As a scholar of contemporary art and critical black studies, I conduct research and teaching committed to tracing how racial violence has fundamentally shaped the conceptual and historical contours of our present understandings of the visual, aesthetics and embodiment. In addition to my focus on the history and theory of art and media since the 1970s, my works derives from an interdisciplinary range of interests spanning the critique of antiblackness, Atlantic slavery, Marxist and post-Marxist critiques of political economy, embodiment, philosophies of vision and the subject, and psychoanalysis and affect. I approach works of art, images, modes of exhibition, and social phenomena as they refract the conditions of their structuration in racial hierarchy and the hydraulics of the capitalist world-system. This yields my work’s two-fold interest: on one hand, to question how thinking about structural violence may alter how we narrate the history of contemporary art and media; and, on the other, to trace how such violence warps the categories that ground our “common sense” of the present.
My current research projects stem from this brief. I am working on a book manuscript that investigates the racial, aesthetic and political-economic work of the idea of the image across a variety of artistic practices, media, and forms of sociality since the 1970s. Reading the idea of the image in Enlightenment and continental philosophies alongside the study of enslavement and captivity, I seek to modify the terms of our engagement with the image, especially where it is taken up as a means of emancipatory aesthetic and representational maneuver. I examine a range of artistic practices, archival documents, popular media objects to demonstrate how scrutinizing the concept of the image may yield a new set of questions concerning the politics of race and modern visuality.
Other current writing projects concern the issue of contract in 1980s studio photography, blackness and the meme-form, and the afterlife of negrophilic primitivism in contemporary multicultural aesthetics. Alongside published gallery and museum essays, a commentary on monumentality and slavery has also appeared in Theatre Journal. That essay's engagement with Alois Riegl points towards future work regarding the relationship between antiblackness and the fundaments of art historical method. In 2020, I co-edited and published a collection of sketches entitled An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979-1989 with Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué (Soberscove Press, 2020). The book presented for the first time the sketching practice of an artist known primarily for his paintings shown across the 1980s New York art scene. The collection was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Non-fiction.
My interest in trans-disciplinary inquiry shapes my pedagogical approach to art history and visual studies. I consistently draw on scholarship in black studies, gender/sexuality studies, media studies, critical theory, sociology and philosophy in order to enrich the process of art-historical thinking and identify under-thought dimensions of our discipline. In line with my approach to course design, I’m interested in working with students from a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives.
Before joining the IFA, I completed my PhD in Yale’s joint program History of Art and African-American Studies, also receiving a Certificate in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. My research during the program was supported by my time as a Whitney ISP Critical Studies Fellow and a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow. I received my BA with honors in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania, where I was a Mellon-Mays Fellow.
