Hal Foster (art Critic) - Career

Career

After graduating from Princeton, Foster moved to New York City, where he worked for Artforum from 1977 to 1981. He was then an editor at Art in America until 1987, when he became Director of Critical and Curatorial Studies at the Whitney Museum.

In 1982, a friend from Lakeside School founded Bay Press to publish The Mink's Cry, a children's book written by Foster. In the following year Bay Press published The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, a collection of essays on postmodernism edited by Foster that became a seminal text of postmodernism. In 1985, Bay Press published Recodings, Foster's first collection of essays. The Anti-Aesthetic and Recordings were, respectively, Bay Press's best and second best selling titles. Foster founded Zone in 1985 and was its editor until 1992.

In 1991, Foster left the Whitney to join the faculty of Cornell University's Department of the History of Art. That same year, Foster became an editor of the journal October; he was still on the board as of 2011. In 1997 he joined the faculty of his undergraduate alma mater, Princeton University, in the Department of Art and Archaeology. In 2000 he became the Townsend Martin Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton. He chaired the Department of Art and Archaeology from 2005 to 2009. In September 2011 he was appointed to the search committee to find a new dean for Princeton's School of Architecture. He is a faculty fellow of Wilson College.

Foster received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998. In 2010 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and awarded the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing by the Clark Art Institute. Spring 2011 he won a Berlin Prize fellowship of the American Academy in Berlin.