Mary K. Coffey
Assistant Professor
Department of Art History
North American and Latin American
Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1999
mary.coffey@dartmouth.edu
tel: 646-4066
office: 208 Carpenter
Art History 50, Social History of North American Art Contact to 1900
Art History 16, Social History of North American Art: 20th century
Art History 17, Latin American Art of the 20th Century
Art History 16.4, The Modern Art of Mexico
Art History 16.5, Mexican Muralism
In addition to these courses, Mary Coffey also teaches specialized courses related to her research on museums, the politics of exhibition, and public art. She also regularly teaches the department's senior seminar on Theory and Methods in Art History.
Special Interests
Mary Coffey specializes in the history of modern Mexican art and culture, with an emphasis on cultural policy, museum history, and the politics of exhibition within Mexico and abroad. Her work takes an interdisciplinary approach informed by feminist and post-colonial theory, as well as cultural studies approaches to the analysis of a broad range visual culture from Mexican folk art to motorcycles to contemporary video installation. In addition to writing about Mexican muralism and the exhibition of Mexican art, Mary Coffey also writes about the history of race, nationalism, and eugenics within the United States.
Mary Coffey studies Art History and Cultural Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before joining the faculty at Dartmouth she taught at Pomona College (1999-2001) and was a Faculty Fellow and Internship Coordinator at New York University's Graduate Program in Museum Studies (2001-2004).
Mary Coffey is currently completing a book manuscript on the post-revolutionary national culture project in Mexico that explores the relationship between Mexican muralism and the development of a federal complex of public museums devoted to national art, history, and anthropology. This project demonstrates that mural artists shaped the visual and ideological strategies for narrating the nation's history, culture, and social makeup pioneered by the “Mexican School of Museology” and eventually instantiated in the world famous National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. By tracking the at times contradictory and even contestatory collaboration between muralists and museums, the book endeavors to demonstrate how mural art was both a populist avant-garde practice and a willing participant in post-revolutionary modernization, social regulation, and state-formation.
She is currently conducting new research for a second book on the exhibition of folk art within Mexico and abroad that explores the role this canon of objects has played in cultivating popular citizenship, national and transnational identity, and developing the tourist economy. This work examines changes in the state subsidization of artisans as well as the partial privatization of folk art production following the neoliberal reform of the economy and the impact of NAFTA.
At Dartmouth College Mary Coffey is also an affiliated professor with the Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies and the Women and Gender Studies Programs.
Selected Publications
•"'The Mexican Problem': Nation and 'Native' in Post-Revolutionary Muralism and Cultural Discourse,” in The Social and the Real: Political Art in the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere, eds. Alejandro Anreus, Diana Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg (State College: Penn State University Press, 2006): 43-70.
•“Of Bodies and Embodiment: Fred Wilson's So Much Trouble in the World Believe it or not!” in So Much Trouble in the World- Believe it or not! ed. Barbara Thompson (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2006).
•“The American Adonis: A Natural History of the Average American Man, 1921-1932,” Popular Eugenics: American Mass Culture in the 1930s, eds. Sue Currell and Christina Cogdell (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006).
•“Angels and Prostitutes: José Clemente Orozco's Catharsis and the Politics of Female Allegory in 1930s Mexico,” CR: The New Centennial Review 4, no. 2 (2004): 1-33.
•Co-authored with Jeremy Packer, “HOGging the Road: Cultural Governance and the Citizen Cyclist,” Cultural Studies 18, no. 5 (July 2004): 641-674.
•"Histories that Haunt: A Conversation with Ann Hamilton," Art Journal 60, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 10-23.