ABOUT

I am an art historian and writer based in the unceded ancestral lands of the Congaree and Catawba, Columbia, South Carolina, where I am Assistant Professor of Art History and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. 

I earned a bachelor’s degree in art history from Oberlin College. After undergrad, I worked in the curatorial department at The Studio Museum in Harlem for three years before returning to graduate school. I earned my PhD in Art History & Archaeology from Columbia University in 2020. 

My work examines the aesthetic and political dimensions of African American and diaspora art, with attention to how artists mobilize folk practices, performance, and abstraction as sites of Black radical imagination. I trace genealogies of Pan-African thought, Afrofuturism, Black and transnational feminisms, and the study of African artifacts throughout art of the 20th and 21st centuries.

I am interested in how artists construct counter-narratives to dominant art historical frameworks, and the ways in which art is inseparable from ordinary life and tactics of survival. I am inspired by what archaeologist Michael Blakey calls the “activist scholarship” of Black intellectual traditions. The artworks I am most drawn to suggest future ways of living, being, and getting free.