I am Lecturer in Art History in the Fine Art department at Newcastle. My work explores queer social and sexual cultures and art from the 1970s to the present with a particular focus on cruising cultures, the HIV and AIDS crisis, queer world making practices, and the politics of urban space, mostly in the USA. I am interested in practices of gentrification and preservation, collaboration and friendship among artists, and queer approaches to challenging hegemonic histories. I am the author of the book Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront (University of Chicago Press, 2019). My writing has also been published in journals such as Performance Research and The Journal of American Studies, among others.
I am also the UK Principal Investigator for Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures (CRUSEV), a three-year collaborative research project (2016-2019) which explores LGBTQ social and sexual cultures of the 1970s and their significance for LGBTQ people across Europe now and in the future. CRUSEV reconstructs aspects of LGBTQ cultures and interactions from the 1970s to consider what this knowledge can contribute to queer politics and identity in Europe’s present and future. CRUSEV is financed by the European funding agency HERA, under HERA’s ‘Uses of the Past’ theme.
My research explores queer social and sexual cultures and art from the 1970s to the present with a particular focus on cruising cultures, the HIV and AIDS crisis, queer world making practices, and the politics of urban space, mostly in the USA. I am interested in practices of gentrification and preservation, collaboration and friendship among artists, and queer approaches to challenging hegemonic histories. I am the author of the book Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront (University of Chicago Press, 2019). As part of the CRUSEV project, I am researching the value of thinking about cruising as a queer historical methodology.
Cruising the Dead River explores the queer sexual and artistic cultures of Manhattan’s abandoned waterfront in the late 1970s, when hundreds of men cruised the ruined warehouses of Manhattan’s derelict West Side waterfront in search of anonymous erotic pleasure. The American artist and writer David Wojnarowicz documented his cruising experiences there in journal entries, poems, photographs, films, and in large-scale site-specific arts projects. Cruising the Dead River takes his work as a guide to the erotic and creative re-uses of the piers by queer New Yorkers in the years that preceded the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It traces a material history of the waterfront area as a cruising ground, rooting through archival ephemera and photographic fragments of this queer sexual culture. Cruising the Dead River examines how and why the ruined buildings that dominated this queer landscape assumed a powerful erotic role in the cruising that took place there in the late 1970s and how a sense of erotic connection between past and present was generated through writing and art-making in or about the piers by artists such as Emily Roysdon, Peter Hujar, and Alvin Baltrop. Presenting the ruin as an ideal symbol through which to tell a queer history of the pre-AIDS era, I argue that the erotic and artistic cultures of this period fundamentally changed how queer people understood their sexualities and their relationship to art practice and the changing city. Cruising the Dead River suggests that the pleasure of the ruin cannot be separated from the complex forces of urban regeneration that were reshaping the waterfront in this period and documents histories of violence, regeneration, and LGBTQ activism that developed in and around this pier cruising scene in the late 1970s, which have been obscured as the neighbourhoods were gentrified in the years that followed. It is both an account of this cruising scene and a study of how and why this important queer art history has been neglected.
Undergraduate teaching
Stage 1
- Art Histories I and Art Histories II
Stage 2
- Gender and Contemporary Art
- Art and Protest
Stage 3
- Dissertation supervisor
Stage 4
- Art Writing
I welcome enquiries from potential PhD students working on topics relating to modern and contemporary art and queer history, HIV/AIDS, queer activism, performance, and feminism. I have experience supervising Art History and Fine Art practice-based PhD students.
- Anderson F. Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront. University of Chicago Press, 2019. In Press.
- Anderson F, Tobin A. Collaboration is Not An Alternative: Artists Working Together in London and New York, 1974–1981. In: Meredith A. Brown, Michelle Millar Fisher, ed. Collaboration and Its (Dis)contents: Art, Architecture, and Photography Since 1950. London: Courtauld Books Online, 2017, pp.158-178.
- Anderson F. ‘‘A trail of drift and debris’: Traces of Whitman in the correspondence art of Ray Johnson'. Journal of American Studies 2015, 49(1), 55-75.
- Anderson F. An Unhemmed Dress: Popular Preservation and Civic Disobedience on the Manhattan Waterfront. Shima: The International Journal of Research Into Island Cultures 2015, 9(1), 18.
- Anderson F. Cruising the Queer Ruins of New York’s Abandoned Waterfront. Performance Research 2015, 20(3), 135-144.
- Anderson F. Preserving and politicising the alternative space. Oxford Art Journal 2015, 38(3), 448-451.
- Anderson F. Notions of the Collaborative in the Work of David Wojnarowicz. Papers of Surrealism 2010, (8).