WRITING + RESEARCH

My first book project, Future Roots: David Hammons and the Art of the African Diaspora, is under contract with Yale University Press and forthcoming in 2027. The book argues that over roughly three decades of art-making, Hammons reinvents the concept of roots, using symbols of African heritage as modular, future-oriented, and adaptable to desires for Black self-determination. Through close readings of objects, I show how Hammons’s work reveals the utility, and the commodity, of heritage as a collectively imagined space of Black American political affiliation in the post-civil rights era.

Another book project examines the creative and intellectual labor of archiving by women artists of African descent in the United States. These artists sought to intertwine aesthetic invention and anthropological observation, and undermine the distinctions between the two: makers such as Thelma Johnson Streat, Katherine Dunham, Camille Billops, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and Lorraine O’Grady blended archival fieldwork with fictional invention.

Current and forthcoming scholarly articles and other projects include investigations of minimalism, postminimalism, and “Black Abstraction;” surrealist and occult knowledges produced by women artists across the Afro-Atlantic; and the feminist journal Heresies. 

Over the years my research has been supported by the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, Tyson Scholars of American Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the American Council for Learned Societies. 

I continue to be both inspired and haunted by the U.S. South: interests in this area include the art collections of HBCUs; the labors and pleasures of U.S. Southern folk art; the convergences of African American craft, materiality, and spirituality in the Southeast and Gulf Coast; and the visual culture of Jewish diasporas in the U.S. South, especially with regard to foodways.