Grant Vetter

Dr. Grant Vetter is a theorist of power/knowledge whose work focuses on issues related to art, architecture, and social control. His first book, The Architecture of Control: A Contribution to the Critique of the Science of Apparatuses (Zero Books, 2012), proposed an entirely new lexicon for how we understand the intersection of surveillance, technology, and bio-power in the twenty-first century. Dr. Vetter is currently working on texts about The Futures of Art and the Curatorial Generation, Being & Capital and A Fair Revolution, all of which engage with questions about the resources of resistance, the politics of intersectionality, and the designs of imperial democracy.

His writings and reviews have appeared in journals like Art + Cake, Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society, and JAVA: Art, Ideas, Taste, Music, and Fashion as well as being published in catalogs by galleries and other art institutions. Some of his most recent writings include reviewing the exhibitions of Kim Sweet at UCLA, Larry Madrigal at Nicodim Gallery, and Bill Dambrova at Mesa Arts Center in addition to writing essays about the works of Erin Lawlor for Miles McEnery Gallery in New York, Max Presneill for Patrick Painter Gallery in Los Angeles, and a monograph project about the work of Steve Hampton that is currently titled The Personal is Geopolitical.

In the past, Dr. Vetter has taught at the Art Center College of Design (ACCD) in Pasadena, the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and the School for Science and Architecture (SCI-Arch) in downtown L.A. He holds advanced degrees from UCI where he was a member of the Critical Theory Institute (CTI) in addition to completing his M.A. and Ph.D. at the European Graduate School (EGS) where his research focused on the rise of hyperbolic capitalism and schizo-analytic theories of being.

He has served as a curator at art institutions like Autonomie Arts and the Foundation for Art Resources in Los Angeles as well as Arizona State University and Fine Art Complex in Tempe. During this time Dr. Vetter organized exhibits with the curators from the Mexi-Cali Biennial, the Wrong Biennial, the Mapping Biennial, The Center for Aesthetic Activism, Land [Muse]um, the Fiber Arts Network, the Society for Photographic Education, the Institute for Humanities Research, ARTRA Curatorial and #NastyWomen. He has exhibited the works of Bruce Yonemoto, Karen Finely, Justin Bowers, Lita Albuquerque, Marie Thibeault, Maya Gurantz, Gabie Strong, Jonas T. Becker, Nick Aguayo, Helga Fassonaki, Liz Nurenberg, Devon Tsuno, Kio Griffith, Michelle Jane Lee, and Edgar Cardenas, among others.

Dr. Vetter was also a cohort in the International Curators Program at the Node Center for Curatorial Studies and has curated exhibitions like Alternative Digital Aesthetics, Memory and the Chromatroposphere, Sense and Counter-Sensibilities: Art and Object Relations after Object Oriented Ontology, Politics as Unusual: Art at the Edge of Conspiracy, Bodies of Experience, In Advance of Identity, Landscape at Escape Velocity, Abstraction in the Singular, Painting on Edge, A Matter of Public Record: Art in the Age of Mass Surveillance, The Status of Portraiture: Status Update, Geometric Elegance: Art in the Age of Computational Beauty, and the De-socialized Landscape. Today, he lives and works in Portland as an arts writer, critic, and curator.

Website: https://www.grantvetter.info