Helen Langa, Associate Professor
of Art History
Professor Langa (PhD University of Carolina-Chapel Hill 1993, MA University
of Colorado–Boulder 1979, BFA Temple University 1966) specializes
in art of the United States from the 17th to the 21st centuries. In both
teaching and research, she emphasizes social history, feminist and postmodernist
theory, and issues of difference (race, class, gender, colonialism, etc.).
Her research focuses on topics related to art's relation to culture, gender, race, and religion. Her book Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in 1930s New York (2004) focuses primarily on how activist artist printmakers in the interwar decades navigated sometimes contradictory interests in cultural democracy, stylistic innovation, gender egalitarianism, and social justice. Her essay on women printmakers in the 20th century appeared in American Women Modernists. The Legacy of Robert Henri (2005). Her published articles have discussed women artists on the WPA-FAP, the tensions between concepts of modernity and modernism, antilynching prints, the influence of contemporary leftist ideologies on labor imagery, and the politics of gender difference and lesbian identity in the work of Elizabeth Olds. She is on the Board of Directors of the Southeastern College Art Conference and is also the SECAC Book Reviews editor.
She teaches four courses in art of the United States, divided into Colonial
to 1940, and 1940 to 1970, and Contemporary Art since 1970, as well as
Twentieth Century Women Artists of the Americas, which includes art by
women from Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America as well as the United
States. Her recent topics for seminars have
been Postmodernism since 1980: Controversial Art and Museum Responsibilities
(2004); Shaking Things Up: The Politics of Identity in American Art 1968-1998
(2002); Representing Women in the Visual Arts: England and the United
States in the Victorian Era (1999); and Modernism and Postmodernism: The
Sixties and After (1996).