Overview

Black Refractions is accompanied by a new publication of the same title co-published by the American Federation of Arts and Rizzoli Electa. The richly illustrated volume includes essays by Connie H. Choi and Kellie Jones; entries by a range of writers, curators and scholars (among them Lauren Haynes, Ashley James, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Larry Ossei-Mensah and Hallie Ringle) who contextualize the works and provide detailed commentary; and a conversation among Choi, Thelma Golden, and Jones that draws out themes and challenges in collecting and exhibiting modern and contemporary art by artists of African descent.

About the Authors

Connie H. Choi is Associate Curator, Permanent Collection at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where she has worked on the exhibitions Regarding the Figure (2017), Fictions, and Their Own Harlems (both 2017–18). Prior to joining the museum in 2017, Choi was the Assistant Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum. She is a PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University, and holds a BA in the history of art from Yale University and an EdM in arts education from Harvard University.

Thelma Golden is Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum, a position she has held since 2005. She began her career as a Studio Museum intern in 1987, and served from 2000 to 2005 as the Museum’s Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs. Among her many awards, she received a Barnard Medal of Distinction from Barnard College, Columbia University, in 2010, and that same year was appointed by President Barack Obama to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, on which she served until 2016. She is a 2008 Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, and in 2016 received the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Kellie Jones is Professor in Art History and Archaeology and a Faculty Fellow with the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. Jones has also worked as a curator for over three decades and has numerous major national and international exhibitions to her credit. In 2016 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Her latest book, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (Duke University Press) was a Best Book of 2017 in Artforum and a Best Art Book of 2017 in the New York Times.