Tenley Bick is Assistant Professor of Global Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History at Florida State University. She is an art historian of modern and global contemporary art, with special interests in post-WWII European (especially Italian) and contemporary African art (continental and diasporic), and a focus on social art history and cultural geopolitics. Her research and teaching are dedicated to the investigation of modern and contemporary art history as a global field, and to the examination of art and social context on a local and global level. Topics of interest include artistic internationalism and its cultural politics after World War II, postcolonial modernisms, diasporic cinemas, historiography and global politics, and artistic labor and process, among others.

Her current research includes her book in preparation, Michelangelo Pistoletto: Figuration and Cultural Politics (under peer review), which examines the work of the contemporary Italian artist within the politicized cultural contexts of post-WWII Italy and Europe, and against the broader geopolitical horizon for art of the 1960s. She is also working on a second book-length project on contemporary art and Italian colonialism. She is the founder and curator of Costellazione, an online bilingual project dedicated to mapping new directions in contemporary Italian art and activism.

Her scholarship and professional activities have been supported by the Institute of International Education (IIE), the University of California, Los Angeles, Florida State University, Magazzino Italian Art Foundation, the Bibliotheca Hertziana–Max Planck Institute for Art History, and the Italian Art Society. Her recent publications have appeared in the journals Third Text, African Arts, Portable Gray, Word & Image, Portable Gray, Forum Italicum (forthcoming 2023), and The International Yearbook of Futurism Studies (forthcoming 2023); the exhibition catalogs Marinella Senatore: Make It Shine (Mazzoleni) and Bochner Boetti Fontana (Magazzino Italian Art), curated by Mel Bochner; as well as the edited volumes Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present: Multi-lingual Literatures, Arts and Cultures (eds. H. Solterer and V. Joos, 2022), Global Revolutionary Aesthetics and Politics after Paris '68 (eds. M. Munro, W. J. Cloonan, B. J. Faulk, and C. P. Weber), and Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing through the Discipline (eds. J. Elkins and K. McGuire, et al). Her translation work (Italian to English) has also been published, appearing in the catalogue for the internationally traveling exhibition, Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (eds. M. Kwon and P. Kaiser). She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from UCLA and a B.A. with Honors in Art History from Stanford University. She was previously Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Washington College.

Photo by Alexa Hoyer.