Mary Anne Staniszewski investigates culture, art, and media in relation to political and social perspectives. Her major writing projects form a “trilogy” of interdisciplinary books that are investigations of modern culture and the modern self. In Believing is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art, Staniszewski frames art as an “invention” of the modern era. In The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art, she presents exhibition design as a discipline and attempts to integrate the installations of the international avant-gardes and MoMA within the discourse of modern art. The third investigation is a series dealing with issues of race, sex, and life and death, for which she is completing the first volume. This past June, Staniszewski organized a contemporary slavery symposium at Exit Art.