Dr. Adrienne Childs: “In the Vortex of Art and Identity: Black Female as Object and Subject”

Keynote Presentation for the 2021 Emerging Scholars Symposium, “Visualizing Identity: Exploring Dimensions of the Self through Art".

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(Welcoming remarks by Dr. Shawnya L. Harris, Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African Americn and African Diasporic Art, Georgia Museum of Art)

Dr. Adrienne L. Childs is an art historian, curator and associate of the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She was guest curator of the exhibition “Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition” in 2020 at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Her current book project is “Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts,” forthcoming from Yale University Press. She has held fellowships at the Lunder Institute at the Colby College Museum of Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, the Clark Art Institute and the David C. Driskell Center. She is co-curator of the recent exhibition “The Black Figure in the European Imaginary” at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College. She contributed to “The Image of the Black in Western Art,” volume 5, from Harvard University Press. Childs is co-editor of the book “Blacks in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century” (Routledge). Her scholarly interests are the relationship between race and representation in European and American fine and decorative arts. She also served as curator at the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland where she organized numerous exhibitions of African American art.

Image: Emma Amos, “Equals,” 1992. Acrylic on linen canvas with African fabric borders, 76 × 82 inches. Private collection.