programming to Help Your Colleagues (Re)Connect Carousel Session at the 47th Annual POD Network Conference
Seattle, WASHINGTON
Read the abstract
What is life coaching and what can it offer educational developers? Coaches are trained to ask critically-reflective questions to help people define, prioritize, and pursue what matters to them. Usually associated with CEOs and senior managers, coaching can be a valuable tool for educational developers to help faculty and staff create more sustainable, satisfying lives and careers. This interactive session will introduce you to coaching techniques, explore the ways in which coaching skills and practices can be incorporated into our work, and share materials from our coaching-based series,, “The Rhythms of Academic Life,” including descriptions of events.
Creating Compassionate Classroom Communities
Presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice and Katherine Myers for the University of Arizona Global Campus Teaching and Learning Conference
Virtual
Looking Closely
Keynote Address for Honors & Awards at Connecticut College
New London, Connecticut
Read the abstract
In this address to the senior class of 2022, I offer the art historical practice of looking closely as anti-racist strategy for self-reflection and critical perspective-taking. I examine artworks by Regina Jose Galindo, Louise Nevelson, Wendy Red Star, and Cassils to consider how looking closely is a political and moral act with radical, inclusive potential.
2021
Art & Activism
Film Viewing of Borderland: The Life & Times of Blanche Ames Ames and Panel Discussion by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the Connecticut College Arboretum
New London, Connecticut
Read the abstract
In this panel discussion, I discuss three artworks by feminist artists visualizing gender and landscape–Ana Mendieta, Marcella Ernest and Keli Mashburn, and Georgia O’Keeff–to explore how activist art might not always look how we expect it to look, and how artists representations are deeply rooted in their cultural contexts.
2019
Intentional Religious Communities and the Disciplining of American Performance Art
Presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the CAA Advancing Art & Design 107th Annual Conference
New York, New York
Read the abstract
From the 1960s to the 1980s, American experimental artists explored the possibilities of performance as a corporal means of knowing. In the process, artists including Chris Burden, Tehching Hsieh, Ana Mendieta, Senga Nengudi, Rafael Montañez Ortiz, Wolfgang Stoerchle, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and others established modes of practice that have shaped the genre to the present. At the same time, intentional religious communities gained visibility in U.S. popular culture. This paper brings together these seemingly disparate modes of cultural production to theorize how radical aesthetic strategies of endurance and habits of discipline responded to popular representations of communal religious commitment. From the best-selling Tassajara Bread Book by Buddhist monk and monastery baker Edward Espe Brown to news images of Catholic nun Liz McAllister’s Plowshares protest actions and footage of Krishna Consciousness devotees on street corners and airports, representations of monks, nuns, and communal religious groups in the public sphere proliferated in U.S. media in the second half of the twentieth century. These images presented religious commitment in terms of habitual action, ethical dissent, and countercultural values and demonstrated how discipline could serve as a powerful performance strategy. Refracted through this lens of popular culture, discipline served as a crucial phenomenological model for performance artists, who used it to deepen the ethical character of their performance actions, to navigate and perform the intersectionalities of gender, race, sexuality, and other identities, and to strive for moral clarity and moral authority in the murky context of Cold War American culture and politics.
2018
Maintaining Discipline: Endurance Art and Monasticism in the 1970s
Presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the Rhodes College Department of Art & Art History
Memphis, Tennessee
Read the abstract
In the 1970s, American popular visual culture and avant-garde performance art coincided in the figures of monks and nuns. Endurance, commitment, and habits of discipline defined mass media figures from Mother Teresa to the vigilante Buddhist monk in the television show Kung Fu and also motivated the aesthetic strategies of experimental artists including Mierle Laderman Ukeles. In this talk, I explore 1970s performance art practices within the context of everyday Cold War popular culture and offer a re-evaluation of important performance actions that shape contemporary art to the present.
2017
Tina Barney and Whiteness: Introduction to Tina Barney: Speaking of Art
Presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the Lyme Academy of Art’s Bridging the Arts film series at the Katherine Hepburn Cultural Center
Old Saybrook, Connecticut
Read the abstract
Tina Barney is a white artist from New York and Rhode Island, active from the 1970s to the present, best known for photographs that are large-scale yet intimate, domestic yet worldy, familiar yet exclusive. This talk explores debates about whiteness and privilege in Barney’s photography and considers questions of race and class in her work as well as the ambiguity of Barney’s representation of power.
2015
OERs in the Art History Survey
Presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for Using and Developing Impactful and Affordable Learning Material in the Digital Age: A Workshop on the Open Educational Resources Movement Conference at Fairfield University
Fairfield, Connecticut
2014
Sexing the Monk: Masculinity and Monastic Discipline in American Endurance Art Circa 1975
Paper presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the College Art Association 102nd Annual Conference
Chicago, Illinois
Read the abstract
This paper examines how male endurance artists in the 1970s used monastic discipline as a visual strategy to negotiate their lived experiences of masculinity. Strategies of discipline motivated male endurance artists in the United States throughout the 1970s, including Wolfgang Stoerchle in his Attempt Public Erection pieces (1972-75), former monk Houston Conwill in his West African/Catholic Juju Rituals (1975-83), and Tehching Hsieh in his series of One Year Performances (1978-present). With endurance actions based on the cultivation of self-control and visual strategies predicated on order and repetition, these three male artists practiced monastic discipline as a means of exploring, delineating, and transgressing gender identity in their artworks. This paper traces the dynamics of masculinity in the performance disciplines of Hsieh, Conwill, and Stoerchle and explores how their actions coincided with, appropriated, troubled, and transformed the figure of the warrior-monk, a new stereotype in 1970s visual culture.
2013
Pop on the Dark Side: Performance Art & Pop Art
Presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the Lyman Allyn Art Museum
New London, Connecticut
Read the abstract
Pop Art’s bright colors and fizzy subjects can be deceptive. Pop artists tackled tough subjects, offered serious critiques, and deliberately engaged with the dark side of consumer society. But these critical commentaries are often overlooked in favor of less confrontational artworks. In this talk, we will excavate the dark side of Pop Art, focusing on waste and violence in the the forms and content of Pop.
2012
Cocking the Trigger: Explicit Male Performance and Its Consequences
Paper presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the Association of Art Historians 38th Annual Conference
Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
Read the abstract
This paper traces the consequences of explicit performance in the work of three male artists: Wolfgang Stoerchle, John Duncan, and Paul McCarthy. How did these artists’ obscene actions impact their lives, their art communities, and art historical modes of critical inquiry about gender and sexuality in contemporary art to the present? Loosely associated in art world circles 1970s Southern California, Stoerchle, Duncan, and McCarthy explored male sexuality, aggression, and vulnerability in their challenging performances. Each worked in the nude to enact or simulate sex acts, and audiences charged all three artists with obscenity. Yet debates around these works and the artists’ subsequent careers have mapped vastly different trajectories, from Stoerchle’s obscurity and Duncan’s infamy to McCarthy’s critical acclaim and commercial success. What shifts in contexts, audiences, and performance strategies yielded such radically diverse responses to these artists’ obscene performances? How have the differing dynamics of victimhood and aggression in these works contributed to the disjunction of art historical discourses about these artists? In examining the reception of explicit male performance during a key moment of avant-garde experimentation, this study illuminates current disciplinary modes of evaluating obscenity in contemporary art history.
Aftershocks: Natural Disaster, Contemporary Art, and Survival
Presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice and Ashley Hope Carlise for the Southeastern College Art Association Conference
Durham, North Carolina
Read the abstract
In recent years, natural disasters in New Orleans, Port-au-Prince, and Tokyo—to name just a few—have transformed local artists into survivors. After the hurricane, avalanche, earthquake, or tsunami, in the unsettled or resettled studio, how do these contemporary artists mark the shock of collisions between before and after? How do they register the radical uncertainties and shifting geographies of post-disaster existence? Waters recede, clean-up operations falter, government assistance fades, public attention focuses on yet other tragedies, but artists continue to visualize their endurance of human loss, displacement, and resettlement.
This panel investigates the visual legacies of natural disasters in contemporary art, with particular attention to the processes, contexts, and consequences of post-disaster art-making. We seek to foster dialogue among practitioners, historians, and theorists in order to develop frameworks for considering the complex intersections of place, process, history, and trauma in artists’ practices. We invite papers on varied aspects of this topic, for example, specific artworks, artists, or communities; visual marks of disaster-induced political and social upheaval in contemporary art practices; artists’ collectives and social action; visual culture in disaster areas, such as graffiti or architectural reconstruction; and traumatic modes of representation. Proposals from artists whose current work engages with these issues are especially welcome.
Emotive Cognition and Sensuous Devotion in Catholicism
Discussant at Connecticut College
New London, Connecticut
2011
Collaborative Religiosity: Christian Jankowski’s Holy Artwork
Paper Presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art Symposium on “Why Have There Been No Great Modern Religious Artists?”
New York, New York
Read the abstract
In his video Holy Artwork (2001), German performance artist Christian Jankowski prostrated himself at the feet of televangelist preacher Peter Spencer for the duration of a worship service. Created in collaboration with Spencer during Jankowski’s residency at ArtPace, an artists’ residency program in San Antonio, Texas, Holy Artwork unsettled the boundaries between religious practice and art practice. In this paper, I explore the historical and theological contexts that shaped both the forms and the content of Jankowski’s important piece. I examine specific bodily worship practices, visual and aural influences, and the theological concerns inherent in Jankowski’s collaboration with Rev. Spencer and his attention to hospitality and submission, and I theorize how the performance artist’s body can become a site of theological significance in this challenging art-world context.
2010
John Duncan’s Confrontational Aesthetics
Paper Presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the Middle Atlantic Symposium at the National Gallery of Art
Washington DC
Read the abstract
Incendiary moral outrage fuelled the early works of American performance artist John Duncan. In this paper, I explore how Duncan’s early work reveals his indebtedness to Calvinist modes of moral communication, public address, and existential anxiety, and how this work visualizes the artist’s deeply traumatized subjectivity as mediated by Calvinist theology. In elaborating these religious roots of Duncan’s controversial art practice, my work seeks to recuperate religion, specifically artists’ religious subjectivities, as a crucial area of art historical concern in the study of performance art.
Minimal Publics: Donald Judd, Marfa, and the Politics of Audience
Paper Presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the New England American Studies Association on “The Arts and the Public”
Boston, Massachusetts
Read the abstract
Throughout the 1980s, minimalist artist Donald Judd systematically acquired vast properties in and around the remote desert location of Marfa, Texas, eventually establishing a contemporary art space—the Chinati Foundation—in this tiny ranching town. Judd’s attempts to colonize this community exacerbated long-standing conflicts in Marfa. In this paper, I explore the impact of Judd’s visual legacy on disparate audiences in Marfa. How does Judd’s aesthetic presence in the Marfa landscape mediate relations between these publics? I argue that Judd’s ongoing visual occupation of Marfa, and the appropriation of Marfa as an art-world destination, pivots on the significance of the myth of the American West to the contemporary art community. I offer a critical assessment of Judd’s visual presence in the Marfan landscape, and I analyze the role of Marfa in the art world imaginary, with particular attention to notions of expansion, masculinity, independence, and privilege.
’Wake Up!’: John Duncan’s Move Forward and the Aesthetics of Moral Outrage
Paper presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the Art, Art History & Visual Studies Graduate Student Symposium at Duke University
Durham, North Carolina
2008
Linda Montano and the Tensions of Monasticism
Paper presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the College Art Association 96th Annual Conference
Dallas, Texas
Read the abstract
The performance art of Linda Montano demands the artist’s serious commitment to a set of predetermined rules, or vows. I draw on Montano’s experiences as a novice in the Maryknoll convent in the 1960s to theorize her art in terms of monastic practice. Through an examination of Art / Life: One Year Performance (1983-4), in which Montano and artist Tehching Tseih remained tied together by an eight-foot rope for one year, I argue that Montano’s performance art enacts the tensions within monasticism. Her work calls attention to the endless negotiations of collaboration and the difficulty of the vow and its visual marker, the habit. This approach corrects critical inattention to Montano’s participation and investment in religious traditions, takes seriously her own understanding of the centrality of religious traditions to her art, and makes visible Montano’s mapping of the bodily practices of monasticism onto her performance actions.
Linda Montano and the Tensions of Monasticism
Paper presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the In Medias Religiones Symposium at Duke University
Durham, North Carolina
2006
Sacralizing the Marginalized Body: Pentecostalism and the Gifts of the Spirit in the Performance Art of Ron Athey
Paper presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the Art, Art History & Visual Studies Graduate Student Symposium at Duke University
Durham, North Carolina
2003
Georgia O’Keeffe in West Texas
Paper Presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the Harrington Fellows Symposium
Amarillo, Texas
Art / Worship / Laughter / Death: Audience Experience at the Rothko Chapel in Houston
Paper Presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the New England American Studies Association on Religion and American Culture
Hartford, Connecticut
The Strange Journey of the Broken Obelisk to Houston
Paper Presentation by Karen Gonzalez Rice for the Urban Issues Program Graduate Colloquium at the University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas
List of talks and Presentations by year
Karen Gonzalez Rice 