Photograph by Eat The Cake NYC
How can art reveal or conceal, resist or reinforce structures of social injustice?
This question animates my work as a historian of modern and contemporary art.
My research focuses on Black visual production and theory, critical race studies, surveillance studies, archives, and intersectional and transnational feminism. I mobilize these perspectives, among others, as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute’s Department of the History of Art and Design.
I earned my PhD in art history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the dissertation “Representing and Refracting the Civil Rights Movement in Late Twentieth-Century Art.” I am the recipient of fellowships from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, the Mellon Foundation’s Black Metropolis Research Consortium, and the Luce American Council of Learned Societies. Programs such as Cornell University’s School of Criticism and Theory as well as Pratt Institute’s Faculty Development Fund have also supported my scholarship. Increasingly, I merge my research and teaching practices. To this end, I have studied pedagogy through participation in many initiatives such as Columbia University’s African-American Studies Summer Teachers and Scholars Institute and a number of year-long Faculty Learning Communities at Pratt Institute.
My writing appears in Afterimage, African Arts Journal, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Art Journal, International Review of African American Art, Panorama: Association of Historians of American Art, Routledge’s anthology Social Practice Art in Turbulent Times, and elsewhere. Recently, Marisa Williamson and I co-edited Women & Performance’s special issue “Views from the Larger Somewhere: Race, Vision, and Surveillance.” I am currently at work on my book project Monitoring and Modeling Citizenship: Racializing Surveillance in Contemporary Art.
CV available upon request.