Kaegan Sparks

Student Fellow

Kaegan Sparks is a PhD candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center. Alongside her academic work she has diverse experience in art institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Dia Art Foundation, the New Museum, and The Drawing Center, and she regularly publishes art criticism and book reviews in Artforum. She has teaching experience at CUNY and in the department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. Kaegan’s interests broadly center on intersections of art and labor, and her research has been supported by the CPCP and the Smithsonian Institution. She is currently completing a dissertation on the US performance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles that analyzes her self-designated “Maintenance Art” practice in light of socialist feminist debates on reproductive labor as well as the broader retrenchment of the welfare state in the US during the 1970s–80s. In 2020–21, she paused her academic work to organize a mutual aid network in Queens.

Participating Years

2022–2023

Revolutionary Arts

Wary of making politics an aesthetic in disguise, radical theory and practice have nevertheless embraced all kinds of artistic provocations and traditions in every form and genre. At the same time, the possibility for fundamental change demands a range of interpretive encounters that might elicit meanings for people whom Julius Scott, writing about a different time, described as “disenchanted people casting about for new options.”