John O'Brian

John O'Brian is an art historian, writer, and curator.

O'Brian was born in 1944 to Canadian parents in Bath, England.

His father was a career officer in the Royal Air Force.

His only sibling, Peter, is a filmmaker and producer.

He was educated at New Park School in St. Andrews, Fife, and Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, before entering Trinity College at the University of Toronto, where he received an Honours B.A. in Political Science and Economics in 1966.

At university, he played Varsity rugby.

In 1969 he married Helen Worts, with whom he has three children: Melanie O'Brian, Amy O'Brian Wang, and Meghan O'Brian Braunstein.

He also has four grandchildren.

He worked at the Toronto firm of Harris & Partners until 1974, before enrolling at York University to study art and literature.

There, he began to publish art criticism, poetry, and art history.

He received his PhD in art history from Harvard University under the supervision of T.J. Clark.

While at Harvard, he was a research associate at the Fogg Art Museum and a proponent of "social art history", an approach that investigates social as well as aesthetic issues.

"I'm interested in how art gets produced and looked at under the social arrangements of capitalism," he stated in an interview.

His work has sometimes been targeted by neoconservative critics for mixing art and politics.

O'Brian has been a critic of neoconservative policies since the start of the Culture Wars in the 1980s.

He is a recipient of the Thakore Award in Human Rights and Peace Studies from Simon Fraser University.

O'Brian was also a member of the Pumping Station collective, a group of radical thinkers that met at the house of Gillian and Iain Boal, during the first half of the 1980s.

O'Brian has taught at York University, Toronto, Harvard University, Cambridge, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto.

His first book, David Milne and the Modern Tradition of Painting, published in 1983, is the first in-depth study of the artist.

He is best known for his books on modern art, including Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, one of The New York Times "Notable Books of the Year" in 1986, and for his exhibitions on nuclear photography such as Camera Atomica, organized for the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2015.

Camera Atomica was the first comprehensive exhibition on postwar nuclear photography.

From 1987 to 2017 he taught at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he held the Brenda & David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies (2008-11) and was an associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.

At the University of British Columbia, he was appointed assistant professor in 1987, associate professor in 1991, and full professor in 1998.

From 1989 to 1991, he was a member of the board of the Vancouver Art Gallery, and from 1991 to 1998 a special advisor to the board of the National Gallery of Canada, In 2020 was appointed an external advisor to the National Gallery.

He has also been involved with the Harvard University Art Museum, Polygon Gallery, and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.

He maintains an occasional art practice.

He chaired the University Art Committee from 1993 to 2014 and the Program in Canadian Studies from 2002 to 2005.

He was the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute Visiting Lecturer in India in 1996-97 and visiting research professor at Ritsumeikan University in Japan in 2007.

O'Brian has been professionally involved with museums and galleries as a curator, exhibitor, researcher, advisor, and board member.

He also held the Brenda & David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies from 2008 to 2011 and was an associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.

He taught undergraduate and graduate courses, in addition to supervising MA and Ph.D. theses.

He also organized numerous field trips for students.

Following the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016, he canceled a field trip to New York because, he said, "worms are crawling out of the ground all over America [and I will] not crawl with them."

Students circulated a petition denouncing the cancellation.

He has lectured across North America as well as in Europe, Australia, China, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Palestine, and South Africa.

His work has been exhibited at public and private galleries: Octozilla (2018), produced with Gregory Coyes, was shown at the Vancouver Art Gallery; Ci elegans (2017), produced with Marina Roy, at SFU Galleries, Vancouver; Sixteen Nuclear Power Stations (2013) at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Multiplication (1998) at the Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver; and More Los Angeles Apartments (1998) at Gagosian Gallery in New York and Los Angeles.

"More Los Angeles Apartments unfolds as a peripatetic meditation on Edward Ruscha's photobooks, personally placing O'Brian in geographical and conceptual proximity to Ruscha's earlier work."

O'Brian is the author or editor of twenty books and many articles.

Some have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, or Japanese.

Approximately half his publications focus on Canadian art and culture.