The Business of Art
Alex Taylor, associate professor in the Dietrich School’s Department of History of Art and Architecture, sees the study and business of art as closely connected. His scholarship situates works of art within the contexts of capitalism, consumption, and mass media, emphasizing the close relationship between art and commerce instead of viewing them as distinct realms.
Taylor's unique career journey influenced his perspective and current research interests. Before his graduate studies at Oxford and joining the Dietrich School, he established a career in arts marketing and communications, beginning as an intern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and eventually leading the marketing and design teams at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne. While in these roles, he was actively engaged in art historical research. His first book, examining the professionalization of artists in early Australian art, was published in 2007, while he was working in the field.
This dual perspective influenced the scholar he is today. Managing a brand, he explains, "shaped my research interest in the visual cultures of capitalism," which he explores in his book Forms of Persuasion: Art and Corporate Image in the 1960s, the first dedicated history of corporate patronage in postwar art. Now an associate professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Taylor shifted his focus to American art after a decade working in museums and galleries in Australia. Between 2014 and 2016, he was the first Terra Foundation Research Fellow in American Art at the Tate in London, where he led the Refiguring American Art initiative. This experience influences the collections-based teaching he now brings to Pitt's Museum Studies program.
Among the people who have helped shape his career, Taylor identifies two mentors as significant influences on his research. At the University of Melbourne, Jeanette Hoorn not only supported his first book but also demonstrated how visual culture could enhance his methodology, even as he pursued this work outside academia. Later, at Oxford, his doctoral supervisor Geraldine Johnson, an expert on Renaissance art, played a vital role as his dissertation shifted from his initial focus on sculpture to consider broader issues of patronage in postwar art.
Pitt attracted him because of its innovative department, collaborations with the local cultural scene, and the facilities of the Frick Fine Arts Building and its University Art Gallery (UAG). He and his husband had visited Pittsburgh twice before relocating and felt confident they would settle in comfortably.
"We knew that we would feel at home in the city,” says Taylor. “It’s great to be able to walk to campus – and, for all its quirks, I love working in the Frick Fine Arts Building.”
Pitt and the surrounding region have significantly influenced his scholarly work. A faculty fellowship at Pitt's Humanities Center gave him both an intellectual community and the time to begin shaping his next book. In addition, Andy Warhol plays a key role in Taylor's recent projects, including an essay he wrote for the catalog of a major Warhol exhibition that opened in France this summer.
“Warhol is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg of this city’s rich art history,” says Taylor. “I am especially interested in how Pittsburgh modernisms developed in the shadow of the city’s industrial economy. I recently co-curated an exhibition of geometric abstraction by Pittsburgh women in the 1960s and 1970s, which let me explore some of this history. My colleague Sylvia Rhor Samaniego, Director of the University Art Gallery, is as interested as I am in these kinds of histories, and it is great to be able to use the UAG collection as a jumping-off point for projects of this sort.”
His public work spans the city, including Pittsburgh International Airport. In 2018, he was invited to give a talk about a large Alexander Calder mobile hanging in the terminal. The mobile, titled "Pittsburgh," is one of Calder's major works: created for the 1958 Carnegie International, where it won first prize for sculpture, it has welcomed travelers to the airport since 1959.
“I have published and spoken widely on the work of Alexander Calder, but it was great luck to land in a city with its own major mobile,” says Taylor. "It was quite strange to stand still to give a talk in the terminal while everything around us moved, including the mobile."
When the mobile was moved to a more prominent spot after the airport was renovated, he was asked to create a permanent description for it: a wall label.
"There is only so much you can say on a label, and I enjoy the challenge of this form’s constraints," he says. "With 10 million passengers passing through each year, every word mattered."
While he was working on this project, he happened to be teaching students how to write labels for a UAG exhibition. He took the opportunity to engage his students in his process by sharing the text with them and asking for their feedback. Bringing real projects to students is central to Taylor's teaching.
"I work hard to treat students as professionals and set them tasks that are genuinely useful for our projects. I want them to learn by doing," he offers, so their work becomes "new knowledge that is going to have a real impact in the world."
For a 2021 collaboration with the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, nine of his students curated an exhibition from the permanent collection, and many now work in art museums. Another project with the School of Public Health had students interpret material from Jonas Salk's collections documenting the development of the polio vaccine at Pitt.
As a graduate supervisor, he helps students define their own research agendas.
"Art history can be insular and faddish," says Taylor, "so I am especially enthusiastic about students who want to push at its disciplinary boundaries."
He fosters a team dynamic in which students feel safe sharing half-baked ideas, testing and refining them with others, and learning how to leave things “on the cutting room floor.”
This fall, he will lead a seminar in which students help research the department's own history, work he hopes will help mark its centennial in 2027.
“The goal will be to create core historical documents that help describe our history, perhaps for a publication of some sort. I am not quite sure what form it will all take yet. That is, in part, what the students in the class will be helping to work out."