The Department of Art History is pleased to announce that Rhiannon Vogl successfully defended her PhD dissertation on November 28th, 2025. Rhiannon has said that her “academic interests have consistently circled around the blurred boundaries between the artist and the writer, the writer and the critic, the critic and the curator.” Her thesis, "Putting Oneself Down on Paper: Re-reading, Re-publishing and Re-enacting Lucy R. Lippard's I See / You Mean" breaks new ground in the study of feminism, Conceptual art, art writing, and new genres of fiction. Lippard is a major figure, an art critic, art writer, and curator. But, until the recent re-issue of her experimental novel “I See / You Mean," (1979) by New Documents, Lippard’s fiction was little known.
In support of this innovative research, Rhiannon has had virtually first access to extensive, not-yet-catalogued archives thanks to the support of both Lippard and her publisher Jeff Khonsary. These materials allow Rhiannon to trace the forces at work during Lippard’s long process of writing the novel and her formidable efforts to find ways of publishing and disseminating artists’ printed work. Rhiannon takes on the complexities not only of the intersections of different genres of writing and varieties of visual representation, but also the obstacles related to “alternative” mechanisms for publication and distribution.
Rhiannon’s thesis constitutes a new and distinctive contribution to the history of Conceptual Art. It investigates the flux of art making and the critical discourse in which Lippard played a key role, her social and intellectual circles, her political concerns, and evolving feminism. Rhiannon identifies Lippard’s own re-conception of the masculinist grid of Minimalism as a “sensuous grid,” an underground force subtending Lippard’s critical and creative practice, stimulating and mapping her “changing mind.” Now, given the republication of I See / You Mean, the thesis resituates Lippard’s novel as a force in the present.
From 2014 to 2018 Rhiannon was an Associate Curator of Contemporary art, at the National Gallery of Canada. Her doctoral research has been supported by a Faculty of Arts & Science Doctoral Excellence Scholarship, a Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellowship at the Jackman Humanities Institute, a Doctoral Fellowship at the Northrop Frye Centre, and a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship Doctoral Award. Her next project is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, “Telepathic Objects: An Extrasensory History of Conceptual Art.”
Our thanks to Rhiannon’s thesis committee (supervisor Professor Elizabeth Legge, Professor John Paul Ricco, and Professor Jordan Bear), and to external examiner Professor Maria Fusco (Professor of Interdisciplinary Writing, University of Dundee) and Professor Claire Battershill (Faculty of Information Studies and English Department, University of Toronto).
Congratulations Rhiannon!
