David Raskin

Mohn Family Professor of Contemporary Art History, Art History, Theory, and Criticism


David Raskin has been teaching at SAIC since 2000. He took his sabbatical during the 2022 Academic Year.

David Raskin is an art historian whose research pursues the stakes of modern and contemporary art produced in relation to earlier artistic developments and contemporary practices. His scholarly work explores how and why the ambitions and debates of the 1960s continue to be relevant while simultaneously constructing a type of art history where his prose captures the complexity, excitement, conflict, and structure of the art he examines. 

Raskin’s book Donald Judd was published by Yale University Press in 2010 and has been reviewed in more than a dozen publications. In 2022, he co-authored Jose Dávila: Monograph, the first career-spanning survey on the self-taught Mexican sculptor. He has been awarded research fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Whitney Museum, and has contributed essays to catalogs of exhibitions at the Tate Modern, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Raskin was honored in 2009 with the SAIC Class of 2009 Faculty Member of The Year award for excellence in teaching.

Education

1999 PhD, University of Texas at Austin
1994 MA, Stony Brook University
1990 AB, Brown University
Whitney Independent Study Program

Notable Classes Taught:

Amplifier
Andy Warhol and the Factory
Can Art Tell the Truth?
Minimalism
Pollock and After
Postminimalism
World on Fire: 1968/Now