Dr Warren Carter

Professional biography

BA Honours Humanities (Thames Valley University), MA and PhD in the History of Art (University College London).

Warren Carter joined the OU in October 2013 after having been a teaching fellow in the History of Art Department at University College London for many years as well as an MA tutor for a decade or so at Richmond – The American International University in London where he taught courses on nineteenth and twentieth century art in the United States as well as on the history of twentieth-century muralism from the Mexican Revolution through to contemporary street art. Since joining the OU he has chaired A344: Art and its global histories and A236: Art and visual culture in the modern world as well as contributing teaching materials to A112: Cultures.

Research interests

His research consists of three principal inetrrelated strands: 1) the historiography of, and different methodologies in, the social history of art with a particular emphasis on marxist interpretations; 2) an analysis of the Mexican Mural Renaissance in the post-revolutionary period after 1920, and; 3) an analysis of the federal art projects in the United States during the New Deal period.

Publications:

Books:

Warren Carter, Barnaby Haran, and Frederic J. Schwartz (eds.), Renew Marxist Art History (London: Art/Books, 2013).

Book Chapters:

'Different Marxist Histories of Art Post-1968: T.J. Clark and O.K. Werkmeister', Tijen Tunali and Brian Winkenweder (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Marxist Art History (New York: Routledge) pp. 120-130.

‘Towards a History of the Marxist History of Art’, Warren Carter, Barnaby Haran and Frederic J. Schwartz (eds.), Renew Marxist Art History (London: Art/Books, 2013), pp. 14-28.

‘The Dialectical Legacies of Radical Art History: Meyer Schapiro and German Aesthetic Debates in the 1930s and 1940s’, Warren Carter, Barnaby Haran, and Frederic J. Schwartz (eds.), Renew Marxist Art History (London: Art/Books, 2013), pp. 64-77.

‘The Artist As Worker: Radical Responses to the New Deal Federal Art Projects’, Avigail Moss and Kerstin Stackemeier (eds.), Painting – The Implicit Horizon (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012), pp. 23-38.

Exhibition Catalogues:

‘Introduction – The Legacy of Social Realism’, Ben Shahn and American Social Realism, The Chambers Gallery, 2009.

Edited Journal Special Issues:

'"Painting the Town Red?": The Contemporary Legacy of One Hundred Years of Muralism and the Left', Warren Carter and Ben Weidel-Kaufmann (eds.), Art and the Public Sphere, vol. 12, no. 1 (2024). 

Journal Articles:

'"Painting the town red?" One hundred years of public muralism and the left: An introductory essay' (with Ben Weidel-Kaufmann), Art and the Public Sphere, vol, 12, no, 1 (2024), pp. 3-27.

'The Slow Fuse of the Revolutionary Mural: Diego Rivera, Poststrucuralism and Historical Revisionism', Acte Academiae Artium Vilnesnis, vol. 94 (December 2019), pp. 39-58.

‘Painting the Revolution: Politics and Ideology in Mexican Muralism’, Third Text, no. 128 (May 2014), pp. 282-291.

‘Structure and Agency in New Deal Art: The Case of William Gropper’s “Construction of a Dam”’, Object, no. 6 (2003/2004), pp. 5-28.

‘The Public (Mis)use of Art: Radical Artists, Reformist States, and the Politics of Mural Painting in 1930s and 1940s America and Mexico’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 23, no. 2 (2000), pp. 165-171.

Teaching interests

He would be willing to supervise research students on topics that embrace a wide-range of themes in twentieth-century American art, the subject of twentieth-century muralism as well as methodologies within the social history of art, with a particular emphasis on Marxist approaches to the subject.