Robert Bailey is Interim Associate Director and Associate Professor of Art History in the School of Visual Arts at the University of Oklahoma, where he researches and teaches the history of modern and contemporary art, the historiography and methodology of art history, and museum studies. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in the History of Art and Architecture from the University of Pittsburgh.
Bailey’s research investigates how artists and scholars relate theory and practice amid social, environmental, and technological change. His books Conceptual Art after Modernism: Reconceiving Art and Art History (Routledge, 2025) and Art & Language International: Conceptual Art between Art Worlds (Duke University Press, 2016) consider intellectual and political histories of conceptualism in art and art history since the mid-twentieth century. He also edited and introduced Terry Smith’s One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism (Duke University Press, 2017). His current projects on environmental topics include two forthcoming books: a collaboration with photographer Todd Stewart about water in the Owens Valley of southeastern California and a monograph on art-historical fieldwork methods. Recently, he has incorporated environmental field recording and signal processing into his fieldwork practice and begun new research on political uses of recorded media by Native American artists and musicians working with sound.
Bailey’s work often integrates scholarly inquiry with creative activity and public engagement. He has exhibited his experimental, place-based writing about social and environmental histories of the southwestern United States at NEST Studio for the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder, Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, Southern Utah Museum of Art, and the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art. He also contributes to the Black Artists of Oklahoma Project, a public humanities initiative supported by the Mellon Foundation, the National Archives, and the Oklahoma Arts Council that documents the legacies of African American artists from Oklahoma and will culminate in a digital edition.
