Tyler Green

Tyler Green is an award-winning critic and historian.

He is the author of “Carleton Watkins: Making the West American,” (University of California, 2018), and “Emerson's Nature and the Artists,” (Penguin Random House/Prestel, 2021). In 2019 "Watkins" won the West's preeminent literary award, the California

Book Awards gold medal for contribution to publishing. Both the San Francisco Chronicle and The Guardian (UK) named it to year-end 'best books' lists.

Green’s next book, “Claiming Yosemite: The California Genocide, the Civil War, and the Invention of National Parks” (working title) is forthcoming from Stanford University Press’ Redwood Press trade imprint in early 2027. Green is also the producer and host of the long-running Modern Art Notes Podcast, the most-listened-to audio program about art.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast, a weekly “Fresh Air” for art, is in its fifteenth year and has aired over 750 weekly episodes. Guests have included artists such as Richard Serra, Julie Mehretu, Robert Irwin, Kerry James Marshall, Dyani White Hawk, Mark Bradford, Shirin Neshat, Fred Wilson, Barbara Kruger, Wendy Red Star, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Robert Adams, and Firelei Báez, and historians such as Nicole Fleetwood, Mary Beard, Deborah Willis, and David Bindman.

Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee wrote that The MAN Podcast is “one of the great archives of the art of our time,” and the BBC named the program one of the world's top 25 cultural podcasts. The Guardian said that the program is “indispensable” and the Washington Post called it “one of the great resources for all art lovers.” For Agence France-Presse, the MAN Podcast “requires all your attention [and is] definitely worth the effort.”

Green’s forthcoming “Claiming Yosemite” will be the first new, revisionist history of the invention of the national park published in 80 years. For the first time, “Claiming Yosemite” will reveal how the invention of the national park was part and product of the California Genocide. It will also detail how it was a process that responded to the Civil War-era sectional divide and, later, the regeneration of US republicanism, and how art and artists informed and motivated the process. “Claiming Yosemite” will revise dated, often racist and erasive histories authored and extended by groups such as the Sierra Club (and still embraced by the National Park Service), including the false notion that Yosemite was preserved as a national park solely because it was beautiful.

Between 2001 and 2014, Green's pioneering Modern Art Notes website featured original reporting, art criticism, and analyses of both art and non-profit art institutions. It was the first stand-alone website to feature art reporting and criticism. The Wall Street Journal called MAN “the most influential of all visual arts blogs,” and later wrote, “You won't find a better-informed art writer than Tyler Green.”

In 2014, the U.S. chapter of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA) awarded Green one of its two

inaugural awards for art criticism for MAN. The award, the only art criticism award voted on by a critic's peers, included a citation for The MAN Podcast.

Among the books featuring Green's work are Phyllida Barlow: Collected Lectures, Writings, and Interviews, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 360°: Views on the Collection, Proving Ground, a monograph from 2018 Guggenheim Fellow David Maisel (Radius), and the exhibition catalogue for Anne Appleby's 2021 exhibition at the Missoula (Montana) Art Museum.