Welcome to Study Hall With Sarah Hoover: art history musings that you’ll never read on a dusty old man’s bookshelf. This is a newsletter for the people who always wanted to take an art history class, or took one years ago and are anxious to dive back in. It’s for the people who linger by every piece at a museum and wonder what the fuck was happening in the artist’s mind and heart while they were creating it. It’s for those of you who recognize that a lot of that art was born from trauma, and that feminist art in particular has a deep history, chock full of stories needing to be told.
Each week, I’ll offer some brief and never dull historical context, plunging into the world of an artist and how it informed their work. I’ll keep things conversational and culturally relevant, and my goal is to leave you feeling just as obsessed with art making– in all of its glorious complexity– as I am.
A little bit more about me…
I’m Sarah Hoover and I am terrified of being boring.
I’m a writer, art historian, cultural critic, professor, and mother. I grew up in Indiana, studied art history at NYU, and then got a masters in cultural theory at Columbia University in the City of New York. I spent 15 years working at the largest international art gallery, managing artists and selling their art. And in between all of that, I went to a lot of dinner parties.
The things I’m most obsessed with are art history, feminism, trauma-theory, and sexual politics. I studied all of it in school and grad school, and I have a book coming out next year, The Motherload, that deals with all of that and more. In fact, I teach a class at a college near me about this sort of stuff. Am I qualified to write a SUBSTACK? I can’t answer that because my imposter syndrome controls me thoroughly. But I think, deep down, the answer is somewhere close to yes.
This weekly newsletter will teach you some interesting facts and some fabulous stories of the art history variety, and it will contribute to a world that supports continuing self-education, as I believe a learned populace is a caring and progressive populace. It will teach in a digestible and informal way. It will support the normalization of trauma-informed and feminist viewpoints. And perhaps most exciting of all, it will gather a community of people who want to engage with these subjects, and engage with each other.
A preview of coming attractions includes: insane asylums, men stealing shit from women, laudanum addictions, penis fixations, murder, suicide, pulling things out of vaginas, putting things into vaginas, turning things into other things that look like vaginas, masturbating, truth-telling, and above all, a belief in the power of art.
May you never, ever be the boring one at the dinner party.
Photo by Carl Timpone/BFA
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