Josh T Franco

Josh T Franco, PhD is an artist and art historian. He is Executive Director of the US Latinx Art Forum and Collector at Large at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. As an artist, Franco’s primary medium is the discipline of art history itself. Using performance and a variety of materials, he transforms the components of being an art historian—reading, writing, annotating, sketching, lecturing, looking, museum going, archival research, and so on—into artworks appropriate for museum going audiences. Franco’s art and scholarship have been exhibited, published, or presented live in many venues, including Co-Lab Projects, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Elsewhere Museum, Addison Gallery of American Art, Agave Festival Marfa, The Future Mpls, 516ARTS, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Syracuse University Art Museum, Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, ICA Philadelphia, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, National Gallery of Art, zingmagazine, The Frick Collection, Third Text, OCTOBER, Independent Curators International, Gulf Coast, and The Journal of Feminist Scholarship. He has written exhibition-related texts for Theaster Gates, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Charlotte Hallberg, Zoe Leonard, Miguel Luciano, Hiram Maristany, and Joshua Saunders. His book, Marfa, Marfa: Rasquachismo and Minimalism in Far West Texas is forthcoming with Duke University Press. His dissertation on the subject was completed at Binghamton University.