Abstraction after Psychology

Suzanne Hudson discusses mid-century abstraction in relation to psychology and projective testing and examines the ways that the use of images in clinical settings conditioned audience encounters with art.

Suzanne Hudson is an art historian and critic based in Los Angeles, where she is Associate Professor of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. Hudson’s work has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), Creative Capital | The Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Dedalus Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. Her writing has appeared in such publications as Parkett, Art Journal, and October. A long-term contributor to Artforum, she also has written numerous essays for international exhibition catalogs and artist monographs. She is the author of books including Robert Ryman: Used Paint (MIT, 2009), Agnes Martin: Night Sea (Afterall/MIT, 2017), and Contemporary Painting (Thames & Hudson, 2021). She is currently at work on Better for the Making: Art, Therapy, Process, a study of the therapeutic origins of art-making within American modernism.

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