Susan Best
Australian art historian
Susan Best is an art historian with expertise in critical theory and modern and contemporary art. Best is a professor at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.
Her book, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde focuses on four artists of the 1960s and 70s: Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark, Ana Mendieta and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. It shows how their work transforms the avant-garde protocols of the period by introducing an affective dimension to late modern art. According to Suzannah Biernoff Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde "should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in psychoanalytic approaches to art." The project was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant.
Awards
In 2017, Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography was the joint winner of the best book prize awarded by the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, an organization with over three hundred members.
In 2017, she was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
In 2012, her book Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde won the best book prize awarded by the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand.
Selected books
Best, Susan 2021, It's not personal: Post 1960s Body Art and Performance, Bloomsbury Philosophy, London
Best, Susan, 2016, Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography, Bloosmbury Academic, London.
Best, Susan, 2011, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde, I B Tauris, London.
The public source identifies “Susan Best” as australian art historian. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Susan, Best and Australian.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18386613. VIAF identifies the subject as 92798965. The Library of Congress control number is no2011187531. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2017, 2012, 2021 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Susan Best” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.