I was raised in Iowa City, IA and am currently based in Berkeley, CA where I am a Postdoctoral Fellow between the Departments of History of Art and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley and a Curatorial Fellow at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. My research, broadly speaking, concerns the development of conceptual art, minimalism, and institutional critique practices from the 1960s onward.

I received my PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU in 2025 and was a Critical Studies participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2023-2024. My work has recently received support from the Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

In the past, I have held research, education, and curatorial positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the Museum of Modern Art, the Barnes Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and have independently curated exhibitions at various museums and galleries.

In 2026, I founded a press, Meclander, which publishes an academic journal and artist monographs.

A select record of my writing, exhibition and editorial projects, conference participation, and teaching can be found on this website.

My full CV can be downloaded here.

Contact info: blakeoetting@berkeley.edu / oetting.blake@gmail.com