Emily Warner, Ph.D.
Emily Warner is a historian of American and twentieth-century art. Her current book project, Abstraction Unframed: Abstract Murals at Midcentury, studies the relationship of abstract murals and modern architecture in the midcentury United States in order to propose a viewer’s history of abstraction: one that attends to the form’s full phenomenological reach and deep social embeddedness. Analyzing abstract murals from the 1930s-50s—from geometric abstraction to the gestural paintings of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner—the book traces the desire for a more immersive, spatially complex, and socially pervasive form of abstract art. Other interests include muralism and public art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; art of the New Deal; and modernism and the urban experience. Warner earned her Ph.D. in History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining OU, she taught at Vassar College and the Courtauld Institute of Art, and held fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Dedalus Foundation, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Email: eswarner@ou.edu
