New Directions in Visual Culture
Visiting Speaker Biographies

Visual Theory: Interruption, Interference, Intervention
October 25-27, 2007

NORMAN BRYSON is Professor of Art History and Theory at the University of California-San Diego. Prior to joining the Department in 2003, Norman Bryson taught at Cambridge, Rochester, Harvard, and London Universities. At King’s College, Cambridge, he was a Fellow and Director of Studies in English. At the University of Rochester he was the first Director of the newly formed PhD program in Visual and Cultural Studies. He was professor of art history at Harvard from 1990 to 1998, when he moved to London to direct the PhD program in Visual and Theoretical Studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. He has published widely in the areas of eighteenth-century art history, critical theory, and contemporary art. His books include: Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Reaktion Books, 2004); Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge University Press,1984); Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (Yale University Press, 1983); Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Regime (Cambridge University Press, 1981). His field-defining edited volumes include Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (Icon, 1991); and Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Over the past five years, contemporary art has been at the forefront of his writing, complemented by teaching in fine art schools (rather than art history departments) including Goldsmiths College, London, the Jan van Eyck Academy at Maastricht, the Netherlands, and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Bryson's current research and teaching focus on modern art and visual culture in the West, China and Japan, on photography, and on the philosophy of visual representation.

KAJA SILVERMAN is Class of l940 Professor of Rhetoric and Film at the University of California at Berkeley, and the author of eight books: Flesh of My Flesh (forthcoming in 2008); James Coleman (Hatje Cantz, 2002); World Spectators (Stanford University Press, 2000); Speaking About Godard (New York University Press, l998; with Harun Farocki); The Threshold of the Visual World (Routledge, l996); Male Subjectivity at the Margins (Routledge, 1992); The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Indiana University Press, l988); and The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford University Press, l982). She is currently working on a book about photography, called The Miracle of Analogy. Her writing and teaching are concentrated at the moment primarily on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, photography, and time-based visual art, but she continues to write about and teach courses on cinema, and has a developing interest in painting.

Islam, Religion and Visual Culture
November 6-9, 2007

FINBARR BARRY FLOOD is associate professor in the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History at New York University, a current Carnegie Scholar, a former Getty Fellow, and a former Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in Washington, D.C.  He is the author of The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Makings of an Umayyad Visual Culture (Leiden, 2001) and Objects of Translation: The Material Culture of Medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ Encounter (Princeton University Press, forthcoming). The recipient of a number of major fellowships, Flood has published widely in a range of international academic journals on the subjects of Islamic art and history, architectural historiography, and technologies of representation.

In his essay, “Between Cult and Culture: Bamiyan, Islamic Iconoclasm, and the Museum” published in the Art Bulletin, he relates the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 not to a timeless theology of images but to the role of the museum as the focus of a secular worshipping of religious imagery characteristic of the modern nation-state. He is now working on a study of the theory and practice of iconoclasm in the Islamic world and its role in Euro-American representations of Islamic cultures. The working title of the project is The Trouble With Images: Aniconism, Iconoclasm and the Representation of Islam.

MAZYAR LOTFALIAN is a resident fellow for 2006-2007 at the Center for Cultural Studies, UC-Santa Cruz and Visiting Assistant Professor at the Global Studies Program at University of Pittsburgh (Spring 08). An anthropologist trained at Rice University, Lotfalian has taught most recently at Yale University. His work explores notions of subjectivity and mediation among Muslims in the context of the transnational resurgence of Islam. His 2004 book, Islam, Technoscientific Identities, and the Culture of Curiosity (University Press of America), focused on the contemporary intellectual undertaking of Muslims to rethink how science and technology are practiced in the Islamic world. It argued that Islam is always already mediated through institutions, intellectual and artistic circles, aesthetic discourses, and technological devices. His current research turns to the consideration of artistic productions of transnational Muslim artists.

HAMID NAFICY is currently the John Evans Chair of Communications in the department of Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern where he also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Art History. Naficy received his Master of Fine Arts degree from UCLA in film and television production and his Ph.D. from UCLA in critical studies in film and television. He has produced many educational films and experimental videos and has published extensively about theories of exile and displacement, exilic and Diasporic cinema and media, and Iranian and Third World cinemas. His books include: An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton University Press, 2001) and The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Important research guides The Iran Media Index (Greenwood Press, 1984).  Important edited volumes include Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged (Harwood, 1993); The Discourse of the Other: Postcoloniality, Positionality, and Subjectivity (Sharpe, 1991); and Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place (Routledge, 1998). His two-volume book, Cinema, Modernity, and National Identity: A Social History of Iranian Cinema, is due out in 2008 by Duke University Press.

JESSICA WINEGAR is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Temple University.  She did ethnographic fieldwork on the visual art world in Egypt, which culminated in a book entitled Creative Reckonings:  The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2006). This book examines the heated cultural politics of neoliberal era artistic production and consumption as articulated through reckonings with the legacies of colonialism, nationalism, and socialism.  For this research, Winegar received postdoctoral fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  She is currently at work on two new projects:  a study of U.S. cultural diplomacy efforts related to the Middle East; and a major historical and ethnographic project tracing the work of the culture concept in Egypt. Her published articles include “Framing Egyptian Art: Western Audiences, Islam, and Ancient Egypt,” in Peripheral Insider: Perspectives on Contemporary Internationalism in Visual Culture, eds. Khaled Ramadan and Stine Hoxbroe (Copenhagen:  University of Copenhagen Press, 2007) and “Cultural Sovereignty in a Global Art Economy:  Egyptian Cultural Policy and the New Western Interest in Art from the Middle East,” Cultural Anthropology 21.2 (2006):173-204. Winegar is also the gallery coordinator at ArteEast, a NY-based Middle Eastern arts organization, and a founding member of the Task Force on Middle East Anthropology.

Visualizing Science
February 7-8, 2008

MICHAEL LYNCH is currently Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. He is currently president of the Society for Social Studies of Science and editor of Social Studies of Science. His areas of research and teaching include ethnomethodology, sociology of science, and contemporary social theory. His long-standing interest in visualization in science goes back to his first book, Art & Artifact in Laboratory Science (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), and his edited anthology (with Steve Woolgar), Representation in Scientific Practice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). and includes papers on visualization in electron microscopy, digital image processing in astronomy, and other fields.  He is co-author of a forthcoming book, Truth Machine: The Contentious History of DNA Fingerprinting (University of Chicago Press, 2008).

Interdisciplinarity and the University Art Museum
April 9-11, 2008

AMY LONETREE is an enrolled citizen of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin.  In 2002, she earned a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley where she specialized in Native American History and Museum Studies.   Her scholarly work focuses on the representation of Indigenous people in both national and tribal museums, and she has conducted research on this topic at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the Minnesota Historical Society, the Mille Lacs Indian Museum, the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways, and the British Museum. She has published articles based on this research in the American Indian Quarterly and the Public Historian, and has recently completed an edited collection, with Amanda J. Cobb, on the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indians to be published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2008.  She is currently an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz

ALAN SHESTACK is the Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Art.  He is working on a book about different types of art museums and their function, paying special attention to university museums.  He served for seventeen years as the Director of the Yale University Art Gallery and has been an advisor/consultant to ten university art museums.  Before coming to the National Gallery of Art, he was Director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.  He believes in the role of university museums as laboratories for art history and in fostering interdisciplinary study.

Colloquium Discussion Participants

JILLH. CASID is Associate Professor of Visual Culture Studies in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  As a historian, a theorist of visual culture, and a practicing artist in photo-based media, her work explores the productive tensions between theory, the problems of the archive and the writing of history, issues of gender, race and sexuality, and the performative and processual aspects of visual objects and imaging.  Her research in visual studies and in vision and aesthetics includes her book Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (2005) and her forthcoming book Shadows of Enlightenment—both with the University of Minnesota Press.  She has just begun a new book project, “The Volatile Image: Other Histories of Photography,” that reconsiders photography as a complex and unstable medium.  Her interest in pursuing the implications of “trans” for the study of visual culture extends to the international visual culture conference on the theme of “trans” which she co-organized (at University of Wisconsin-Madison in October 2006), the video exhibition she guest curated for the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (2006), and the anthology she is planning on "Visual Transculture."  In addition to creating a new curriculum in visual culture studies and contributing to the development of curatorial and museum studies, she also directs the new Visual Culture Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

THOMAS E.A. DALE, Professor of Medieval and Byzantine Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, joined the faculty in 1999 after teaching for nine years at Columbia University in New York.  He received his B.A. in art history from the University of Toronto and his M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the Johns Hopkins University. His first book, Relics, Prayer and Politics in Medieval Venetia (Princeton University Press, 1997) explores the role of images in promoting both thaumaturgical and political functions of the cult of the saints.  His second book, an edited collection of essays, Shaping Sacred Space and Institutional Identity in Romanesque Mural Painting (Pindar Press, 2002) focuses on the ways in which programs of narrative painting in Romanesque churches function as representations of sacred space, ritual and institutional politics.  A third book nearing completion, Romanesque Corporealities, re-conceptualizes our understanding of European images of the eleventh and twelfth-centuries by taking into an increased valorization of the physical body, vision and the senses as the means of spiritual access.  A fourth book in progress will focus on the theme of cultural exchange between Venice, Byzantium and the Islamic east in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He regularly makes use of the Chazen Museum’s collection in his teaching and helped arrange a long-term loan of medieval objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

MEGHAN DOHERTY is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History. Her dissertation, “Carving Knowledge: Engraving, Etching and Early Modern Science”, investigates how engraving and etching became an integral part of the communication of ideas in the circle of the Royal Society in London in the middle of the seventeenth century. Art historical questions about the role of images in communication are brought to printed books that are usually considered the realm of the history of science. In 2007 Meghan guest curated the exhibition “Under the Medicean Stars: Medici Patronage of Science and Natural History, 1537-1737” at the UW Department of Special Collections.

STEPHEN FLEISCHMAN received a Bachelor's degree in 1977, and an M.B.A. in 1983, both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He went on to work at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and has been the Director of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art since 1991.  He has curated numerous exhibitions, including "Claes Oldenburg: Printed Stuff" which was accompanied by a catalogue raissone of the artist's printed works. In the past he has served on the Board of Directors of the Greater Madison Convention and Visitors Bureau; the Madison Arts Commission, Madison; The Southern Theatre, Minneapolis; the Minnesota Citizens of the Arts, Minneapolis; and the Cable Arts Consortium, Minneapolis.  He currently serves as a reviewer for the Accreditation Program of the American Association of Museums.

MARCELA C. GUERRERO-MEDINA  is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her areas of research include contemporary Caribbean art and visual culture with an emphasis on postcolonial theory. In the summer of 2006 she was one of fifteen graduate students and museum professionals to be selected to participate in the Latino Museum Studies Program organized by the Smithsonian Latino Center—a branch dedicated to promote education and exhibitions about Latino culture across the Smithsonian Institution. Previous to this, Ms. Guerrero had also worked as an intern at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden where she collaborated in the Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985 exhibition curated by former Hirshhorn deputy director, Olga Viso.

JOHN HOUSE is Walter H Annenberg Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. A specialist in French 19th century painting, he is the author of Monet, Nature into Art (1986) and Impressionism: Paint and Politics (2004). He has also organized a number of international exhibitions, most recently Impressionists by the Sea, currently on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT.

CHELE ISAAC is a graduate student in the Department of Art, from which she will receive a Master’s of Fine Arts Degree in May 2008. She has exhibited work widely in Wisconsin, including at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Wisconsin Film Festival, Overture Center for the Arts, the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and several galleries and performance spaces throughout the Midwest. As an MFA student, Chele has focused primarily on video and sound installations, work she often locates outside of formal exhibition spaces in order to explore the contingency of experience upon location. On the occasion of this conference, Chele has installed Bluethrough, a pair of intersecting semi-translucent hallways through which participants may pass, playfully emphasizing the quintessentially social aspects of the public plaza. For its duration, Bluethrough might also be considered an annexed gallery of the Chazen Museum of Art, a marker and meeting point that encourages contemplation and discussion of the university art museum’s unique role in and potential for advancing contemporary art practice. Chele
was awarded a David and Edith Sinaiko Frank Graduate Fellowship to support the making of Bluethrough.

TOM JONES is an Assistant Professor of Photography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He received his MFA in Photography and a MA in Museum Studies from Columbia College in Chicago, IL. He was the curator for the show “Dressing Up” for the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Illinois and the traveling show “America First People, New People, Forgotten People”. He is currently collaborating on a future show of Horace Poolaw’s photographs with Dr. Nancy Mithlo. Jones has been working on an ongoing photographic essay on the contemporary life of his tribe, the Ho Chunk Nation of Wisconsin. Jones hopes to give both the tribe and the outside world a perspective from someone who comes from within the Ho Chunk community. He is generating a new understanding of how the Ho Chunk live in the twenty-first century, and showing how they still adhere to traditional ways in spite of adapting to the white culture that surrounds them. In his current series “Native” Commodity he is documenting the visual rhetoric and commercial use of all things “Native” within the advertising and architecture of the Wisconsin Dells.  Jones has work in the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian, Polaroid Corporation, Sprint Corporation, The Chazen Museum of Art, The Nerman Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, and Michigan State University Museum.

MEGAN KATZ is an MFA Student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  She holds an MA in Anthropology and a BA in Comparative Literature, and has been involved with the Visual Culture Cluster since 2003.  She has participated as both artist and curator in several trans-disciplinary curatorial projects, including an Arts Institute-sponsored residency and exhibition with Matthew Buckingham, “Visualizing TRANS” in conjunction with the Visual Culture Cluster’s TRANS conference in October 2006, and Pritika Chowdhry's Transdiasporic curatorial projects. She is currently involved in organizing an off-campus exhibition called "Housework." 

ETHAN LASSER is the Curator of the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, a private foundation that supports scholarship in the American Decorative arts and material culture.  Lasser holds a PhD in the History of Art from Yale University, and a BA from Williams College.  He has lectured and published widely on American art and furniture.  He is currently involved in reinstalling the American Decorative Arts Galleries at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

NANCY ROSE MARSHALL is an associate professor of nineteenth-century art and visual culture at UW-Madison.  A specialist in Victorian Britain, she was the research curator and co-author of the catalogue for the exhibition "James Tissot: Victorian Life/ Modern Love" that originated at the Yale Center for British Art and traveled to the Musée du Québec and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo in 1999-2000. 

NICK MILLER is an undergraduate student in visual culture studies at UW-Madison. He will further his studies at Northwestern University in pursuit of a PhD in Art History. Along with continuing to study representations of race in contemporary art, he hopes to further his research interests to include representations of hip-hop in contemporary culture, evaluating the evolution of the black male entertainer from the historical role of “Sambo,” to the representations of contemporary hip-hop icons found in the work of artists such as David Scheibaum, Alex Melamid and Kehinde Wiley. Nick is the Director of Volunteer Outreach for the 10,000 Hours Show of Dane County.

NANCY MARIE MITHLO is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and the American Indian Studies Program. Her work concerns the intersection of visual arts and anthropology, particularly in relationship to indigenous media productions. For the past decade she has sponsored contemporary Native arts exhibits at the Venice Biennale with the nonprofit Indigenous Arts Action Alliance (IA3). In June 0f 2007, she curated with Ryan Rice the exhibit “REQUICKENING” featuring the work of Lori Blondeau and Shelley Niro at the University of Venice’s Department of Post-colonial Literature. These international efforts are complimented by her continued community-based learning projects in the regional settings of New Mexico and Oklahoma. Titled the Tribal College Relations Initiative, the aim of these projects is to codify and legitimize indigenous curation methodologies that privilege community control and cultural sensitivity. She recently completed a book titled ‘Our Indian Princess’ Subverting the Stereotype that explores how counter representations (appropriation and reformulation of restrictive and demeaning classifications) can indicate political agency.

WILLIE NEY is the Executive Director of the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives, the first program of its kind on a university campus in the United States dedicated to highlighting, celebrating and integrating spoken word and hip-hop culture into the fabric of the culture of the University. Willie is a past winner of the Martin Luther King Heritage Award (the highest civil rights award given out annually by the State of Wisconsin), the Bartell Arts Award (the top community arts award given at annually at the UW Madison) and numerous other awards for community outreach particularly focusing on his innovative multicultural arts programming. A former Assistant Director of the Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program, Willie has produced and spearheaded dozens of multicultural productions focusing on Afro-Latin culture and history and is the founder of the Madison World Music Festival. 

AMY NOELLis a PhD Student in the Art History Department at UW-Madison. She studies transnational contemporary art and cinema, focusing largely on post-colonial theory and discourses of identity politics among and around diasporic populations in the US and Europe. She is currently developing a dissertation project that will examine the global movements of African cinema and African contemporary art in the contexts of international film festivals and museums. Her curatorial experience includes Sighting Knowledge: Photography in the Lab, the Museum and the Archive (Chazen Museum of Art, coinciding with this conference), The Scientist’s Eye: Dialogues between Art & Science (Kohler Art Library, 2008), and Visualizing TRANS, an interdisciplinary exhibition at Madison’s Kupfer Center in conjunction with the Visual Culture Cluster’s TRANS conference in October 2006. Her essay on that project, titled “Seeing Trans for the Trees: Rhizomatic Curatorial Frameworks and the Visualizing TRANS Exhibition” appears in Invisible Culture, an online journal for visual culture published by the University of Rochester.

RUSSELL PANCZENKO became director of the Elvehjem Museum of Art (now the Chazen Museum of Art) in September, 1984 after serving as assistant director at the Williams College Art Museum for four years.  He received his Ph.D. in Letters from the Universita degli Studi di Firenze, Florence, Italy. A partial list of his recent exhibitions organized for the Elvehjem Museum includes - Xu Bing, The Glassy  Surface of a Lake, Elvehjem Museum of Art, September 4 – November 28, 2004; The Art of Gillian Jagger, 2002 (monograph published in 2003); The Art of Judy Pfaff, 2001 (monograph published in spring 2004 by Hudson Hills Press); Wildeworld: The Art of John Wilde, 1999 (catalogue published by Hudson Hills Press); John Steuart Curry: Reinventing the Middle West, 1998-1999 (catalogue published by Hudson Hills Press); Bridge: Illusion in Clay, Work by Ah-Leon, 1997-1998; and The Terese and Alvin Lane Collection: Twentieth-Century Sculpture and Sculptors’ Works on Paper, 1995 (catalogue published).

EMILY PFOTENHAUER received her master's degree in Art History, with a concentration in Material Culture Studies, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2006. Under a fellowship from the Chipstone Foundation, she is currently working with the Wisconsin Historical Society on a long-term fieldwork project to catalog Wisconsin-made decorative arts objects in the collections of local historical societies and museums around the state. Some of these findings will be presented in an exhibition that she will curate at the Milwaukee Art Museum this fall.

JON PROWN is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee. In 1999, he initiated an institutional partnership with the Milwaukee Art Museum centered around the innovative interpretation and display of long-term and changing installations in the American Collections Galleries. Jon works with Dr. Ann Smart Martin, Chipstone Professor of American Decorative Arts, and other scholars at UW-Madison to develop and implement programming in the Material Culture Program, which includes support for educational initiatives and museum displays in the Chazen Museum of Art. He regularly lectures and teaches classes in the UW Art History program, and directly assists individual students on project planning and thesis development. In 2001, he initiated chipstone.org, a web site devoted to creating substantive visual and information databases, virtual exhibits, and online versions of Chipstone’s two annual publications. Selected publications include “John Singleton Copley’s Furniture and the Art of Invention” in American Furniture (2004) and "Cases with Bottles and The Alcohol Culture of the Early South" in Fermented and Distilled: The Material Culture of Alcoholic Beverages, (Yale-Smithsonian Seminar on Material Culture, 2005).

ROBIN SCHMOLDT is a 1997 graduate of the University of Wisconsin- Madison, with a BA in Communications Arts (Radio/TV/Film). She currently works as the Arts Advisor at the Wisconsin Union, managing the permanent art collection and advising student arts programmers on the Art and Film Committees.

JANE SIMON is the curator of exhibitions at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA), where she has organized exhibitions such as
Between the Lakes: Artists Respond to Madison, Alyson Shotz: Topologies, and the upcoming exhibitions George Segal: Street Scenes and TL Solien: Myths & Monsters. Before joining the museum in 2004, she worked in the curatorial departments of Independent Curators International and Minetta Brook in New York, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, where she curated Mirror Mirror and co-curated Yankee Remix: Artists Take on New England. She has also written for ARTnews, Art on Paper, and the Brooklyn Rail.

JON SORENSON is Director of Development for the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin Foundation. He earned his BA in Art History from UW-Madison in 1985 and did his graduate work in Art History at Williams College, where he specialized in 20th century American art. Jon has worked in many galleries, including Hirschl & Adler (New York), LA Louver Gallery (LA), and Gallery Paule Anglim (San Francisco). He followed these experiences with his own Fine Art Consulting business in San Francisco. He recently returned from Christchurch, New Zealand, where he was Manager of Education and Public Programs at the Canterbury Museum. Jon also spent two
years teaching 4th grade students in an inner-city school in Long Beach, CA.

FREIDA HIGH W. TESFAGIORGIS (M.A., M.F.A.) is Professor of Modern and Contemporary African and African Diaspora Art History and Visual Culture, and former Chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies, UW-Madison. Faculty affiliations include the Art Department, African Studies, and Women Studies. She is one of the founders of the Visual Culture area at UW-Madison. Her scholarly publications span the areas of art history, visual culture, and feminist art criticism with emphasis on America (U.S.A.), Britain, and Africa (particularly Nigeria). Her most recent project is The High Report: The National Gallery of Art, Nigeria, A General Condition Assessment, funded by the Ford Foundation of West Africa (2007). Select publications include “In Search of a Discourse and Critique/s that Center the Art of Black Women Artists,” 4th printing in Feminist Art Theory (H. Robinson, 2001); "Afrofemcentrism: The Work of Elizabeth Catlett and Faith Ringgold," in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (N. Broude and M. Gerrard, 1992); “Interweaving Black Feminism and Art History: Framing Nigeria," Contemporary Textures: MultiDimensionality in Nigerian Art (N. Nzegwu, 1999); and "Chiasmus: Art in Politics/Politics in Art, Chicano/a and African-American Image, Text, and Activism of the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies," Voices of Color: Art and Society in the Americas (P. Farris-Dufrene, 1997).  She has exhibited widely. Her art is discussed in Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists (Lisa Farrington, 2005); The Art of Black American Women: Works of Twenty-Four Artists of the Twentieth Century (R. Henkes, 1993), among others.

BETH ZINSLI is a PhD student in the Department of Art History at UW-Madison. She studies global histories of photography and the art and visual culture of the Americas. She has a particular interest in the transcultural relationships between the United States and Latin America and the Caribbean, manifest in travel, immigration, and commerce. Her work focuses on representations of the body in contemporary photography and visual culture, neo-imperial imaging of Latin America, and questions involving the promiscuity and duplicity of the photographic image and its consequences. Her curatorial experience includes Sighting Knowledge: Photography in the Lab, the Museum and the Archive (Chazen Museum of Art, coinciding with this conference), The Scientist’s Eye: Dialogues between Art & Science (Kohler Art Library, 2008), Visualizing TRANS (Kupfer Center, 2006) and You Count the Centuries, I Blink My Eyes (Vilas Studios, 2006).