Artie Foster is a PhD candidate in the department of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in modern and contemporary Euro-American art, with a focus in avant-garde painting at the end of the 20th century.

He is especially interested in the material and cultural changes painting underwent from the 1960s to the 90s—wherein issues of form, identity, representation, and perception were hotly debated—and the aesthetic and political shifts these changes signal. He is currently writing a dissertation about the work of painter Frank Bowling and his anachronistic embrace of modernist formalism after 1970 as a case study (projected defense date: May 2027).

Artie is also a lecturer in art history at at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Carthage College, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has worked at institutions ranging from the National Gallery of African Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, as well as a handful of Chicago galleries including Art In These Times, Co-Prosperity Sphere, ARTSPACE 8, and UIC’s Gallery 400, among others.