Jenny Mikulay is currently an assistant professor/public scholar at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) with a joint appointment in Museum Studies and Herron School of Art and Design

She completed a special committee Ph.D. in visual culture studies at UW Madison in May 2007. Her dissertation examined the intersection of public sphere theory and public art with a case study of the first NEA-funded public art work, La Grande Vitesse by Alexander Calder, which was dedicated in 1969 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Jenny's research specializes in contemporary public art, emphasizing theories and technologies of public address. She conducts case studies to show how viewers use public art to produce civic meaning and express agency in their everyday lives. Through such productive viewership, publics renew works of art. Though scholars recognize that taste in art and opinions about quality are subjective and contingent, the experiences and actions of viewers—fleeting, unanticipated, and subtle—are only beginning to be documented and theorized. She is interested in how publics continuously revise the meaning and significance of art, and her scholarship aims to articulate this process. The cases she investigates include public art projects sponsored by the federal government, municipal art commissions, museums, public schools, and non-profit arts organizations, displaying the dispersion and ambiguity of contemporary civic institutions and the mulitiplicity of today’s publics.