Lee Ann Custer, PhD
Lee Ann Custer is an art historian who studies the art, architecture, and urbanism of the United States, with a focus on the intersection of cultural production, environments (both built and natural), and the construction or refutation of racial and social hierarchies. She is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. 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, examines the socio-spatial politics of urban air and its visualization by modern artists living in New York City in the early twentieth century.
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 National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Luce Foundation/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 University, and the New York Public Library, among others. Her related scholarship has appeared in American Art and Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and is forthcoming from the Detroit Institute of Arts. 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.
As a teacher and a curator, Custer leverages in-depth object study and interdisciplinary place-based methodologies to rethink canonical histories. She has taught courses on art, race, and urbanization; art and environment(s); and introductions to the art and architecture of the United States at Vanderbilt University, the University of Arizona, Georgetown University, and the University of Pennsylvania. At the National Gallery of Art, she is supporting a major traveling exhibition of American art to be staged at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia in 2027.
As part of her efforts to re-assess who and what constitutes American art and how and why it is taught and displayed, Custer co-organizes the Re-Surveying American Art initiative, a forum for scholars to reimagine conventional narratives. Committed to bridging the humanities and urban studies, she also serves on the Advisory Board of the Urban Humanities Network.