Emily Warner is a historian of American and twentieth-century art. Her first book, “Abstraction Unframed: Murals in Midcentury New York” (forthcoming with Yale University Press) examines how a generation of abstract painters turned to muralism to expand the spatial and social reach of their art. From the 1930s onward, artists such as Ilya Bolotowsky, Albert Swinden, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and others created murals for a range of modern architectural spaces, bringing painted and built abstract form into dialogue. The murals they produced—expansive compositions in public housing; immersive, curving forms in hospitals; freestanding murals in living rooms—were viewed not only by art enthusiasts, but also by tenants, patients, workers, pedestrians, inhabitants of modern homes, and dwellers in a changing urban fabric. Situated at the interface between art, architecture, and daily life, abstract murals form a privileged site for understanding modernism. They illuminate not only one of its most tenacious dreams—to return art to the world—but also how that world responded, how the culture at large welcomed, rejected, and transformed abstract painting when it was placed in its midst.
Warner’s research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dedalus Foundation, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, among others. Her publications include “Shadows and Fantastic Fancies: Gorky’s Murals for the Modern City,” in Arshile Gorky: New York City (Hauser & Wirth 2025); “Pompeii 1959 by Hans Hofmann,” in Tate In Focus: Refiguring American Art, 1945-1980 (Tate Research Publication 2018); and “Marketing the Monumental: Wall Painting at Midcentury," Archives of American Art Journal 56.2 (Fall 2017): 26-49.
At OU, Warner teaches survey and topics classes in American and modern art, including Introduction to Art History, Introduction to Modern Art, Murals in American Art, American Art in the Cold War, and Modern Exhibition Histories.
Warner holds a PhD in Art History from University of Pennsylvania and a BA from University of Chicago. Before coming to OU, she taught at Penn, Vassar College, and the Courtauld Institute of Art.
