Grant Kester was a Visiting Scholar Panel Participant at the Questioning Aesthetics Symposium at the Arts Research Center on March 13, 2015.
Grant Kester is Professor of Art History and the founding editor of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism (field-journal.com). Kester is one of the leading figures in the critical dialogue around socially engaged art practice. His publications include Art, Activism and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage (Duke University Press, 1998), Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (University of California Press, 2004, second edition 2013),The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context(Duke University Press, 2011) and Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art 1995-2010, co-edited with Bill Kelley (Duke University Press, 2017). Kester's essays have been published in Art in Theory: The West in the World-An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Wiley/Blackwell, 2020), A Companion to Public Art (Oxford, 2016), The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945 (Blackwell, 2006), Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1945 (Blackwell, 2004), Poverty and Social Welfare in America: An Encyclopedia (ABC-Clio, 2004), Politics and Poetics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom (St. Martins Press, 1999), and the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 1998). Kester's most recent books include a two-volume study of the history of aesthetic autonomy: The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (Duke University Press, 2023) and Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art (Duke University Press, 2023).