Blake Oetting is a Postdoctoral Fellow between the Art History and Rhetoric departments and Curatorial Fellow at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. He received his PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (2025) and his BA from Swarthmore College (2018). In 2023-2024, he was a Critical Studies participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Oetting’s current book project focuses on the development of Institutional Critique practices at the end of the twentieth century. It showcases how artists—including Renée Green, Tom Burr, Adrian Piper, Andrea Fraser, John Knight, and Art Club 2000, among others—negotiated the metabolization of artistic subjectivity through work that marked and undermined the biopolitical capture of identity, desire, subculture, and sociality. In doing so, these artists reveal a new vision of Institutional Critique in which the prevailing understanding of museums as static, physical entities is replaced with one in which institutionality operates as a diffuse technique of subject construction. Other forthcoming projects include an edited volume on the recent work of Tom Burr (Primary Information, Fall 2025), the role of “discrepant phenomenology” in postwar practices in the United States, the role of erotic drawing within queer modernism, and the pioneering tactics of gallerist Colin de Land.
Recent articles by Oetting appear in Oxford Art Journal, Art Journal, Criticism, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. His art criticism has appeared in Artforum, Texte Zur Kunst, Flash Art, The Brooklyn Rail, November, BOMB, caa.reviews, The Public Review, baargeld and exhibition catalogs for Renée Green, Hernan Bas, and Jean Cocteau (which he co-edited with Kenneth Silver). Oetting has curated exhibitions at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Helena Anrather Gallery, and 80WSE, and served as a visiting critic at the Parsons School of Design. He has also worked for a number of institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Barnes Foundation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the journal, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics.
Oetting’s work has been awarded fellowships from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Museum Research Consortium at the Museum of Modern Art.
