Robert C. Morgan (born 1943) is an American art critic, art historian, curator, poet, and artist.
Robert C. Morgan received his M.F.A. in sculpture from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1975 and his Ph.D. in art education from New York University in 1978. Professor Morgan has had an extensive academic career. He has taught at New York University, Wichita State University, the University of Rochester, the School of Visual Arts, Barnard College, and Columbia University. From 1981- 2001, he was Professor of the History and Theory of Art at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is currently an adjunct professor of Fine Arts in the Graduate School of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.
Morgan has worked extensively as an independent curator. He has organized museum retrospectives of Allan Kaprow (1979) and Komar and Melamid (1980), both at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Kansas. In 1990, he curated Concept -- Decoratif in conjunction with the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York. From 1989 to 1990, he directed a gallery in SoHo (New York) where he curated a dozen exhibitions of both emerging and established artists, including Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Grossman, Hung Liu, Hong-Wen Lin, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Mel Bochner, Antoni Muntadas, and Max Ernst. In 1994, he co-organized the exhibition Logo Non Logo with French critic Pierre Restany at the Thread Waxing Space in New York, which later traveled to the Art Museum of the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida.
Morgan has authored numerous books, catalogs and monographs on contemporary artists in various countries. His book on the American conceptualist Robert Barry was published by Karl Kerber Press in Bielefeld, Germany (1986). Haim Steinbach was published by the Musee d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux (1988). Duchamp, Androgyny, Etc., (on Marcel Duchamp) was published by Editions Antoine Candau in Paris (1990). A Hans Bellmer Miscellany was published by Baum/Malmburg in Malmö, Sweden in 1993. His Turkish Bath installation at Artists Space in 1976 has been recognized an early example of post-conceptual art.
Morgan frequently writes art criticism for the Brooklyn Rail. His books and collected critical essays published include commentaries on conceptual art, post-conceptual art and the new media arts (Umbrella Associates, 1992). He has published the following books in the United States: After the Deluge: Essays on the Art of the Nineties, (Red Bass Publications, 1993), Conceptual Art: An American Perspective (McFarland, 1994); Art into Ideas: Essays on Conceptual Art (Cambridge University Press, 1996), Between Modernism and Conceptual Art (McFarland, 1997): and The End of the Art World (Allworth Press, 1998).
His critical anthologies on Gary Hill (2000) and Bruce Nauman (2002) were published by Johns Hopkins University Press. An edited volume of the late writings by the critic Clement Greenberg was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2003. In 1995, he traveled to Korea on a Fulbright Fellowship.[1]
