He received his Ph.D. in art history from the University of Texas at Austin. Since 1983 his essays and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including Artforum, Parkett, Frieze, Art in America and Flash Art. He has also written recent monographs on Polly Apfelbaum, Richard Artschwager, Jeremy Blake, Vija Celmins, Toba Khedoori, Monique Prieto and Wolfgang Tillmans among others, and contributed to such exhibition catalogues as Public Offerings and Helter Skelter (both Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2001 and 1992 respectively). He has delivered lectures at Harvard University, New York's Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago among other venues. From 1987 to 1991 he served as editor of Artpaper, a monthly art magazine based in Minneapolis. After teaching for a decade at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where he joined the faculty in 1991, in the summer of 2001 he was appointed director of the Core Program and Art History at the Glassell School of Art in Houston, Texas