Tirza True Latimer
Tirza True Latimer (Chair)
Tirza True Latimer has published work from a lesbian feminist perspective on a range of topics in the fields of visual culture, sexual culture, and criticism. She is coeditor, with Whitney Chadwick, of the anthology The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars (Rutgers University Press, 2003); the author of Women Together / Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris (Rutgers University Press, 2005); and coauthor of Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories (University of California Press, 2011). Her essay “‘In the Jealous Way of Pictures’: Gertrude Stein’s Collections” appeared recently in a special issue of Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal devoted to the politics and practices of collecting. An essay on “Queer Cross-Gender Collaborations,” jointly authored with comparative literature scholar Jane Garrity, was included in the Cambridge Companion to Lesbian and Gay Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2010). The Musée Jeu de Paume in Paris commissioned the essay “Le Masque Verbal: Claude Cahun’s Textual Travesty” for the catalogue of its 2011 retrospective of Cahun’s photographs.
Parallel to these pursuits, Tirza has been continuously active in the curatorial domain. Both students and faculty members from CCA have shown work in the exhibitions she has curated or co-curated at SomArts Cultural Center (Chronotopia, Threads, Making Room for Wonder) and the GLBT Historical Society (Lineage: Match-Making in the Archive). She is co-curator of a 2011 exhibition about the life and afterlife of Gertrude Stein, organized by the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. She is currently working on an exhibition featuring new work by Harmony Hammond.
Tirza was awarded a Georgia O’Keeffe Research Fellowship to conduct research for a new book on Queer Modernism during the 2010-2011 academic year, while on sabbatical leave.
Recent conference papers include “Gertrude Stein Loved Men,” Feminist Art History Conference, American University, 2011; “Dix Portraits: Gertrude Stein’s ‘Second Family’ Album,” “Family Structures of Innovation” Session, Modernist Studies Association Conference, Buffalo, NY; “Out in the Canon: Picasso’s Gertrude Stein,” Hide/Seek Symposium, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., 2011.
Tirza’s teaching, like her research, explores the intersection of visual and sexual cultures. Her interests include the emergence of lesbian and gay visual communities in early twentieth-century Paris, collaborative and participatory art practices in contemporary art, new genres of public art, the visual politics of identity, art activism, social practices, and the history of photography. She is an active member and former co-chair of the Queer Caucus for Art, a College Art Association affiliated society, an advisor to the Board of the Queer Cultural Center, SF, and founder of the CCA Queer faculty group, Quorum.
Chair and Associate Professor, Visual and Critical Studies. Associate Professor, Visual Studies.
Contact: tlatimer@cca.edu
Additional Links: http://blog.sfmoma.org/author/ttlatimer/
BA, Sarah Lawrence College
MA, University of California, Davis
PhD, Stanford University
