John Paul Ricco

VIEW to the U: An eye on UTM academic community

The value of Art and times of social upheaval In this episode Professor John Paul Ricco from UofT Mississauga’s Department of Visual Studies talks about his art and art history research, and also about how past health crises have shaped art movements. We also talk about some of the ways in which this current pandemic may influence artists now and in creations to come, and what kinds of things John Paul is doing in this time of solitude. John Paul is an art historian and queer theorist whose interdisciplinary research, teaching and writing draws connections between late-twentieth-century and contemporary art and architecture; continental philosophy; and issues of gender and sexuality, bodies and pleasures, pornography and eroticism. He graduated from New York University where he majored in art history and minored in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. After a couple of years lecturing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Paul went on to complete a PhD in the Theory, Historiography and Criticism of Art History at the University of Chicago. During his doctoral studies at Chicago, Ricco was a Graduate Exchange Scholar in the School of Architecture at Princeton University. As a young scholar in the early-1990s, John Paul contributed to the formation of three newly emerging fields of study: Gay and Lesbian Art History, Visual Culture, and Queer Theory, and he was one of the first scholars to bring questions of space, geography and architecture to bear upon the discourses of queer theory and the politics of AIDS. John Paul joined the Visual Studies department at UTM in 2006. A full transcript of the interview is available at https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/vp-research/sites/files/vp-research/shared/JPR-interview-transcribed_April2020.pdf. Resources - John Paul's webpage is at https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/dvs/john-paul-ricco. - Read a profile based on this interview at https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/vp-research/news/art-time-covid-19. - Read Professor Ricco’s article “Impotentiality and Resistance,”https://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/sduk/tilting/impotentiality-and-resistance, his contribution that appears in Tilting, a publication the Blackwood Gallery recently issued as part of their Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) broadsheet series, launched expressly in response to the pandemic and to support artists. - To read Ricco's contribution to the UofT Press journal Topia, "On Ways of Living in the Midst of the COVID-19 Global Pandemic (Three Brief Meditations)," https://www.utpjournals.press/journals/topia/covid-19-essays/on-ways-of-living-in-the-midst-of-the-covie-19-global-pandemic. - You can view an excerpt of the film Blue by Derek Jarman that John Paul mentions at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jEer2d3nMg. - The recent article John Paul mentions from the New Yorker magazine "A New Doctor Faces the Coronavirus in Queens" is at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/27/a-new-doctor-faces-the-coronavirus-in-queens. - The article by Catherine Malabou "To Quarantine from Quarantine" can be read at https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/23/to-quarantine-from-quarantine-rousseau-robinson-crusoe-and-i/. - The book John Paul is reading by Anne Dufourmantelle is called In Praise of Risk https://www.amazon.com/Praise-Risk-Anne-Dufourmantelle/dp/0823285448.