Mark A. Cheetham
Cheetham’s research centres on artwriting and art making from the mid 18th century to the present. He has written books and articles on the history, theory, and current practice of abstract art, the reception of Immanuel Kant’s thinking in the visual arts and the discipline of art history, on art historical methodology, on ecological art, and on recentCanadian and international art. He was the Project Director of a 3-year SSHRC initiative called CACHET (Canadian Art Commons for History of Art Education & Training), 2013–16, which linked five institutions and 20 researchers. See www.ArtCan.ca
His latest book - Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature since the ‘60s - was published by Penn State UP in 2018. Cheetham is active as a curator: recent projects include 'Struck by Likening: The Power & Discontents of Artworld Analogies' at the McMaster University Museum of Art in 2017 and Ecologies of Landscape (BE Contemporary, Toronto, 2018-19).
Cheetham is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute Fellowship, a University of Toronto Connaught Research Fellowship and two Chancellor Jackman Research Fellowships in the Humanities, several Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada research grants, the Edward G. Pleva Award for Excellence in Teaching (Western University1998), and the Northrop Frye Award for teaching (University of Toronto). Cheetham received the Art Journal Award from the College Art Association of America for “Matting the Monochrome: Malevich, Klein, & Now,” and the Curatorial Writing Award from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries, for “The Transformative Abstraction of Robert Houle,” in Robert Houle: Troubling Abstraction. His co-curated exhibition Jack Chambers: The Light From the Darkness/Silver Paintings and Film Work was awarded “Exhibition of the Year” by the Ontario Assoc. of Art Galleries. He became a member of the Royal Society of Canada in 2008. He is part of a national research project addressing settler-colonial practices in the art history of Canada. Cheetham is currently researching and teaching in four areas: ecological art in its relations to earlier landscape practices, Public Art in Toronto, the importance of analogy in art history and museums, and the image cultures of weather in 19th-century Arctic voyaging from the Anglosphere.