Dr. Frances Colpitt is a specialist in American art after the 1960s and holds the Deedie Potter Rose Chair, an endowed professorship in contemporary art history, at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. She is a corresponding editor for Art in America and the author of Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (University of Washington Press) and Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press). She was also the lead author of a monograph on Texas conceptual painter Vernon Fisher by the University of Texas Press in 2010. She has written about the work of Donald Judd on several occasions, including an essay in Donald Judd: Selected Work from the Judd Foundation, published by Christie’s in 2006. Her essay on entertainment in contemporary art in Boredom Studies Reader: Frameworks and Perspectives is forthcoming from Routledge.

Her writing focuses on abstraction and, in particular, its history and current practice in Southern California, which she has explored in two recent publications, “Hard-Edge Cool,” in Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Mid-Century, and “In and Out of the Studio,” in Under the Big Black Sun: California Art in the Age of Pluralism, 1974 81, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. She is currently working on publications about the works of Ed Moses and Doug Wheeler.

Dr. Colpitt has organized numerous exhibitions of contemporary American art at venues including the University of Texas at San Antonio, Artpace, and Blue Star Art Space in San Antonio. She was curator of shows at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Fisher Gallery at the University of Southern California; the Phoenix Art Museum; and Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, TCU’s off-campus gallery. Her exhibitions at FWCA include Material Culture, a group show of Texas sculptors using real or readymade materials; Skin Freak, four California and Texas abstract painters; and, with the participation of TCU graduate students in art and art history, Color Pictures, an exhibition of conceptual and fine-art photographers.