UMass Boston

Modern and Contemporary Art; American Art; particular interests include conceptual art, art and technology, African American artists, twentieth-century printmaking

PhD, Art History, Emory University 2015

MA, Art History, Tufts University

BA, Art, Colby College

• Hans Haacke’s Double Agents: Art, Systems, and Parasitical Resistance. New York and London: Routledge, 2027.
• “From Theory to Practice: Loïs Mailou Jones and James Porter’s American Modernisms.” In Beauty Born of Struggle: The African American Art World in Twentieth-Century Washington, DC. Edited by Jeffrey C. Stewart. New Haven and Washington: National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 2023. 98-123.
• “The Artist as ‘Weatherman’: Hans Haacke’s Critical Meteorology.” In Nervous Systems: Art, Systems, and Politics since the 1960s. Edited by Johanna Gosse and Tim Stott. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022.
• “When Systems Get Personal: Puzzling Over Sol LeWitt’s Photobooks.” In Locating Sol LeWitt. Edited by David Areford. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.
• “Nineteen Notes for Elena del Rivero’s Nineteen Flags,” Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought (2020).
• “The Washington Renaissance.” In The Routledge Companion to African American Art History. Edited by Eddie Chambers. New York: Routledge (2019).
• “Beyond Systems Aesthetics: Politics, Performance, and Para-Sites.” In Hans Haacke: All Connected, exh. cat. curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari. New York: Phaidon and New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2019.
• “Review of Joshua Rivkin, Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly .” The Art Newspaper 315 (September 2019): 13.
• "Politics of the Press: Newspapers and the Representation of Art by African Americans in the Nation’s Capital. American Art 33.2 (Summer 2019).
• “Programming and Reprogramming the Institution: Systems Politics in Hans Haacke’s Photoelectric Viewer-Programmed Coordinate System.” In Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology. Edited by Steven Duval. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University California Press 2018.
• “Impressions, Inversions, and Decomposition: The Negative Aesthetics of Cy Twombly’s Printed Graphic Work,” Print Quarterly XXXV.1 (March, 2018).
• “Industrial Arts: Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert and Minimalism and Land Art,” “Pop Cinema: Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou,” and “New Tactics: Vanguard Art and Far From Vietnam.” In New Waves: Transatlantic Bonds between Film and Art in the 1960s. National Gallery of Art, 2017.
• “The Work of Jayson Musson: Representing Play, Immaterial Labor, and Mediation.” International Review of African American Art (IRAAA) 26.2 (fall 2016).
• “The Context as Host: Hans Haacke’s Art of Textual Exhibition.” Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 31.3 (September 2015): 213-232.

John A. Tyson is a specialist in modern and contemporary art. Tyson’s recent scholarship has addressed art in the Cold War era, text and image interactions, multiples and print portfolios, parallels between vanguard art and cinema, and modernism in Washington, DC. His book, Hans Haacke's Double Agents, explores the relationship between the artist’s works and concurrently emerging forms of performance, technology and politics.

From 2015 to 2017, Tyson held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellowship at the National Gallery of Art, where he worked on projects with the departments of British and American Painting, Modern and American Prints and Drawings, and Film Programs. He continues to be interested in curating and has co-curated (with colleague Sam Toabe) From Theory to Practice: Artistic Legacies of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2019) as well as Equals 6: A Sum Effect of Frank Bowling's 5+1 (2022-23) at the University Hall Gallery.

Professor Tyson’s is the former President of the Society of Contemporary Art Historians (SCAH). He has organized various iterations of the Visual Culture Consortium Symposium, an annual event that provides undergraduates with a platform to develop their scholarship. Tyson's other fellowships and awards include a a UMB College of Liberal Arts Careers/Curriculum Grant to support teaching oriented toward finding employment in the humanities (2020-21), a Henry Luce/ American Council of Learned Societies American Art Dissertation Fellowship (2014-2015), a Helena Rubinstein Fellowship in Critical Studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (2011-12), and a National Committee for the History of Art CIHA Travel Fellowship (2012). In 2008, he was a teaching fellow at Harvard University; additionally, he has taught classes for MFA students at George Washington University and the Pratt Institute.