Cary Levine
Associate Professor, Contemporary Art History
Associate Dean and Director of Ideas, Information, and Inquiry Curriculum
clevine@unc.edu
Cary Levine specializes in contemporary art. He received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and was a recipient of a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. His first book, Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon (University of Chicago Press, 2013) examines the work of these artists in terms of post-60s politics, popular culture, mass media, and strategies of the grotesque. Levine’s current research focuses on the intersections of art, politics, and technology. He is currently working (with Philip Glahn) on a major study of Mobile Image, one of the most significant telecommunications art collectives of the contemporary era. He was a 2020 recipient of the Art Journal Award, given to the most distinguished contribution published in Art Journal during the previous year, and a 2014 recipient of the Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Scholarly Achievement at UNC. In addition to his research and teaching, Levine has lectured widely, both nationally and internationally, has written criticism for magazines such as Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and BOMB, and has published numerous catalogue essays. He also worked for three years in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Selected Publications:
Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon. University of Chicago Press, 2013.
“Satellite Arts: A Television of Attractions” (with Philip Glahn), Parallax, vol. 26, no. 1, Sept 2020.
“The Future is Present: Electronic Café and the Politics of Technological Fantasy” (with Philip Glahn), Art Journal, Fall 2019.
“Interrogating Invention: Electronic Café and the Politics of Technology” (with Philip Glahn), Panorama, vol. 1 no. 3, June 2016.
“Between Nothing, Nowhere and No One,” in Guy Yanai: Ancienne Rive, exhibition catalogue, Yundler Brondino Verlag, 2015.
“Worried Man,” in Mark Mothersbaugh: It’s a Beautiful World, exhibition catalogue, ed. by Adam Lerner, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, 2014.
“Wedge Woods,” in Jason Middlebrook: My Landscape, exhibition catalogue, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 2014.
“A Gaping Hole,” in Beyond the Anti-Aesthetic (Stone Art Theory Institutes), ed. by James Elkins. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013.
“Transgression,” The Brooklyn Rail, June 2013.
“Under Cover Of Darkness: Jenny Holzer’s Endgame Paintings,” in Jenny Holzer: Endgame, exhibition catalogue, Skarstedt Gallery, 2012.
“Dana Schutz: It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” in Dana Schutz: If the Face Had Wheels, exhibition catalogue, Neuberger Museum of Art (Prestel Verlag), 2011.
“Manly Crafts: Mike Kelley’s (Oxy)Moronic Gender Bending,” Art Journal, vol. 69, no. 1, Spring 2010.
“You Are What (and How) You Eat: Paul McCarthy’s Food-Flinging Frenzies,” Invisible Culture, Issue 14, Spring 2010.
“Culture Morte: Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life Parodies,” in Tom Wesselmann: The Figurative Impulse, exhibition catalogue, Städtische Gallerie Ravensburg, 2008.
“Logical Conclusions: 40 Years of Rule-Based Art,” The Brooklyn Rail, April 2005.
“A Flatland of Forms: Thomas Nozkowski’s Paintings,” Art in America, October 2004.
“A Diderot of the Low: Mike Kelley’s Foul Perfection and Minor Histories,” Art in America, February 2004.
Header image credits: 1. Mobile Image, Satellite Arts (The Image as Place), 1977 (the Sherrie Rabinowitz & Kit Galloway Archive. 2. Mobile Image, Hole in Space (A Public Communication Sculpture), 1980 (the Sherrie Rabinowitz & Kit Galloway Archive). 3. Mobile Image, Electronic Café, 1984 (the Sherrie Rabinowitz & Kit Galloway Archive)