Better for the Making: Art, Therapy, Process will offer an expansive historical treatment in response to a straightforward but elusive query: when and under what circumstances did people in America come to believe that making art was good for them? It argues that the turn to process—here defined as making something without anticipating or requiring an artwork to serve as the culmination of one’s engagement—is foundational to American visual modernism and to the eventual coining of “process art” by the sculptor Robert Morris.
Suzanne Hudson writes on modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on abstraction, painting, process, creativity, pedagogy, and American philosophy as it intersects with aesthetics and institutional discourses. She is cofounder of the Contemporary Art Think Tank and the Society of Contemporary Art Historians, an affiliate society of the College Art Association. Her work has appeared in such publications as Artforum, Parkett, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, Art Journal, and October. She is the author of Robert Ryman: Used Paint (MIT Press, 2009; 2011) and the coauthor and coeditor of Contemporary Art: 1989–Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). Her book Painting Now is forthcoming from Thames & Hudson. She is an assistant professor of art history and fine arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.