Home People Exhibitions Venues Images About

Kellie Jones (Dr.)

Kellie Jones is a professor, writer and curator, with a pronounced interest in the work of African American artists and artists of the African Diaspora. She has held a number of curatorial positions in galleries in the USA and is a prolific writer of essays and other texts for catalogues, magazines and other publications. Amongst others, she has contributed to: Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995, Walker Art Center, 1995; US / UK Photography Exchange: Dawoud Bey, Charles Biasiny-Rivera, Mikki Ferrill, Ingrid Pollard, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Maxine Walker, Jamaica Arts Center, and Camerawork, 1989; Lorna Simpson, Phaidon, 2002; Interrogating Identity, Grey Art Gallery & Study Center, New York University, 1991; Martin Puryear, 20 Bienal Internacional de Sao Paulo 1989, Jamaica Arts Center, 1989; Basquiat, Merrell, 2005; and Betye Saar: Extending the Frozen Moment, University of California Press., Berkeley, 2005. She contributed an essay to the catalogue for Back to Black (Whitechapel/The New Art Gallery Walsall) 2005. Jones has held a number of academic positions at universities including Yale, and more recently, Columbia.

Jones contributed an important essay to one of four books in a series titled Annotating Art’s Histories, jointly published by The MIT Press, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts and iniva the Institute of International Visual Arts, London.The volume was Discrepant Abstraction was published in 2006 and edited by Kobena Mercer. Jones’ essay was ‘It’s Not Enough to Say “Black is Beautiful” ‘: Abstraction at the Whitney, 1969-1974.

Jones contributed a text, ‘Charles White: Feminist at MidCentury’, to the 2018 catalogue, Charles White: A Retrospective, the first major museum survey devoted to the artist in well over 30 years. The exhibition charted the breadth of Charles White’s career—from the 1930s through to works completed before his death in 1979. Featuring in excess of 100 works, including drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, illustrated books, record covers and archival materials, this was by far the most extensive, well resourced exhibition of the artist’s work ever to take place. Fittingly, it travelled to prominent galleries in the three US cities with which White was associated. Opening at the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition travelled to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, finishing its tour at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This was a weighty, profusely illustrated catalogue, coming as it did with important texts by leading scholars and well known names.

Kellie Jones (Dr.)

Related items - view 5

» Art Monthly 288 | Back to Black: art, cinema and the racial imaginary

» Back to Black - catalogue

» Back to Black: art, cinema and the racial imaginary

» Charles White: A Retrospective

» Critical Decade: Black British Photography in the 80s

» Discrepant Abstraction

» Energy/Experimentation