Harriet F. Senie

Harriet F. Senie is director of the MA program in art history with tracks in art museum studies and art museum education at the City College, CUNY; she also teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center.  She is the author of Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 (Oxford University Press, 2015); Dangerous Precedent? The “Tilted Arc” Controversy (University of Minnesota Press, 2001); and Contemporary Public Sculpture: Tradition, Transformation, and Controversy (Oxford University Press, 1992).  She is coeditor with Sally Webster and contributor to Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy (HarperCollins, 1992; Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998) and coeditor with Cher Krause Knight and contributor to the Companion to Public Art (Wiley Blackwell, 2016), as well as the forthcoming Museums and Public Art? (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2017). In 2008, she cofounded Public Art Dialogue, an international organization that is also a College Art Association affiliate. She coedited the peer review journal Public Art Dialogue since its first issue in March 2011 through the spring 2017 issue.  In 2017, she was appointed to the mayor’s committee to consider a policy for controversial statues in New York City. She is currently working on a book entitled Memorials in a Post-Heroic Age, as well as an anthology called Teachable Monuments with Jennifer Wingate and Sierra Rooney; an outgrowth of a 2018 CAA panel that she cochaired, it will take an international approach to using monuments as educational tools both to start conversations about their underlying values and the potentially controversial issues they may raise.