About

Dr. Melissa Ragain is an Associate Professor at Montana State University, where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary art history, specializing in environmental aesthetics and the intellectual history of art. She is the author of Domesticating the Invisible: Form and Environmental Anxiety in Postwar America (University of California Press 2021), and the editor of Jack Burnham’s, Dissolve into Comprehension: Writings and Interviews, 1964-2004, (MIT Press 2015). Her writing has appeared in Art Journal, Art Journal Open, Hyperallergic, X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, ARTLIES, Criticism, and American Art.

She was a 2010-11 Core Critical Studies Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, a 2016-17 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, and a recipient of a 2016 Art Writers Grant from the Warhol Foundation/ Creative Capital. Based in Livingston, Montana, her new research considers the importance of environmental emplacement to artmaking in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.

In addition to her work as a scholar, she curates independent projects and has been the consulting curator for Tinworks Art in Bozeman, Montana, since 2020. She has curated projects with artists such as A.K. Burns, Gregory Crewdson, Kota Ezawa, Avram Finkelstein, Karolina Halatek, Raven Halfmoon, Tracy Linder, Suzanne Kite, Tucker Nichols, Macon Reed, Wendy Red Star, Layli Long Soldier, Laurel Sparks, and others.