Robert Hobbs

had been planned, Robert Hobbs enrolled in the early 1960s in Maryville High School, which in the post-Sputnik era had a greater percentage of students attending M.I.T.

During this time he was employed summers, running routine experiments in a chemical lab and acting in local college theatrical productions.

at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville), working with Dale Cleaver, who was a student of Joshua Taylor, who in turn had studied with Heinrich Wölfflin.

[4] Combining philosophic, social history, and formalist views, Hobbs wrote a dissertation on Robert Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic while participating in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.

The next year, as a lecturer at Yale University, he lived in Motherwell's guesthouse in Greenwich, Connecticut, and turned sections of his dissertation into essays for the catalogue that accompanied this artist's first European retrospective.

[6] In addition to being presented in five United States' venues, this exhibition was selected as the U.S. official representation for the 1982 Venice Biennale, and it subsequently traveled to five European museums.

An adjunct to this exhibition was Hobbs' Cornell University Press monograph on Smithson's sculpture, which has come to be regarded as a standard reference on this subject.

Hobbs has continued to write extensively on modern and postmodern art, including investigations of the work of the following artists (listed alphabetically): Alice Aycock, Hernan Bas, Duane Hanson, Keith Haring, Jonathan Lasker, Mark Lindquist, Malcolm Morley, Robert Motherwell, Beverly Pepper, Richard Pousette-Dart, Neo Rauch, Andres Serrano, Yinka Shonibare, James Siena, Frank Stella, Frank Thiel, Kara Walker, Kelley Walker, John Wesley, and Kehinde Wiley, among others.

[17] Hobbs has written in-depth essays for the Rubell Collection (Miami), including a historical overview, titled "Looking B(l)ack: Reflections of White Racism" (for the well-received exhibition 30 Americans[18]) that looks at the challenges, goals, and sensibilities facing African-American artists from the 1980s to the present.

She has worked closely with such artists as Alice Aycock, Christian Boltanski, David Ireland, Alfredo Jaar, Sherrie Levine, Kay Rosen,[19] and Lorna Simpson.