Kim Theriault, PhD

Kim S. Theriault holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Virginia and is Professor Emerita of Modernist and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois. 

Her book, Rethinking Arshile Gorky (Pennsylvania State University Press), was awarded a Society for the Preservation of American Modernists publication grant because it offers insights into the themes of displacement, trauma, and memory, as well as identifying issues of identity, originality, and mourning in Gorky’s work. Dr. Theriault contributed the essay “Exile, Trauma, and Arshile Gorky’s The Artist and His Mother” to the Yale University Press catalog for Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, an exhibition organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which traveled to the Tate Modern and Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

In addition to delivering research papers and organizing panels at numerous professional conferences, she has been a featured speaker at the Library of Congress, National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal, and institutions such as Oxford University, the University of London, the University of Michigan, and the Universities of California at Los Angeles and at Berkeley.

Continuing her interest into the ways that art helps to negotiate trauma, memory, and identity, Dr. Theriault is writing The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and its Infusion into American Culture, Conscience, and Consciousness. This book derives from research, presentations, and her publications about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, such as “Re-membering Vietnam: War, Trauma and ‘Scarring Over’ After “The Wall” and “Go Away Little Girl: Gender, Race, and Controversy in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.” In 2016, she chaired a College Art Association Annual Conference session in Washington, DC, entitled, “Reconsidering the Wall: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Thirty-Five Years Later,” and that summer was invited to the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar “Veterans in Society: Ambiguities and Representations.” 

Dr. Theriault has instructed and advised students, and directed undergraduate theses, internships, and honors projects, and participated on graduate thesis committees and artist critiques. While living in Chicago, she taught graduate art and art history students at the School of the Art Institute. Throughout her career, Theriault has offered a wide range of courses, and has a particular fondness for teaching Museum Studies, Modern Art, Contemporary Art, and specialized courses like Abstract Expressionism, Contemporary Art for Non-Majors, and Art of the 1960s and 1970s. Because of her dedication to Art History Survey courses, she spent over a decade helping to score AP Art History Exams. She has also served on non-profit advisory boards, university committees, assisted in museums and galleries, and just completed a three-year appointment as a juror for the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism. Dr. Theriault is very happy to be teaching here at USM!