Thomas Lawson is currently on faculty at Cal-Arts, Los Angeles, having recently stepped back from his thirty year tenure as Dean.
As an artist, Thomas Lawson is part of the Pictures Generation and has exhibited at a.o. MetroPictures and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Hammer Museum and MoCA in Los Angeles, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art at La Jolla, CCA Glasgow, the Goss-Michael Foundation in Dallas and Magasin, Grenoble.
He has written extensively on contemporary art, for Artforum, Flash Art, and Afterall, and an anthology of his writing, Mining for Gold, was published in 2005 by JRP/Ringier. He is Editor-in-Chief of East of Borneo - a collaborative online magazine that archives contemporary art from Los Angeles. From 1979 -1992 he, along with Susan Morgan, published and edited REAL LIFE Magazine, and from 2002 until 2009 he was co-editor of Afterall Journal, a joint publication of Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London and CalArts.
He has also curated many exhibitions of younger artists and was a co-selector of the British Art Show in 1995. In 2011 he was lead organizer of “The Experimental Impulse,” part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time initiative. He is a Guggenheim NEA Fellow, and has been awarded residency fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ucross Foundation.