Marie Shurkus

Professor, Program Chair

Dept. : Academic Studies, Art History, Writing

mshurkus@meca.edu

“"The philosopher Gilles Deleuze has said that we write at the limits of our knowledge, for this is where knowledge opens and creativity enters discourse, making room for the unknown. As an educator, I am committed to developing and promoting pedagogical structures that create opportunities for students to confront and embrace the uneasiness of not knowing, to recognize and shake off the sediments of convention, and to explore how ideas and history can become viable tools for honing their critical thinking skills and expanding their creative practices as artists and scholars.”

For more than a decade, Dr. Shurkus has participated in discourses on art and culture as a professor and scholar of modern and contemporary art history and media studies at Pomona College, the University of Arizona, and Vermont College of the Fine Arts; and as a museum educator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has delivered talks on contemporary art and artists at the Getty Research Institute, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and at numerous conferences and universities in Canada, Great Britain, and throughout the US. She co-edited and contributed to the celebrated catalogue It Happened At Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973. Her scholarship has been published in the anthology Telling Stories: Countering Narrative in Art, Theory and Film; the Journals Photographies and X-Tra Contemporary Art Quarterly; and numerous exhibition catalogues and monographs. She earned her Ph.D. from Concordia University and her MA in modern art history, theory and criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Laurels

Panel co‐chair and presenter for the 2015 Society for Cinema & Media Studies Conference in Montreal
Catalog essay for Armory Center for the Arts
Digital Pedagogy Integration Grant, Pomona College