isa Lipinski is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, George Washington University. She earned her doctorate in art history in 2000 from the University of Texas at Austin.
Statement of Teaching and Research Interests
I teach courses on the history of photography, history of exhibitions and art museums, the Harlem Renaissance, Marcel Duchamp, and art of the 21st century. My courses regularly include field trips to local art museums and memorials. I am a licensed D.C. tour guide and a member of the Guild of Professional Tour Guides, Washington, D.C., and I conduct private tours through my business Capital Art Tours.
My research has examined the ways in which twentieth-century art has been interpreted through the lens of modern and contemporary art theory of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Hubert Damisch. I am interested in art as philosophy, art as a form of thinking.
My first book, René Magritte and the Art of Thinking, (Routledge Press, 2019) focused on his paintings, both iconic and less well-known paintings from the 1940s and his writings. Through paintings of ordinary objects rendered with illusionism, Magritte probed the limits of our perception—what we see and cannot see, the nature of representation—as a philosophical system for presenting ideas, and explored perspective as a method of visual argumentation. Magritte’s painting is about vision and the act of viewing, of perception itself, and the process of how we see and experience things in the world, including paintings as things.
I am currently writing a history of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art + Design, one of the oldest fine art museums in the country, which was chartered in 1869 and opened in 1874. The Corcoran closed in 2014. My book examines the history of the art gallery and art college with a focus on the challenges and obstacles faced through its long history.I have worked in curatorial departments of major art museums: the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Phillips Collection and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. My essays have appeared in museum catalogues on Pierre Bonnard, 19th-century American and French painting, as well as Spanish and Flemish paintings in the Prado.