Karen Koehler

Biography
Karen Koehler is the Marilyn Levin Professor of Art and Architectural History at Hampshire College, as well as a frequent visiting faculty member in the Five Colleges. Professor Koehler is also Director of the Institute for Curatorial Practice at Hampshire College: http://www.hampshire.edu/academics/curate.htm.

Karen is a member of the Five College Architectural Studies Council, a collaborative program which she chaired and co-directed for a decade. In 2012 she was awarded honorary membership in the Western Chapter of the American Institute for Architects in recognition of her contributions to architectural education.

Professor Koehler teaches courses in modern and contemporary architecture, painting, sculpture, photography and design, with a special emphasis on connections between the built environment, art, critical theory, and socio-political history. Karen received her B.A. in English Literature and M.S. in Library Science from the University of Ilinois in Urbana, her M.A. in Art History from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and an M.F.A. and Ph.D. in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University. Her research addresses the interaction of architecture and other forms of artistic expression from a diversity of times and places.

Professor Koehler has done visual and archival research in Berlin, Weimar, Dessau, Paris, Bern, Munich, London, New York, Chicago, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has published extensively on twentieth century art and architecture, with a concentration on the role of exhibitions in the history of art. Her work questions the relationships of art and exile, translation and perception, and the interactions of architecture with other forms of cultural expression, as in her edited volume The Built Surface: Architecture and the Pictorial Arts from Romanticism to the 21st Century (London: Ashgate, 2001). In 2012, Professor Koehler took part in a series of workshops and symposia on “Revival: Utopia, Identity, Memory” at the Courtauld Institute for Art, London; and in 2011 with Eve Blau (Harvard University) she chaired a session on “Architectural Exhibitions in/as Critique” at the College Art Association Conference in New York. In October 2014, Professor Koehler will be returning to the U.K. to give two papers: one on ""Exposures, Mimesis and Traces: Bauhaus Double Portraits" at the University of Nottingham Institute for Research in Visual Culture; and another on "Gropius and Leave-Taking" in the School of Architecture at Cambridge University.

She has most recently published catalogue essays for the exhibitions The Small Utopia: Ars Multiplicata (Foundazione Prada, Venice, 2012) and The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910-1938 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2011) and was a contributing editor to the Mead Collection Handbook (Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, 2011). Her contribution to the conference “Bauhaus Palimpsest: The Object of Discourse” at the Harvard University Art Museums was published in Bauhaus Constructs (Routledge, 2009).

Professor Koehler’s museum work began as curatorial assistant at the University Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of Massachusetts, where she contributed to shows on Barnett Newman, Martin Puryear, Chris Burden and other American artists. More recently, Professor Koehler was faculty curator and sole author of the catalogue for Bauhaus Modern at the Smith College Museum of Art (2008), an important exhibition that contributed new thinking on the complexity and diversity of Bauhaus art and history, while challenging assumptions about the mass production of modernist objects and images. She is currently at work on two books, a survey of the Bauhaus for Phaidon Press, and an intellectual history of the German architect Walter Gropius, including his exhibition designs in New York, Berlin, Weimar, London and Paris.

''Karen is the recent recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to teach an "Enduring Questions" course ("Art Questions" in the Spring 2014), a principal a recent Kress Foundation Grant to Hampshire's Institute for Curatorial Practice, and a principal on two Five College Mellon grants--"New Technologies and the Curatorial Imaginary", and a Bridging the Liberal Arts and Professional Programs grant for Architectural Studies. Finally, Prof. Koehler was also a contributing author of the Five College Mellon Public History/Museum Studies project.

Education

 * B.A. in English Literature and M.S. in Library Science from the University of Ilinois in Urbana
 * M.A. in Art History from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst
 * Ph.D. in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University