About

Jordan Tate is an artist whose work examines how photographic and institutional systems govern what the public is allowed to see, understand, and own. He began as a landscape photographer before studying philosophy in Miami University's Western College Program, and received his MFA in Photography from Indiana University in 2007, the same year he published A Contemporary Dictionary of Sexual Euphemisms (St. Martin's Press).

A 2008-2009 Fulbright Fellowship in Berlin supported New Work and Gamut Warning, a body of photographs about how photography itself is seen, which led to a cover feature and portfolio in FOAM introduced by Lesley A. Martin of Aperture, selection as an Aperture Portfolio Prize finalist, and exhibitions in New York, London, and at the National Gallery of Kosova. SUPERBLACK (Transformer Station, Cleveland, 2014) and Prefaces (Denny Gallery, New York, 2017) turned the inquiry toward the institutions of art, fabricating exhibition histories, wall labels, and provenance archives to show how value and authority are conferred. Picturesque Snot: Polemics of the Landscape (Hot Take Press, 2019) brought that critique back to the land, addressing landscape as the genre most practiced at presenting an ideological picture of land as neutral fact. His work is held by the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Rhizome ArtBase at the New Museum, and he received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2015.

Since 2025 he has directed the Public Lands Institute, a sole-authored photographic index of American public lands released entirely to the public domain, now numbering 97 sites across 20 states. Tate is Professor of Art and Head of Photography at the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning, where he co-founded the Critical Visions certificate program, and he has maintained the curatorial project ilikethisart.net since 2008.

Jordan Tate
jordan.tate@gmail.com