Karen Kurczynski

Karen Kurczynski teaches Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She co-curated the Asger Jorn Centennial exhibition "Expo Jorn: Art is a Festival" at the Museum Jorn, Denmark, from March 1-September 14, 2014. Accompanied by a scholarly catalogue, the exhibition foregrounds the artistic dialogues between Jorn and his colleagues in the Surrealist, Cobra, and Situationist movements in Europe. The show was complementary to the retrospective at the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, "Asger Jorn: Restless Rebel," for which she also contributed a catalogue essay. Her monograph on Asger Jorn from Ashgate entitled "The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won't Give Up" was published in September, 2014. She is currently planning a major U.S. traveling exhibition on the Cobra movement called "Animal Culture: Cobra and the Popular Imagination," to open at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale in 2016. She has published a wide range of essays and reviews on Asger Jorn, the Situationist International, Cobra, drawing in contemporary art, feminism and art, and the legacy of the 20th-century avant-garde. She has also contributed texts to the anthologies "En tradition af opbrud: Avantgardernes tradition og politik" (2005), "Abstract Expressionism: The International Context" (2007), "Expect Everything, Fear Nothing: Scandinavian Situationism in Perspective" (2011), "Actes du Colloque Michel Ragon" (2012), "Kitsch: History, Theory, Practice" (2013) and "The Avant-Gardes in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950: History, Culture and Aesthetics" (2015).