Lee Ann Custer, PhD
Lee Ann Custer is a historian who specializes in the art, architecture, and urbanism of the United States. Her concerns as a scholar and a teacher focus on the ways in which images mediate ideas of place and space in order to ask whose experiences they fortify and whose they omit.
Lee Ann is currently an NEH Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University in History of Art. She earned her PhD and MA from the University of Pennsylvania, and her AB from Harvard University.
Work
Lee Ann’s current book project, Urban Air Modernism: Beyond the Skyscraper Aesthetic in New York City, 1880–1940, considers the socio-spatial politics of urban air and its visualization by modern artists living in New York City.
Offering a counternarrative to the “race to the sky” that so often dominates histories of New York and of the metropolis more broadly, Urban Air Modernism connects works by John Sloan, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Aaron Douglas with period debates about light, air, and open space that played out in the politics of housing reform, zoning law, and public health. Through historical maps, municipal records, and other archival sources, it unravels the ways in which race, class, and gender shaped city dwellers’ access to and experiences of these sought-after zones.
Lee Ann’s research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Luce/American Council of Learned Societies, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, and the New York Public Library, among others. Her related article on Progressive Era reformers’ aims to create an airier, and racially whiter, environment in relation to Sloan’s paintings of tenements was published in American Art in summer 2023.
A second ongoing project studies the entangled histories of race, visuality, municipal control, and residents’ use of space in the American city during the 1950s–70s through the pedagogy and photography of architect and city planner Denise Scott Brown. An essay on Scott Brown’s embrace of the everyday urban environment in her influential design courses at Penn in the 1960s appeared in Denise Scott Brown: In Other Eyes (Birkhäuser, 2022).
In the classroom, Lee Ann centers her interdisciplinary interests in how visual culture and built forms reflect or upend social and political power structures. She has taught courses on Art, Race, and Urban Space and Art and the Environment, as well as general introductions to the art and architecture of the United States at Vanderbilt, the University of Arizona, Georgetown, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Committed to bridging the humanities and design, Lee Ann serves on the Advisory Board of the Urban Humanities Network and on the Steering Committee for Vanderbilt’s Cities Grand Challenge Initiative.