Stony Brook Experts

Katy Siegel is a Distinguished Professor and the Thaw Chair at Stony Brook University. A social historian of postwar art, Siegel has focused on underrecognized figures, particularly Black artists and women, producing major scholarship and exhibitions on Jack Whitten, Mark Bradford, and Joan Mitchell, at venues including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and the Venice Biennale.

Her most recent project is What Was America? Art, Culture, and Politics in the Bicentennial (Yale University Press, 2026), co-written with Elise Armani. What Was America? explores the role of art in national debates about identity and history, populism and pluralism, broadening our definitions of art and also its social role. What Was America? is crafted explicitly in relationship to the state of the nation and its culture at the moment of its approaching Semiquincentennial.