Cher Knight

Cher Krause Knight is an art historian focused on modern and contemporary art and architecture. She is a specialist in public art and museum studies.

Dr. Knight's publications include the books: Museums and Public Art? (co-edited with Harriet F. Senie; hardcover 2018/paperback 2021, Cambridge Scholars Publishing); A Companion to Public Art (co-edited with Senie; hardcover 2016/paperback 2020, Wiley Blackwell); Power and Paradise in Walt Disney's World (hardcover 2014/paperback 2019, University Press of Florida); and Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism (2008, Blackwell Publishing). She has also authored two exhibition catalogs for the James A. Michener Museum of Art: An Independent Spirit: The Art and Life of R.A.D. Miller (2009); and Louis Bosa: A Keen Eye and a Kind Heart (2005). Professor Knight has contributed essays to the anthologies: The Artist as Curator (2015, Intellect); Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women and Feminism (2007, Cambridge Scholars Publishing); and Reclaiming the Spiritual in Art: Contemporary Cross-Cultural Perspectives (1999, SUNY Press). Her other publications appear in various sources, including Art Journal Open, Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, the Journal of American and Comparative Cultures, Visual Resources, American Art Review, Boston Art Review, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics.

Dr. Knight was honored as Distinguished Alumnus/Scholar by Tyler School of Art/Center for the Arts at Temple University in 2014. She has been twice awarded the Gemmill Research Fellowship at the Michener Museum in Doylestown, PA, and was Emerson College's 2006-2007 recipient of the Mann Stearns Distinguished Faculty Award. She is the co-founder of Public Art Dialogue, an international professional organization devoted to providing an interdisciplinary critical forum for the field. She also co-founded the journal Public Art Dialogue (published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis), was its co-editor through Spring 2017, and now serves on its editorial board. Additionally Professor Knight is on the advisory board of Now + There (a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing temporary and site specific public art to Boston), and is a board member of Boston Art Review (an independently published contemporary art periodical). She served as the Memorial/Public Art Research Advisor for the One Boston Resilience Project (Boston Art Commission and Mayor's Office of Arts + Culture, City of Boston), as well as the Public Art Scholar on the Art Committee for the Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King Memorial (Boston Art Commission, City of Boston, jointly with King Boston nonprofit organization). Dr. Knight is currently on the visual arts team for the Humanities and Human Flourishing Project (University of Pennsylvania), for which she serves as public art researcher and co-author.