In The Fuller Effect: Contemporary Art and the Critique of Total Design, Díaz will examine the stakes of contemporary artists’ return to R. Buckminster Fuller’s work. Fuller’s reception by artists has been pronounced in recent years, and many artists explicitly cite him in ways that nearly constitute a revival. Díaz will track and analyze the influence of Fuller’s ideas about equitable resource management and sustainable architectural forms on the work of a select group of contemporary artists and collectives, including Agnes Denes, Fritz Haeg, Matthew Day Jackson, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Mary Mattingly, Nils Norman, N55, Sarah Oppenheimer, and Marjetica Potrc.
Eva Díaz recently completed a book on Black Mountain College, The Experimenters, which will be released by University of Chicago Press in the fall of 2013. It examines how an interdisciplinary group of artists at Black Mountain proposed new models of art practice around the concept of experimentation, and focuses on three key Black Mountain teachers in the late 1940s and early 1950s: Josef Albers, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller. Díaz’s writing appears in such magazines and journals as the Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Art in America, Cabinet, frieze, Grey Room, and October, and she is a regular contributor to Artforum. She is an assistant professor of contemporary art at Pratt Institute in New York.