A Brief Reflection

Prior to teaching at Emory, I have taught full-time or as an adjunct at UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, Wellesley College, Spelman College, and Morehouse College and as a visiting professor at Dillard University in New Orleans.

I have had poetry published in Black World and Callaloo.

My first published photograph was in Black Photographer’s Annual, Vol. 2 (1974).

I have exhibited art works in New York, Haiti, Martinique, France, Scandinavia, and all over the United States. My work has been seen alongside that of Benny Andrews, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Jeff Donaldson, Renee Stout, David Driskell, and many many other great African American artists. It has been reproduced in books and catalogs, and has resided in airports, museums, university collections, and in private collections.

In 1979 I became a member of the artist collective, AfriCOBRA, and have met and exhibited with and written about the group and the artists since that time, beginning with the 1980 exhibition we had at the United Nations at the request of the Committee Against Apartheid to commemorate the June 16, 1976 Soweto Massacre.

I have curated exhibitions as Gallery Director of the Neighborhood Arts Center in Atlanta, at the High Museum of Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, and for 9 years at the Harvey B. Gantt Center of African American Culture in Charlotte.

My first scholarly book, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation, won two national awards and was one of the first dealing with African American art that was not a survey or monograph, but focused upon theoretical and social aspects of visual culture. My dissertation for the Yale University Ph.D., “Contemporary Yoruba Art in Ile-Ife: History, Continuum, Motive, and Transformation,” may have been the first to deal with a contemporary African art topic. My first major publication credit, co-curator of Astonishment and Power: Kongo Minkisi and the Art of Renee Stout, (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), was groundbreaking in exploring the relationship between African Art and contemporary Western expression. I was one of the authors of the first text book on African Art, A History of Art in Africa (Harry Abrams, Inc. 2000), and wrote the chapter about the African diaspora.

My latest scholarly book, Sanctuary: Conjuring and Africana Art Aesthetic, is under contract at Duke University Press and is going through the editing process. A book I am co-editing with Paul Carter Harrison and Pellom McDaniels, Ashé: Poetics in Africana Expressivity, is under contract with Routledge Press in London. My contribution to the volume will be an essay about Alison Saar, “Undone: Bottle Trees, Charms, and Flashing Spirits.” An article, “Loving Blackness: Jeff Donaldson in Washington,” is accepted and being edited by Jeffrey Stewart for The African American Art World in Twentieth Century Washington, D.C., (Washington and New Haven: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, and Yale University Press, forthcoming). I edited volumes 2 and 3 of The International Review of African American Art in 2019 with the theme of Seeing Black And Blues: African American Artists long in the Storm.