Faculty

Huey Copeland (Ph.D., History of Art, University of California, Berkeley, 2006) is an Assistant Professor focusing on modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on articulations of blackness in the visual field.  His interests also include theories of subject formation, twentieth-century sculpture, histories of slavery, and African-American art historiography.  Among his recent course offerings are the seminars “The Work of Andy Warhol,” and “Modernism and the Black Metropolis,” co-taught with Darby English of the University of Chicago.  Copeland is an occasional co-curator of exhibitions, such as Interstellar Low Ways at the Hyde Park Art Center, and his writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, and Qui Parle as well as in several international exhibition catalogues.  A recipient of the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and an alumnus of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, during the 2008-09 academic year, he is a Scholar-in-Residence at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, where he is at work on The Blackness of Things.  In this book, Copeland examines the aesthetic and political significance of slavery for postmodern artists—Renée Green, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, and Fred Wilson foremost among them—whose work of the early 1990s radically reimagines the figuration of blackness, objecthood, and the self in American art.

h-copeland@northwestern.edu

Photograph by Steve Reinke