I am an arts and museum professional based in New York with a decade of experience writing, fundraising, and teaching in art history. I thrive at making complex art historical or organization-specific content understandable through compelling storytelling, and regularly produce written materials for a range of projects, including grant proposals, case statements, commissioned texts, critical reviews, and book- or chapter-length manuscripts. I have a track record of crafting successful grant proposals for institutional and personal projects, and have over eight years of experience content- and copy-editing. As a nonprofit fundraising consultant and in roles at museums across the U.S. and U.K., including at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Tate Modern, I have learned the importance of carefully managing detailed information while remaining focused on a project’s legibility to non-specialist audiences.
In my scholarship and critical writing, I question the power dynamics surrounding the production, use, and interpretation of space in art and its institutions. Accordingly, I am interested in how the body, in all its difference, and conceptions of embodiment enter into artistic practices. My thinking circles around process, affect, perception, materiality, and feminist, queer, and critical race theory. My writing has been awarded grants from the Getty, Terra, Luce, and Fulbright Foundations, among others. My experience in art historical research has taught me to work closely with artists: my writing draws from studio visits and ongoing conversations, and I am deeply committed to writing thoughtfully and accurately about contemporary art.
I have edited and contributed to numerous artist monographs, exhibition catalogues, and journals. Recently, an essay on the paintings of gallerist Betty Parsons examined opacity as a strategy of non-disclosure, while another addressed doubled subjectivity in the work of Loie Hollowell. A chapter from Yale University Press discusses conditions of impairment and the embodied experience of difference in acts of making. I am at work on a long-term book project entitled Beside Painting that addresses the intersection of philosophies and psychologies of perception in the work of abstract painter Sam Francis. Based on extensive archival research, it proposes painting as a non-hierarchical space of experimentation, per the spatial positionality of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “beside,” that is nevertheless deeply rooted in its own history.
Elizabeth Buhe with Alina Tenser’s Parentheses, Yellow Path (2022), Hesse Flatow Gallery. Photo © Fawn Krieger.
I earned a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts-NYU, hold masters degrees from the IFA and The Courtauld, and am a member of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (AICA).
To be in touch regarding my availability for writing commissions or lecture/visiting critic invitations, please contact me.