Research and Curatorial Work

My research is predominantly focused on art and material culture from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, and migration. My first book, published by Duke University Press is called Black Bodies White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World. It uses the networks created by the Anglo-American cotton trade to examine connections between art, slavery and colonialism in the nineteenth century and in contemporary art practice. Two other books are also in the works, on 19th century Black Diaspora Art, and another on the imagery of the plantation and unfree labour. I recently completed the text for a new book on the photography of Barkley L Hendricks. My articles cover a range of topics from review essays to thematic articles on subjects including portraiture, landscape painting, photography. labor, history of medicine and  public art. My curatorial work, which I value enormously, has involved organizing and writing essays for several exhibitions including Embodied: Black Identities in American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery (2009) and Barkley Hendricks, O Snap! (2015).

Books

PUBLISHED:

Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World, Duke University Press

Barkley L. Hendricks: Photography. 1st ed. Milan: Skira editore, 2020

in process:

The Global Plantation: Visual Vocabularies of Unfree Labor

with Mia L Bagneris, Beyond Recovery: Reframing the Dialogues of 19th Century Black Art

Book Chapters

“From Poetry to Paint: Robert S Duncanson and the Song of Hiawatha for Ursula Frohner (ed), Intermediality: New Perspectives in American Art, Terra Foundation of American Art Essay Series (Spring 2022)

“Ingrid Pollard and the Aesthetics of Interruption” in Alice Correia, Anjalie Dalal-Clayton and Elizabeth Robles, Interventions in British Art History: Critical Approaches to Artists of African, Caribbean and Asian Heritage, (London: Routledge Press, 2022)

“Seeing Things: The Visual Life of Commodities”, in Jonathan Curry-Machado, Jean Stubbs, William Clarence-Smith and Jelmer Vos (eds), Handbook of Commodity History, Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2021       

“Black in Britain: Seeing Beyond Nation” in Ian Mclean et al, What is Postnational Art History? (Melbourne: Perimeter Books, 2021)

“Caribbean Absences in African American Art History” in Eddie Chambers (ed) Routledge Companion to African American Art, (Routledge Press, New York, 2019) Link to more information

“The Impermanence of Place: Migration, Memory and Memoir” in Deborah Willis, Ellyn Toscao and Kalia Books (ed), Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History, (Openbook Publishers, New York, 2018) Link to more information

“The Visual Culture of South Asians in Victorian Jamaica,” in Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest (eds.), Victorian Jamaica, (Durham, Duke University Press, 2018)
Link to more information

“From Salem to Zanzibar: Cotton and the Cultures of Commerce between Salem and East Africa, 1820-1861,” in Patricia Johnston and Caroline Frank, (eds.), Global Trade and Visual Culture in Federal New England (University of New England Press, 2014)
Link to book chapter

Articles

“The Viral and The Virus: Representations of Parangi in Colonial Sri Lanka” Ars Orientalis 51

Seeing Through Empire, PMC Notes, 16, Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art

“Seeing Empire” in Panorama: Journal of the Association of American Art, Bully Pulpit, Summer 2020

“Intimate Politics: Patricia Kaersenhout’s Acts of Empathy”, Small Axe: Visual Life of Social Affliction, Summer 2019

“What is Tamil For Loss? Remembering the Sri Lankan Civil War” Warscapes, May 2019 Link to article

"Portraits in Black: Styling, Space and Self in the Work of Barkley L Hendricks and Elizabeth Colomba” in NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Black Portraitures Issue, Fall 2016
Link to article

"Family Jules: Barkley L Hendricks and the Seventies Black Male Body” for Tate in Focus, Fall 2017
Link to article

"Dressing Up and Laying Bare: Fashion in the Shadow of the Marketplace,” Vestoj, July 2012 (London College of Fashion)
Link to article

Book Reviews

“Travel and Trauma: Witnessing Slavery Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition,” in Burlington Review, November 2019

“Kerry James Marshall: Look, See” CAA Reviews, May 2018
Link to review

"Rewriting the Modern: New Perspectives on Romare Bearden and Archibald Motley,” Journal of American Studies December 2015, pp 1 - 5
Link to review

Exhibition Catalogues

‘Sutapa Biswas and the Space of Diaspora’, Sutapa Biswas: Lumen, edited by Amy Tobin. Cambridge and Gateshead: Kettle’s Yard and BALTIC, 2021: pp. 11-22. 

Mia Bagneris and Anna Arabindan-Kesson “The Spirit of Louisiana: Painting Racialised Geographies in the Slave-Holding Atlantic” in Katie Pfohl, Inventing Arcadia: Landscape Painting in Louisiana (New Orleans Museum of Art, 2019)

“Unfolding Photographs, Experiencing Space: The Philadelphia Block Project in Context,” in The Philadelphia Block Project, (Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, January 2017)
Link to catalogue

“Portraits in Black” in The Moon is My Only Luxury, catalogue for Elizabeth Colomba, Long Gallery, Harlem, May 2016

“Opaque Space” in Camouflage Artist book for Didier William, Hap Gallery, Portland, Oregon, November 2015

“Displaced Embodiment” in Pamela Franks and Bob Steele, Embodied: Black Identities in American Art From the Yale University Art Gallery (Yale University Art Gallery Press, 2010)

Exhibitions

Shiraz Bayjoo: It is the Ocean That Connects Us, 12 Gate Arts, Philadelphia, October 2020

Undisciplined Pleasures, Vigilant Defiance: Sarah K Khan 12 Gate Arts, Philadelphia, March 6 2020 more info here

Co-Curator for Barkley L Hendricks: Oh Snap!, Art Sanctuary, Philadelphia, May 1-July 30, 2015
Link to article about exhibition

Guest Curator for solo show by Stephanie J Williams, Emerging from the Curious: Commonplace Anomalies District of Columbia Arts Center (DCAC), Washington DC, 2012
Link to more information
Link to article about exhibition

Co-Curator of Embodied: Black Identities in American Art From the Yale University Art Gallery, David C Driskell Center University of Maryland, College Park, September 16th-October 29th, 2010, Yale University Art Gallery, February 18th- June 26th 2011.
Link to article about exhibition

Curatorial Assistant for John La Farge’s Second Paradise: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890-1891, October 21st 2010 – January 4th 2011, Yale University Art Gallery, Addison Gallery of American Art, January 22-March 11 2011.
Link to more information