I was thrilled, and honoured, to be one of the Lunder Institute for American Art inaugural Research Fellows for the 2019-2020 academic year. Convened by Professor Tanya Sheehan (William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art, Colby College), I joined Adrienne Childs (Research Associate, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University), Tuliza Fleming (Curator of American Art, National Museum of African American History and Culture), Tess Korobkin (Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park), Key Jo Lee (Assistant Director of Academic Affairs, Cleveland Museum of Art), John Ott (Professor, James Madison University), and Rebecca VanDiver (Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University). We convened in November 2019 at Colby College to begin our state of the field discussions on African American Art. We also had the opportunity to get up close with the art works we had chosen to research at the Colby Museum of Art. Our second convening was to be in March 2020, however the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted those plans. We were able to gather virtually however, and present our work in progress research papers. These will be online and available to view very soon.
The artist I chose to work on was Edward Mitchell Bannister: I am considering what his small, closely observed, scenes of Rhode Island tell us about being Black in nature.