John Rico

John Rico is a Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto and the Lead Curator of the Sexual Representations Collection. His research and writing derive the majority of their content from contemporary art, architecture and film. The questions motivating his work concern relations between aesthetics, ethics and politics; sex and sexuality; bodies, anonymity and the common; loss and disappearance; extinction and the collective afterlife of things. His theoretical and conceptual approach to this content and these questions is based in his reading of 20th-century and contemporary French philosophy, in particular the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Roland Barthes, and Giorgio Agamben, along with American thinkers Leo Bersani and William Haver.

Email: john.ricco@utoronto.ca