Banner image: Jasper Johns, Ventriloquist, 1983. Encaustic on canvas, 75" x 50". © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Associate Professor Isabelle Loring Wallace explores the thematics of voice within the pictorial project of Jasper Johns with particular attention paid to the subject of ventriloquism and the painting of 1983 that takes this strange, antiquated art forum as its titular subject.

Wallace delves into this topic in a recently published anthology titled Ventriloquism, Performance and Contemporary Art, which she co-edited with Jennie Hirsh, professor of art history at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), (Routledge 2023).

Lecturer bio

Isabelle Loring Wallace currently serves as Associate Director of Research and Graduate Studies. Her research focuses on a wide range of objects and images, ranging from mid-twentieth-century American painting to early twenty-first-century photography, video, and installation. She is the author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogue essays on artists such as Manet, Duchamp, Jenny Saville, Wim Delvoye, Christian Jankowski, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Paul Pfeiffer, and the co-editor of three anthologies that reflect her commitment to thinking about contemporary art within broad cultural and historical contexts: Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, co-edited with Jennie Hirsh (Ashgate/Routledge 2011); Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility, co-edited with Nora Wendl (Ashgate/Routledge 2013); Ventriloquism, Performance and Contemporary Art, co-edited with Jennie Hirsh (Routledge 2023). In addition, Professor Wallace is also author of Jasper Johns (Phaidon 2014) and is currently completing a second book on Johns that considers his work in conjunction with contemporaneous developments in the fields of genetics and psychoanalysis. Simultaneously, she is working on a new project that considers recurring intersections between new media art and assorted Judeo-Christian themes. At the School of Art, she teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on postwar visual culture, as well as various thematic courses dedicated to tracing contemporary art's intellectual and artistic genealogies.