Elizabeth Johnson

Elizabeth Johnson is a Senior Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies and historian of modern and contemporary art. Her research centres on the intersections between sculpture and technology and is informed by theories of media. Elizabeth has published research on sculpture since the 1960s, monuments and digital technology, and holograms.

[email protected]

Background

Elizabeth Johnson is an art historian of modern and contemporary art, with specialisms in sculpture studies, art and technology, and digital culture. She is interested in how contemporary sculptural practice can animate the material, social and political impacts of the global infrastructures and political economies that underpin networked, digital technologies.

She is currently completing a book that investigates how contemporary artists have harnessed social media and other algorithmic technologies to imagine a more responsive and equitable culture of monuments. The book’s unique approach draws from the methods of art history to address the production and aesthetics of digitally engaged monuments, while using the insights of media studies to examine their position in the broader ecosystems of digital culture. The book offers a vital account of artists’ efforts to use algorithmic technology to imagine a different landscape of monuments, and politics, for the future.

Her second research project ‘The Hologram in the Expanded Field’ investigates how contemporary artists have engaged with the idea of the hologram since the mass uptake of mobile, networked digital technologies. Drawing from theories of media and sculpture studies, it intervenes in the screen-centric discourse that often dominates histories of art and technology and suggests that artists have been using the idea of the hologram to attend to the increasing expansion of the gathering and instrumentalization of data in physical spaces.

Prior to this appointment Elizabeth was the Henry Moore Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College London, an Associate Research Fellow of the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology at Birkbeck, and a short-term Research Fellow in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. Before her career as an academic, she worked organising exhibitions in prestigious galleries and museums.

Elizabeth is a co-founder of the Art History for Art Programmes Network, which brings together art historians and art school educators to explore the teaching, learning and assessment of art histories for creative practice students.

Research interests

• Modern and contemporary art
• Histories and theories of sculpture
• Sculpture since 1960
• Histories of art and technology
• 3D
• Holograms
• Monuments and monumentality
• Digital culture

Areas of research supervision

Elizabeth warmly welcomes research students in areas relating to art and digital culture, art and technology, and sculpture studies. Please get in touch at the email address above - she would be happy to discuss your project further.

Qualifications

• PhD, Humanities and Cultural Studies, London Consortium, University of London. Dissertation title: What do you call a sculptor who doesn’t make sculptures? Bruce Nauman, 1965-1974.
• M.Res., Humanities and Cultural Studies, London Consortium, University of London.
• B.A. (Hons.), Sculpture, Camberwell College of Art, University of the Arts London.

Selected recent publications

‘Light Trap for Bruce Nauman: The Holographic Image and Expanded 3D Imaging’, Cultural Politics [in press, expected publication Dec 2025].

E. Johnson, ‘Lessons from the Hologram’, in The Handbook of Digital Culture, eds. Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness and Yiğit Soncul (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025), pp. 151-159.

E. Johnson, ‘Confederate Monuments 2.0: Mary Ellen Carroll at Prospect.3’, in The Sculptural in the (Post-)Digital Age, eds. Ursula Ströbele and Mara Johanna-Kölmel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023), pp. 184-197.

E. Johnson, ‘N Dimensional Space in a One-Dimensional World: The Art of Holograms in 1970’, Archives of American Art Journal 62, no. 1 (2023): 42-59.

E. Johnson, ‘Sculpting the readyunmade’, in Meuser: Works 2021-2023, ed. Christian Malycha (Berlin: Galerie Gisela Capitain, Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Meyer Riegger, Galerie Nordenhake, 2023), pp. 94-96.

E. Johnson, ‘Review of Thomas Morgan Evans, “3D Warhol: Andy Warhol and Sculpture” (London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2017)’, Sculpture Journal 27, no. 1 (2018): 137-38.

E. Johnson, ‘The Body of the Text: Bruce Nauman’s Words’, Sculpture Journal 25, no. 3 (2016), pp. 391-405.