Tara McDowell is Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She has worked as a curator at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Her research interests include contemporary curating, exhibition histories, art institutions, feminist and queer spaces of sociability and production, and the various support structures of art.

McDowell holds a PhD in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley. Her recent books include The Artist As (2018) and The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess (2019). The book was awarded the 2018 CAA Millard Meiss Publication Fund Award; was a 2020 nominee for the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for outstanding scholarship in the field of American art, Smithsonian American Art Museum; and was reviewed in seven national and international publications, including Bookforum, The Gay & Lesbian Review, and The New York Review of Books.

Excerpt from the book The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess

Bringing Jess and Duncan together as this study does allows some of what surrounds a poet, artist, or any other creative life to be restored to that life. By this I mean the material surroundings of the home, the habitual daily rhythms of a life, and the people held most dear; in short, all that might be put aside to focus on “the work.” Jess and Duncan’s work was coextensive with their household, and as such it is impossible to bracket out their domesticity. This is a politics, and an ethics. I read Jess and Duncan together in what follows, and this book focuses on moments in which that togetherness is especially rich or fraught: their household, their failed experiment in collaboration, their respective unfinished lifelong works, and their origin myths. The book argues for the ethics of domesticity and the relationality of queerness, but it also aims to convince readers of the sheer strength of this work—Jess’s pictures and Duncan’s words—and that it deserves and rewards more attention than it currently has, in part because of its difference.