Over the course of my thirty-year career as a multidisciplinary scholar and curator, I have focused on the entwined variables of history, ideology, culture, and social temperament. As an historian who specializes in the study of material and visual culture, my work originates from the premise that all human-made and human-modified objects represent the tangible articulation of ideas, values, and sensibilities in the contexts of time and place. I have approached overarching questions about social existence that turn on identity and representation through close readings of the artifact record (which, for me, does not differentiate between what is called “art” and what is deemed to be “non art”).  Rather, I interrogate expressive culture – objects of all kinds – through the framing of questions and close analysis, which relies on the methodologies of material culture and art history.  I both write about objects and put objects on display in curatorial practice.  As such, my work has engaged and been in dialogue with multiple disciplines, including history, architecture, art history, design history, religion, anthropology, Black studies, and gender studies, among others.  My scholarly body of work–encompassing four books, nine chapters in anthologies and edited volumes, numerous articles, book reviews, invited lectures and keynotes–and twelve curated exhibitions, have shaped the dialogue around how we interpret objects and place in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.  

In 2022 I published a monograph on contemporary British artist Hurvin Anderson whose paintings open questions on histories of landscape painting, race, nationalism, and identity.  As the first detailed consideration of his body of work, Hurvin Anderson presented, through my archival and critical research as well as numerous interviews, the new argument that the tension of the historical and cultural character of the expanded Atlantic world vis-a-vis British art will often render illegible emerging forms and images by virtue of the operations of hegemonic aesthetics that occlude difference.  Utilizing the methodological frameworks and interpretive lenses of postcoloniality, Atlantic history, and theories about the roles of landscape in the cultivation of identity, my work on Anderson was a critical narrative of his life and practice that turned on careful readings of his beautifully seductive and intentionally deceptive images of natural vistas, historical places, and objects that exist in the landscapes of everyday life. In 2023 the international organization for my field, The Historians of British Art, awarded me the prize for a work on a single artist subject.  In writing to me, the jury chair commended my work, telling me that the committee members were deeply impressed by the scope and rigor of my analysis.  In closing, she thanked me for my “remarkable scholarship.” 

I came to that work through a long commitment to monographic work on living artists as well as long-standing research interests in the quotidian and its relationship to contemporary art historical developments in the globalized world.  My first book, a monograph on artist An Te Liu, constituted a close reading of his evolved practice and, in particular, his taking up ceramics as the medium for the creation of sculptures, the shapes of which were born of the negative spaces of three dimensional packing materials made of expanded polystyrene that safeguarded consumer products for shipment. This book was awarded the Ontario Association of Art Galleries (OAAG) Award for Curatorial Writing in 2014.  My materialist analysis of this body of work – or what I called “foam follows function,” and a variation of the modernist doctrine of ‘form follows function’ – argued that Liu’s use of postconsumer products was an important chapter in the long traditions of makers using discarded materials to create ideologically and aesthetically significant works. 

My most recent book, Reside: West Coast Architectural Responses (2024), explores how contemporary residential architecture is necessarily a response to the place and site of its creation, as well as the social and geographic contexts of its time; here, I examine the west coast architecture of British Columbia, which always already reveals notions of ecology, public and private spheres, home and leisure, and nature.  Examining the work of thirty-four architects and firms, I bring my expertise in architectural history and my interest in the roles of place and regional identity to a consideration of contemporary developments in the design of dwellings.  The volume considers how, through carefully considered responses to site, material choice, and the particularities of program, the profiled practitioners have not only crafted a strikingly contemporary and intellectually important west coast vernacular but one which, although informed by the region’s mid-twentieth century architectural legacies, is innovative, new, and consequential.  In my final essay for the book I considered the condition of contemporary architecture in British Columbia, and interrogated the creative process of space-making and the state of architectural criticism at an inflection point of economic inequality, decolonization, and environmental vulnerability.

My curatorial exhibitions and scholarship maintain a similar engagement with expanding the dialogue and discourse on viewers’ understandings of art historical forms, architecture, design, and material culture through the nexus of postcolonial identity, place, and race.  I take seriously the central importance of the study of objects as non-verbal texts.  With twelve international curated exhibits, I have researched and presented objects that revealed new histories of design, forms, and the unique ways that objects contain the historical and material traces of their time and place.

My commitment as a scholar to advancing the work of decolonization in the academy and outside of it has been recognized.  I have twice been awarded research fellowships at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, CT. In spring 2023, my work at the YCBA explored new interpretive strategies for the study and display of British art, particularly 18th century images depicting imperial subject matter. I was specifically interested in the work of Arthur Devis and his paintings privileging the rising gentry who were his sitters in their domestic interiors. These images made clear that the people being depicted understood both the need for the possession of the material trappings of economic and social power and the communication of the same. My work at Yale was the basis for an invitation from the National Gallery of Canada and the Wexner Center at the Ohio State University to speak at the Venice Biennale in June 2024 at a panel on artist Kipwani Kiwanga’s “Trinket.”  My lecture considered the complicity and the ethics of beauty in Ms. Kiwanga’s sundering immersive creation which employed eight million Venetian beads – conteria – and invited consideration of the material, economic, and social history of the medium.

I have multiple projects currently in progress.  First, I am completing a commissioned essay about post-1945 Canadian design and design culture for volume three of the Bloomsbury World Encyclopedia of Design. This essay balances discussions of the circumstances of industrial and other design in Canada after World War II and profiles makers and their creations against the backdrop of the particular economic and social conditions of the country up to 2000.  Second, I was invited by the Art Canada Institute to write a book on the American-Canadian artist June Clark (b.1941 USA). This work is in process and considers Clark’s emergence as a photographer in the late 1960s in Toronto (when, in 1968, she moved from New York City to Canada with her husband, architect Ken Greenberg) and her movement into installation and painting.  In early 2024, I was asked by the Glenbow Museum in Calgary to curate the gallery of western Canadian/Turtle Island ceramics (Manitoba to British Columbia). My goals are to produce deeply researched stories of Indigenous and settler pottery from 800 BPE to the present that communicate through displayed objects the social roles and cultural power of ceramics in the domestic, industrial, and aesthetic histories of the Canadian west.  I have also been asked to co-curate an exhibition of British Columbia ceramics from the acclaimed collection of the Vermont-born Vancouverite antique dealer John David Lawrence.  Alongside that, I was asked to co-edit a heavily illustrated volume about Mr. Lawrence’s life, work, and collections of Indigenous west coast objects, Vancouver street and ‘outsider’ art, and modernist jewelry. This volume, titled The Place of Things: The Collections of John David Lawrence, will feature an introductory essay about the social, aesthetic, psychological, and autobiographical aspects of collecting, feature contributions from more than thirty friends, colleagues and associates of Mr. Lawrence, and an edited conversation between me and Mr. Lawrence, showcasing the range and historical significance of the collections he has built up over his four decades in Vancouver. Lastly, I continue to work on a project about middle class taste in North America after 1940.

As demonstrated by my large and varied body of work, my scholarship is intellectually consequential and internationally recognized.  I am continuing to engage and expand the field, and look forward to contributing fresh and original research in the areas of design, design history, art history, and material culture.

Michael J Prokopow