Ken Allan, PhD

About Ken

My work on artists Ed Ruscha, Wallace Berman and others has been published in journals such as The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, X-Tra Contemporary Art Quarterly and the book Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980 (Getty Publications, 2011). I recently published an essay on the contemporary painter Jonas Wood and the history of modernism for a Dallas Museum of Art/Yale University Press catalog and a review of Kellie Jones's South of Pico: African-American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s in Art Bulletin.

I've also contributed essays to exhibition catalogs such as, American Aleph: Wallace Berman (Kohn Gallery/D.A.P., 2016), Pop Departures (Yale, 2014) and The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, 1960-1980 (Yale, 2014). I've been invited to speak on art in 1960s Los Angeles at The Art Institute of Chicago, The Getty Center and The Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona and I was a member of the advisory committee for 2011 Getty Museum exhibition "Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970."

My work has been supported by the Smithsonian/Archives of American Art, The Terra Foundation of American Art and an American Council of Learned Societies/Henry Luce Foundation.

I've served as the Associate Director of the Study of the U.S. Institute: Contemporary American Literature and Culture at Seattle University, an initiative funded by the U.S. Department of State. I'm currently a member of the board of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP).

Qualifications

PhD, Modern and Contemporary Art History
University of Chicago

MA
University of Chicago

AB
Washington University in St. Louis