Faculty Detail

Kathryn Kramer

Professor Kathryn Kramer is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art. She received the Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University in 1993. Her dissertation, Mythopoetic Politics in the Late Work of Paul Klee, examines Klee's adaptation of mythical imagery as an aesthetic strategy for opposing the visual language of Nazism. Professor Kramer also has focused on the marketing of Klee's work by German émigré art dealers in the United States after World War II.  The Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Starr Foundation, the research foundations of Columbia University and SUNY Cortland supported this research, and it has been published in exhibition catalogues, journals, and book chapters.  

Professor Kramer’s current research investigates contemporary artists’ revival of flânerie (the practice of wandering through rapidly modernizing cities as a means toward the aesthetic assessment and representation of urban transformation), especially in globalizing cities of explosive growth.  She received a Research Enrichment and Development Initiative Fellowship (REDI) for 2008-2010 to focus this research on Shanghai.  Entitled “Flânerie Shanghai Style,” Professor Kramer’s project comprises an essay that will present the practice and artistic production of flânerie in contemporary Shanghai as a cultural metric of urban dynamism. Artistic flânerie’s extent and representational focus will be illustrated, discussed and contextualized. The REDI Fellowship enabled Professor Kramer to travel to the 2008 Shanghai Biennial: Translocalmotion.  This international exhibition of contemporary art focused on artists who reflect on “mobility related to the urban, economical and social developments" of Shanghai’s urban spaces (en.shanghaibiennale.org/index.php <http://en.shanghaibiennale.org/index.php> ), and so was intrinsic to her study of the socio-aesthetics of contemporary flânerie and globalizing cities, which will eventually encompass artistic flânerie in Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, Mumbai, and Melbourne.

Recently, Professor Kramer has published various aspects of her research on flânerie and contemporary art in several venues. Her essay, “Flanerie Re-Enfleshed,” was published in the catalogue for the exhibition Contemporary Flânerie: Reconfiguring Cities that was presented by the Oakland University Art Gallery in the spring of 2009. Kramer was the Guest Editor for a special issue of Wagadu: A Transnational Journal of Women’s and Gender Studies (Vol. 7, Fall/Winter 2009).  This special issue was entitled Today’s Global Flâneuse and focused on the contemporary possibilities of flânerie for women in the arts and the social sciences and also featured examples of visual art by artist-flâneuses.   In 2010, Professor Kramer’s “The Flâneur’s Redemption,” was published in the anthology The European Mind: Narrative and Identity.

In 2007, Kathryn Kramer received the Rozanne M. Brooks Dedicated Teacher Award.  The Brooks Award supported her travel to the Venice Biennale and the Documenta exhibitions of international contemporary art during the summer and fall of 2007.  She developed a new course, “Contemporary Art and Globalization,” offered during the Fall 2008 semester, based in part upon a close study of these important exhibitions.