Kellie Jones
Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology and Institute for Research in African American Studies , Columbia University
Art historian Dr. Kellie Jones teaches in the Department of Art History and Archaeology as well as the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. Her research interests include African American and African Diaspora artists, Latino/a and Latin American Artists, and issues in contemporary art and museum theory. Dr. Jones’s writings have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues and the journals NKA, Artforum, Flash Art, Atlantica, and Third Text among others. Current book projects include, Taming the Freeway and Other Acts of Urban HIP-notism: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. Her book EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (2011, Duke) was named one of the top art books of 2011 by Publishers Weekly.
Dr. Jones has also worked as a curator for over two decades and has more than twenty-five major national and international exhibitions to her credit. She has organized shows for the Johannesburg Biennale (1997) and São Paulo Bienal (1989), the latter of which, featuring the work of Martin Puryear, won the grand prize for best individual exhibition. Her most recent exhibition was “Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964-1980” at The Studio Museum in Harlem (April-July 2006). Her exhibition “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980,” (2011) at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, was named the best thematic show nationally by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). She was the co-curator of “Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the 1960s” at the Brooklyn Museum which was named one the best exhibitions of 2014 by Artforum.
Dr. Jones was named an Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellow in 2008 for her lifetime of writing on visual art. The fellowship commemorates the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954 which struck down legal segregation; it recognizes candidates whose work honors and furthers the spirit of the statute. In 2005 she was the inaugural recipient of the David C. Driskell Award in African American Art and Art History from the High Museum of Art, Atlanta and a Scholar-in-Residence, at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy.
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