Dr. Suzanne Hudson is an art historian and critic who writes on modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on abstraction, painting, art pedagogy, and American philosophy as it intersects with aesthetics and institutional discourses. For Rebecca Morris: 2001–2022, Dr. Hudson will reflect on the practice of abstract painting as it is championed by such practitioners as Rebecca Morris and others today.

Suzanne Hudson (PhD Princeton University) is Associate Professor of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she was recently a Faculty Fellow in the Society of Fellows. An art historian and critic, her research spans the 19th through the 21st centuries, with special emphasis on the history, theory, and conventions of painting: within art schools and alternative pedagogical institutions, including museums and cultural centers, but also spaces of care work and medical and psychological services. The questions that she asks center on artistic process, seeking to understand how making art came to be understood to function as a cultural and therapeutic good.

Hudson’s scholarly work has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), Creative Capital | The Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. She is also a regular contributor to Artforum and has written numerous essays for international exhibition catalogs and artist monographs. The author of Robert Ryman: Used Paint (MIT, 2009), recent books include Agnes Martin: Night Sea (Afterall/MIT, 2017) and Contemporary Painting (Thames & Hudson, 2021). Supported by a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, she is pursuing research into the practical applications of art making for her book, Better for the Making: Art, Therapy, Process, a study of the therapeutic origins of process within American modernism.