Walter Hopps Colloquium with Jennifer Sichel, November 17, 2025

Please save the date for the next Hopps Colloquium. It will be a lecture and book event, celebrating the publication of Jennifer Sichel’s new book from University of Chicago Press, in the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Collection series: Criticism Without Authority: Gene Swenson’s and Jill Johnston’s Queer Practices (2025).

The Walter Hopps Colloquium, an ongoing series of lectures and discussions in modern and contemporary art, funded in part via the Hopps Chair, will begin with a lecture on artist Edward Keinholz, with whom Hopps founded the Ferus Gallery in 1957.

This fall quarter, the colloquia will run alongside Professor George Baker’s graduate seminar AH232 Contemporary Art, which proposes to reexamine and open up LA art history in the 1960s and 70s by thinking it through global and other networks.

Jennifer Sichel
University of Louisville

In the 1960s, Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston transformed art criticism into something much more expansive and unruly. Incorporating elements of poetry, performance, and protest, they developed idiosyncratic practices that forged new ground, politically and aesthetically. These critics were deeply enmeshed in New York’s avant-garde art scene, and both were explicitly and unapologetically queer. This lecture and discussion will trace how Swenson and Johnston changed the course of artmaking as they refused norms of disciplined writing and authoritative voice.

A graduate of Williams College and the University of Chicago art history programs, Jennifer Sichel is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the University of Louisville’s Hite Institute of Art and Design, and affiliated faculty in the Department of Interdisciplinary and Comparative Humanities. A scholar of 20th and 21st-century art history, she focuses on practices that fall outside traditional genres of artmaking and develops methodologies in careful dialogue with queer and affect theory. Her book, Criticism without Authority: Gene Swenson’s and Jill Johnston’s Queer Practices (University of Chicago Press, 2025), traces how Swenson and Johnston reinvented criticism as a capacious practice by rejecting modernist appeals to purity and coherence. They devised new ways not only to describe experiments in art and performance, but also to enact new queer sensibilities. At the same time, they often failed to effect change or to see a bigger picture beyond their own triumphs and struggles. Criticism Without Authority makes their work visible not just as criticism, but as its own form of art.

Sichel has published scholarly and critical writing in Selva: A Journal of the History of Art, The Oxford Art Journal, Sculpture Journal, as well as in exhibition catalogues for museums including The Whitney Museum, The Jewish Museum, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. She is the author of “‘Do You Think Pop Art’s Queer?’ Gene Swenson and Andy Warhol” —a key queer intervention that changed art history’s understanding of Warhol’s practice through archival recovery, and established Swenson’s importance as a queer writer and artist. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Clark Art Institute, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Terra Foundation for American Art, and Humanities Division at the University of Chicago.

Reception to follow in the Art History and Classics Faculty Lounge.