Research

Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis 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. She is one of the founders of the Visual Culture area at UW-Madison. Her work spans art history, visual culture, and feminist art criticism with emphasis on America (U.S.A.), Britain, and Africa (particularly Nigeria).

Professor High is a painter, art historian, and visual culturalist. Her expertise is modern/contemporary art, visual culture, and art theory, with emphasis on contemporary Africa & the African Diaspora (Northern Hemisphere), and modern European Art & Primitivism. Feminism and critical race theory permeate her work. She has exhibited, curated exhibitions, and published, spanning the boundaries of artist and scholar.

Her current research manifests in an inquiry into the work of Ben Enwonwu, Representation, and the Visualization of Nigeria. This inquiry revisits the artist's work and place in modern/contemporary art in Nigeria and Britain.

Education:
A.A Graceland College, Lamoni, IA
B.S. Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL
M.A., M.F.A. - University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ph.D. work at University of Chicago

Select Publications
Include “In Search of a Discourse and Critique/s that Center the Art of Black Women Artists,” in Theorizing Black Feminism/s (1993) and Feminist Art Theory (2001); "Afrofemcentrism: The Work of Elizabeth Catlett and Faith Ringgold," in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (1992); “Interweaving Black Feminism and Art History: Framing Nigeria," in Contemporary Textures: MultiDimensionality in Nigerian Art (1999); "Chiasmus: Art in Politics/Politics in Art, Chicano/a and African-American Image, Text, and Activism of the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies,"in Voices of Color in the Americas. Her art is discussed in The Art of Black American Women: Works of Twenty-Four Artists of the Twentieth Century (1993); Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists (1996); and Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists (2005). She has had solo and group exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum (WI); Minnesota Museum of American Art; National Arts Club (NY); Burpee Art Museum (IL); Studio Museum in Harlem (NY); Schenectady Museum (NY); Fine Arts Museum of the South (AL); Herbert Johnson Museum, Cornell U. (NY); Fine Arts Gallery-College-Camille Cosby Humanities Center at Spelman College (GA); National Gallery (Dakar, Senegal); and Museo Arte Contemporanea di Gibellina (Palermo, Italy), among others.