robert atkins

ROBERT ATKINS is an art historian, educator, writer, and activist who studied at the London School of Economics and the University of California’s Riverside and Berkeley campuses. A former staff columnist for the Village Voice, he has written about the intersections of art, politics, and media for more than 100 publications, including The New York Times, Art in America, (Japanese) Esquire, and Wired. In early 2026, Amarna Books and Media published his newest book, AIDS, Art & the Origins of the Culture War.

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Atkins has written dozens of books and exhibition catalogs. He is the co-author of Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression (published by the New Press) and the best-selling gateways to contemporary and modern art: ArtSpeak: A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords (Abbeville), and its prequel ArtSpoke: A Guide to Modern Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords 1848-1944 (Abbeville). Other books he has written include From Media to Metaphor: Art About AIDS (Independent Curators Inc.), the book accompanying the first international, traveling exhibition devoted to AIDS-art.

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He is a co-founder of Visual AIDS, the producers of Day Without Art and the Red Ribbon. He has taught and lectured widely at such institutions as the Rhode Island School of Design, the Maryland Institute/College of Art, and the San Francisco Art Institute, where he co-organized Susan Sontag: Media, Modernity & Morality, a cross-disciplinary project involving a dozen institutions throughout the Bay Area. He has curated numerous exhibitions at far-flung venues, including Between Science and Fiction (which he co-organized for the Sao Paulo Biennal), David Ireland (for the New Museum), and Fusion! Artists in a Research Setting for Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a Fellow at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry.

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He has created pioneering websites, including TalkBack! A Forum for Critical Discourse, sponsored by the City University of New York’s Lehman College, Artery: The AIDS-Arts Forum, sponsored by the New York Arts Alliance, and ArtSpeak China, the first “wiki” about contemporary Chinese art. He is also the former arts editor of The Media Channel and Vice-President/editor-in-chief of the Arts Technology Entertainment Network (a New York Times Video start-up).

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A former board member of the American branch of the International Art Critics’ Association (AICA), Atkins is the recipient of awards for arts criticism and cultural commentary from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Manufacturers Hanover Bank, Microsoft, and the Penny McCall Foundation, among other foundations and agencies.

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He lives in Southern California and can be reached at rdatkins@gmail.com.