Lee Ann Custer, PhD
Lee Ann Custer is a historian who specializes in the art and visual culture of the United States, broadly understood, with a focus on the intersection of art, the urban environment, and the construction of racial and social hierarchies. She is currently an NEH Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University in History of Art. She earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and her AB from Harvard University.
Work
Custer’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.
Urban Air Modernism traces a typology of “open-air space” that emerged in modern American art as a spatial complement to the skyscraper. It connects artistic representations of the city with period debates about open-air space that played out in the politics of housing reform, zoning law, and public health. By examining the work of three painters who lived in New York at roughly the same time yet embodied different subject positions in their art—John Sloan, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Aaron Douglas—the book unravels how intersectional concerns of race, class, and gender shaped city dwellers’ access to, and experiences of, these sought-after zones.
Her 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. A 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. Additional publications have addressed the relationship between writing, teaching, and design in the work of Denise Scott Brown (Birkhäuser, 2022) and Robert Venturi (MoMA, 2019) in the early 1960s.
In her teaching, Custer leverages local resources and her interdisciplinary interests in place-based methodologies to empower students to recognize art in their everyday environment. 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 urban studies, Custer serves on the Advisory Board of the Urban Humanities Network and on the Steering Committee for Vanderbilt’s Cities Grand Challenge Initiative.