Assistant Professor
jpbowles@email.unc.edu
As an historian of African American art, I work from the assumption that art plays an important role in determining how we see ourselves as morally responsible individuals. In research and teaching, I attempt to convey the urgency of art by elucidating the moral and political dilemmas we would often rather ignore. My current research projects explore the role of feminism in the Black Arts Movement in Los Angeles and artists' critical engagement with hip-hop as a global phenomenon. I am also currently at work on my second book, “Globalization and African American Art: History and Transnational Dialogue,” in which I explore how African American artists - from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s until today - have engaged simultaneously with modernism, globalization and diaspora. I conceive of this project as an investigation of historical attempts by African American artists to question the certainty of racial classification in the service of a broader, more global politics of liberation and solidarity.
My recently completed book, Adrian Piper: Race, Gender and the Artist's Body (in process with Duke University Press), is the first scholarly monograph on Piper's work. Informed by eight years of conversations with Piper, my book places her early conceptual and performance art at the nexus of Conceptual and Feminist art of the late 1960s and early 1970s and in relationship to the work various African-American artists were making at the time. My project participates in recent reconsiderations of the art of the 1960s and 1970s that call for replacing the canon of “superstar” artists with analysis of the range of artists engaged in a critique of modernism.
In response to Piper's critical examination of “white” privilege and her claim that it lies at the foundation of American racism, in 2001 I organized and edited a forum on the topic for the Art Journal, “Blinded by the White: Art and History at the Limits of Whiteness.” Six scholars from Nigeria, New Zealand, and the United States wrote essays specifically for the forum and Adrian Piper created a special artists' project for the magazine. I asked contributors to consider the question of responsibility: If race matters to art historians only when writing about artists who are black, Latino, Asian - that is, not white - what is the value of whiteness? While my current study of gender and sexuality focuses on matters of race, I began researching questions of identity with a study of how perceptions of social class, gender, and sexuality affected artists associated with the Beat poets in 1950s and 1960s San Francisco. In my essay, “`Shocking “Beat” Art Displayed:' California Artists and the Beat Image,” published in Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000 (University of California Press), I ask how the persecution of homosexuality and the proscription of conventional femininity made the image of the Beat a liability for some artists even as it propelled others to national prominence.
I received my Ph.D. from UCLA in 2002 and am a graduate of the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program. I have published articles and art criticism in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, American Art, the Art Journal, Art in America, Art Papers, and elsewhere.
Last modified
09/23/2008 10:10am.
) "Blinded by the White")