Anthony Lee

Associate Professor of Art History; Adviser, Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Certificate; Chair, American Studies Program

Specialization
Modern and contemporary European and American art; alternative histories of modernist art; history of photography; American visual culture

When Anthony Lee looks at a photo, painting, or any piece of visual art, he sees more than the aesthetic effect of brushstrokes, color, and tonal contrasts. He sees a historical document that tells a lot about social and political history. Whether he is studying the masks used in African religious ceremonies, the Diego Rivera murals that depicted radical political ideologies of the 1930s and 1940s, or the paintings and photos of San Francisco's Chinatown that helped non-Chinese maintain dominance over the quarter's immigrants, Lee "decodes" the visual by connecting it with the social movements, political struggles, and cultural prejudices that surround it.

Lee's two largest projects have been books devoted to art in San Francisco: Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco's Public Murals (1999) and Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (2001), which won the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art.

He is currently writing a second book on Diego Rivera, studying photos of Chinese shoemakers in a nineteenth-century Massachusetts factory town, and developing an exhibition about a series of little-known photos by the 1960s New York photographer Diane Arbus.

"Lee, Lipman, Morgan, and Smith to Receive Faculty Awards," College Street Journal, April 19, 2002

"New Faculty: Art Historian Anthony Lee," College Street Journal, October 16, 1998