Faculty

Krista Thompson

Bio

Research Areas

Exhibitions

Teaching

Conferences

Photo courtesy of Mary Hanlon

Krista A. Thompson (Ph.D., 2002, Emory University; Associate Professor) teaches courses on the arts of the African diaspora, critical race theory, visual cultures of colonialism and postcoloniality, and global histories of photography, as well as courses on contemporary Caribbean and African art.  She is the author of An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque  (Duke University Press, 2006), an examination of the colonial imaging of the Anglophone Caribbean in photographs and its effects on landscape, history, race, governmentality, and contemporary art.  Thompson has published in Art Bulletin, American Art, The Drama Review, and Small Axe (where she serves on the editorial collective). She is co-editor, with Huey Copeland and Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, of a special issue of Representations on New World Slavery and the Visual Imagination (Winter 2011). She is currently working on a book titled The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Practice on visual culture and black urban youth in the Caribbean and United States, which is forthcoming from Duke University Press. The publication investigates the intersections among vernacular forms of photography, performance, and contemporary art.  Thompson has received postdoctoral fellowships from the J. Paul Getty Foundation (2008), the Institute for the Humanities, University of Illinois, Chicago (2004), and the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora (2003).  In 2009, Thompson received the David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, which recognizes “original and important contributions to the field of African-American art or art history.”

Current Research

The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Practice

The book length study of contemporary visual practices of black urban youth in the northern Caribbean and southern United States charts new visual modalities of African diasporic formation and novel reformulations of representation. The book illuminates how black youth from across the circum-Caribbean engage in performances of visibility, practices that are about being seen and, more specifically, being seen in the process of being represented.  Light, or its simulation, is intrinsic to these expressions, whether in Kingston’s dancehalls, Nassau’s proms or street festivals in the southern Unites States.  The book considers how these practices shed light on how race, class, color, and respectability inform social visibility in postcolonial and post civil rights societies. This first scholarly investigation of black vernacular visual practices in the United States and the Caribbean adds to art historical considerations by documenting how the very meaning of representation has been reconfigured in these practices in which the visual mechanics of being seen - light, cameras, and backdrops - have become their own form of representation.

Exhibitions

2008 - Curator

Developing Blackness: Studio Photographs of “Over the Hill” Nassau in the

Independence Era. Nassau, Bahamas: The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas 

2007 - Co-Organizer

An Account of a Voyage to Jamaica with the Unnatural History of That Place.

Fred Wilson’s reinstallation of the collections of the Institute of Jamaica, an exhibition marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade.  Institute of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica.

2006 - Faculty Co-Organizer of Big House/Disclosure, a digital art project addressing the City of Chicago’s Slavery Disclosure Ordinance by Keith+Mendi Obadike. http://bighouse.northwestern.edu

2006 - Curator

“Visualizing the Unseen: The Counter-Picturesque in Contemporary Bahamian Art.” Third National Exhibition. Nassau, Bahamas: The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas.

2002 - Curator

Bahamian Visions: Photographs 1870-1920, the first exhibition and written account of the early history of photography in the Bahamas, National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, Nassau, Bahamas 

Teaching

African Diaspora Art and Visual Culture, African Diaspora Performance Arts, African Art, Caribbean Art, Race and Representation, Postcolonial Theory and Visual Representation, and Visual Cultures of Colonialism.

Conferences

Out of Sight: New World Slavery in the Visual Imagination

krista-thompson@northwestern.edu

curriculum vitae