Ann Reynolds is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History and the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and Assistant Chair for Art History. In her research and teaching, she focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century art and visual culture in the United States and Europe with a concentration on the theory and practice of archival research. She is close to completing the manuscript for a book entitled Imagining an Altogether: Cinema, Surrealism, and New York 1940–1970. This book provides a history of relationships among New York artists, poets, novelists, critics, choreographers, and filmmakers circa 1940–1970 that were shaped by shared, if heterogeneous, commitments to surrealism and its legacy, primarily through an engagement with film. Investigating the traces of such sharing, much of which is preserved in the archives of individuals, as it constellated both in the same moment and over time, reveals historical continuities and legacies that a focus on a single generation or group may lose sight of. In articulating the interplay between the more mundane aspects of New York life and how people came to terms with larger cultural, social, economic, and political events, she draws out the complexities of how individuals experience and share, shape and contest culture, and cultural politics, in ways that are not necessarily reflected in institutional art historical narratives and that are inherently more racially and sexually diverse.
Some of Reynolds’s most recent publications include “Mediated Visibility: Magnum’s Legacy of Water Imagery,” which appears in a special issue of LA+ on media, (Spring 2026). This text is the first part of her new book-length project tentatively entitled Water Archives, Water Histories, a consideration of the visual rhetoric of water as instantiated by a wide range of graphic, photographic, and moving image archives and then used by artists, sociologists, and ecologists to build arguments about and histories of water in the Southwestern US during the 1970s to the present. Other recent publications include “Standing in the World,” Lynn Chadwick. (Gallimard Press, 2026); “The Presence of Color in a Black and White Landscape,” Robert Smithson in Europa. (Joseph Albers Museum, 2026); “Parker Tyler’s ‘Film as The Problem of Space Control,’” for Abigail Susik, ed. Beyond Still Life: Surrealism and Animation. (Bloomsbury Press, 2025); and other essays, such as “No Strangers” for the exhibition catalogue The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930–1955 (David Zwirner Gallery, 2019); an essay on Ruth Asawa for the exhibition In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury (Art Institute of Chicago, 2019); and Joan Jonas (Fundación Botín, 2016 and US Pavillion, Venice Biennale, 2015). Reynolds is also the author of Robert Smithson: Learning From New Jersey and Elsewhere (MIT Press, 2003), which was translated into French in 2014. She has received residency fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (2021-2022); the National Humanities Center, NC (2017–2018); and the Clark Art Institute (2006). She has been the recipient of five teaching awards including the College of Fine Arts Distinguished Teaching Award in 2006.
She is not taking graduate students for the 2027–2028 academic year.
Mediated Visibility: Magnum's Legacy of Water Pollution Imagery PDF
Curving into a Straight Line PDF
No Strangers PDF
Ann Reynolds is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History and the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and Assistant Chair for Art History. In her research and teaching, she focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century art and visual culture in the United States and Europe with a concentration on the theory and practice of archival research. She is close to completing the manuscript for a book entitled Imagining an Altogether: Cinema, Surrealism, and New York 1940–1970. This book provides a history of relationships among New York artists, poets, novelists, critics, choreographers, and filmmakers circa 1940–1970 that were shaped by shared, if heterogeneous, commitments to surrealism and its legacy, primarily through an engagement with film. Investigating the traces of such sharing, much of which is preserved in the archives of individuals, as it constellated both in the same moment and over time, reveals historical continuities and legacies that a focus on a single generation or group may lose sight of. In articulating the interplay between the more mundane aspects of New York life and how people came to terms with larger cultural, social, economic, and political events, she draws out the complexities of how individuals experience and share, shape and contest culture, and cultural politics, in ways that are not necessarily reflected in institutional art historical narratives and that are inherently more racially and sexually diverse.
Some of Reynolds’s most recent publications include “Mediated Visibility: Magnum’s Legacy of Water Imagery,” which appears in a special issue of LA+ on media, (Spring 2026). This text is the first part of her new book-length project tentatively entitled Water Archives, Water Histories, a consideration of the visual rhetoric of water as instantiated by a wide range of graphic, photographic, and moving image archives and then used by artists, sociologists, and ecologists to build arguments about and histories of water in the Southwestern US during the 1970s to the present. Other recent publications include “Standing in the World,” Lynn Chadwick. (Gallimard Press, 2026); “The Presence of Color in a Black and White Landscape,” Robert Smithson in Europa. (Joseph Albers Museum, 2026); “Parker Tyler’s ‘Film as The Problem of Space Control,’” for Abigail Susik, ed. Beyond Still Life: Surrealism and Animation. (Bloomsbury Press, 2025); and other essays, such as “No Strangers” for the exhibition catalogue The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930–1955 (David Zwirner Gallery, 2019); an essay on Ruth Asawa for the exhibition In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury (Art Institute of Chicago, 2019); and Joan Jonas (Fundación Botín, 2016 and US Pavillion, Venice Biennale, 2015). Reynolds is also the author of Robert Smithson: Learning From New Jersey and Elsewhere (MIT Press, 2003), which was translated into French in 2014. She has received residency fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (2021-2022); the National Humanities Center, NC (2017–2018); and the Clark Art Institute (2006). She has been the recipient of five teaching awards including the College of Fine Arts Distinguished Teaching Award in 2006.
She is not taking graduate students for the 2027–2028 academic year.
Mediated Visibility: Magnum's Legacy of Water Pollution Imagery PDF
Curving into a Straight Line PDF
No Strangers PDF