Frances Cathryn
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06. About
Research
Writing
Curatorial projects
Editing
Guest lectures & teaching
Bio & contact

Frances Cathryn is an art historian who studies the ways American culture shapes a common understanding of the past. Through her curatorial projects, editorial work, and critical writing, Frances contributes to debates in art history concerning place-based memory, the ethics of representation, and the role of material culture in mediating unresolved pasts within the present. Across her work, Frances emphasizes collaborative and public-facing methodologies that reconsider how historical narratives are constructed and circulated in U.S. art and cultural discourse.


Photograph by Michael Valiquette.

02.Writing

Selected publications:

1. “Plantation Horror,” Art Papers, November 6, 2025
2. “What makes a family?” Times Union, July 22, 2024
3. “In the Room,” an exhibition brochure for CPW Kingston, June 6, 2023
4. “For the People,” Monument Lab Bulletin, February 28, 2022
5. “Stephanie Syjuco’s Tale of Two Americas,” Frieze magazine, May 2021
6. “A Past That Is Not Past,” the Brooklyn Rail, November 2020
7. “Saying Her Name: What monuments to Sojourner Truth can teach us about representing Black lives,” Social Text journal, October 2020
8. “How Will We Remember This Moment?” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 2020