Dr. Michaela Rife

Assistant Professor of Art

Michaela Rife is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art with a focus on North America and the environment. She is currently working on her first book about New Deal-era murals in the Dust Bowl region as a way to understand how art contends with environmental disaster while supporting (or resisting) settler colonialism. Her research has been supported by institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Antiquarian Society, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Getty Research Institute.

Dr. Rife is passionate about teaching an inclusive version of art history, incorporating object-based learning, primary sources, and creative projects at every level. Before coming to SUNY Plattsburgh in 2023, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows and History of Art at the University of Michigan.

Education
- Ph.D. University of Toronto, 2020
- M.A. University of British Columbia, 2014
- M.A. Courtauld Institute of Art, 2011
- B.A. University of Oregon, 2010
Recent Publications
- “Derricks and Skulls: Filming and Promoting the Extractive Landscapes of Boom Town (1940).” In American Energy Cinema, edited by Robert Lifset, Raechel Lutz, Sarah Stanford-McIntyre, 115-131. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2023.
- “Turning a Corner: Reexamining Joe Jones’s Anthony, Kansas Mural through Pandemic Eyes,” Panorama: Journal of the Associations of Historians of American Art 8.2 (November 2022).
- “Oil Field Art and Alexandre Hogue’s Land Ethic,” iArchives of American Art Journal 59.1 (Spring 2020): 24-43.
- “Below Ground and Foreground: Wyoming Coal, the Mountain Pine Beetle, and the Removal of Chris Drury’s Carbon Sink,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 4.1 (Winter 2016): 25-43.
- “Will Wilson and Jetsonorama: Confronting Resource Extraction in the Navajo Nation,” Seismopolite: Journal of Art and Politics 14, Special Issue on Art and Political Ecology, Fall 2016.