Seph Rodney will write a series of articles that will challenge the popular, and often tacit, orthodoxies that shape and support our collective ideas of value, success, authority, and intellectual rigor as they relate to contemporary art. Rodney will continue to seek out imaginative, poetic ways of attending to the artistic encounter and will produce criticism that aims to give greater visibility to artists who lack high-profile institutional backing.
Seph Rodney is a freelance writer who was born in Jamaica and grew up in the Bronx, New York. He came to art writing after taking a degree in photography at UC Irvine and a doctoral degree in museum studies from Birkbeck College, University of London. His book The Personalization of the Museum Visit was published by Routledge in 2019. His writing has appeared in publications including CNN, Hyperallergic (where Rodney worked as senior critic and opinion editor), MSNBC, and the New York Times. In 2020 he won the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation Prize for art journalism. Rodney can be heard weekly on the podcast The American Age.