Wes Hill

Biography

Wes Hill is Senior Lecturer in art history and visual culture, and Faculty Director, Higher Degree Research and Training, at SCU. A specialist in contemporary art and its genealogies, after completing honours in fine art and creative industries at Queensland University of Technology, Wes completed a PhD in Art History at the University of Queensland in 2012. From 2008-2011, Wes lived in Paris (France) and Hamburg (Germany), before returning to Australia to teach at the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. He is active in the Australian and international arts industries as an historian, critic, and curator, with an interest in post-1960s art and experimental practice. He currently lives in Lennox Head, NSW, where he has been since 2013.

Research

Research areas include: art and pedagogy, critical art practice, hipsters, postmodernism, identity politics and contemporary installation art. Books include: 'Art after the Hipster: Identity Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics' (2017) published by Palgrave Macmillan; 'Hipster Culture: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives' (2019), published by Bloomsbury; and 'How Folklore Shaped Modern Art: A Post-Critical History of Aesthetics' (2015) published by Routledge. As an art critic, he writes regularly for Artforum, Artlink, Eyeline and Frieze magazines. Curated exhibitions include Speech Acts (University of Technology Sydney Gallery), Living Things (Lismore Regional Gallery), Outside Thoughts (Contemporary Art Tasmania) and Jeff Gibson: Countertypes (Griffith University Art Museum).

Supervision

Wes has examined and supervised numerous art-historical and practice-based PhD research projects on installation art, Op art, photojournalism, autobiographical painting and archival art, amongst others.

Teaching

Wes teaches theory units in the Art & Design degree, including: Looking at Art, Modern Art and the Avant-Garde, Art After 1960, and Advanced Theories of Contemporary Art.

Other

Wes has received numerous grants and awards over his career, including funding from the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Queensland and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He was appointed as a peer assessor by the Australia Council for the Arts from 2019-2021, assessing nation-wide individual and institutional grant applications during this period.