Community

Clemente Course in the Humanities

I am currently the art history professor for the Harlem branch of the Clemente Course in the Humanities. In this role my goal is to go beyond teaching students about art history, to exploring how all of our backgrounds and experiences make up the content, contexts, and critical themes of art history. My teaching methods prioritize students bringing into the classroom their received histories and experiences of visual art and material culture. As a group and community, we then investigate how our narratives and perspectives form vital parts of a broader, interconnected history of global art.

From the Clemente Course in the Humanities website:

“Instead of building grand structures, Clemente educates people in spaces embedded in their communities, from health centers to public libraries. As college tuition soars, Clemente remains free, while also providing crucial wrap-around support by covering childcare and transportation costs. While many institutions curtail or eliminate humanities programs, Clemente wagers on their enduring value and power to uplift individuals and communities. Over thirty Clemente Courses operate across the United States and Canada, from Boston, MA to Oakland, CA and from Madison, WI to Atlanta, GA. Each course is embedded in the community it serves, with the support of local and regional networks and institutions. All Clemente courses are accredited, either through our primary partner Bard College, or universities closely linked to Clemente sites. Our core model consists of six credit hours delivered over two semesters to cohorts of 15-20 students. Guided by experienced college faculty in a rigorous and supportive classroom, students are taught via seminar, encouraging active participation. Classes offered include philosophy, history, literature, art history, and writing. All who complete the course receive a certificate of achievement. Students who demonstrate college-level work may earn college credit from Bard College or one of our other academic partners.”

“Our students face significant barriers to higher education. The U.S. Federal Poverty Level is $15,000 for individuals; $31,000 for a family of four. Many of our students fall below this threshold, and the vast majority qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid (130% and 150% of the Poverty Level respectively).In addition to financial distress, our students commonly report other major barriers to higher education, including housing insecurity, incarceration, trauma, and health-related challenges. Clemente offers an open door. We require only that students are at least 17 years old, able to read a newspaper, and plan to complete a year-long course. We do not require a high school diploma, GED, college test scores, or other documentation.”

“Animal Stories: Non-Human Animals in the Arts of the Americas”

From 2025 to 2030, I am participating in a multi-year project led by Dr. Jenn Marshall (Professor and Chair of Art History, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; 2025 Tyson Scholar for Graduate Mentorship and Collaborative Initiatives, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art). This initiative consists of a cohort of scholars who meet over the course of several years for creative brainstorming and collective experimentation around the theme of “Animal Stories.” The project will ultimately culminate in a published anthology of creative nonfiction essays and short stories.

From Dr. Marshall’s project proposal:

“ ‘Animal Stories’ brings together scholars of visual and material histories who are invested in creative experimentation in art historical research and writing methods, and agree that animals can serve as charismatic thought partners for this enterprise. Whether or not they count themselves as animal studies scholars, all participants come to the gathering curious about how animals have informed the art and/or histories they study. Project lead Dr. Jenn Marshall has designed this project with three overarching goals in mind: (1) to consider howspeculative approaches to historiography have always been core to art-, image-, and object-based historiography (as well as to animal histories and ontologies), (2) to center writing as methodology, especially to highlight the potential of creative non- or para-fiction for maximizing audiences for the interdisciplinary humanities, and (3) to advance collaborative models of academic supportfor thinking, research, and writing in the humanities, where the single-author norm often frustrates efforts at exchange, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility.”

“ ‘Animal Stories’ invites work that considers the expansive role that non-human animals have played in the art and aesthetics of the American hemisphere. Animals provide artists with subject matter, inspiration, companionship, and art supplies; they also practice their own creativity and contribute aesthetics to ecosystems. Animals are everywhere in the history of art and visual/ material culture. Their wiry whiskers, shiny claws, glossy pelts show up everywhere in paintings and sculptures. Parents know they can easily occupy children at art museums with the off-hand instruction: ‘just look for the dogs.’ Animals themselves are often artworks. Any visitor to a state fair appreciates how the bodies of livestock are the result of creative genetic modeling. Animals also sometimes make art, whether zoo-bound primates, pufferfish on the ocean floor, or bowerbirds in their scavenger-made sculpture parks. Then, too, non-human creatures contribute raw materials to art-making. Chicken eggs and animal fats are crucial to pigment making and the production of photographic papers. Weasels give their hair to paintbrushes and elephants their tusks to scrimshaw. Finally non-human animals--variously experienced as relatives, companions, captives, and aggressors--also look back. If John Berger famously asked, ‘Why Look at Animals?’ a reciprocal interrogative might consider what they see when they look at our human-made visual and material world.”

Theology and the Visual Arts

From 2023 to 2028, I am participating in a multi-year initiative based in the Theology and Religious Studies Department at King’s College London. This project aims to strengthen Theology and the Visual Arts (TVA) as a formal discipline within academia, particularly under the umbrella of Systematic Theology. Led by Professor Ben Quash working with Dr. Chloë Reddaway, this endeavor involves seventeen scholars who will meet over the course of several years to explore, question, and sketch out the contours of this emerging field.

From the TVA project page:

“ ‘Theology and the Visual Arts: Firming Foundations; Firing Imaginations’ is a five-year project, led by Professor Ben Quash, Chair of Christianity and the Arts, working with Dr Chloë Reddaway, and generously sponsored by the McDonald Agape Foundation. Based in the Centre for Arts and the Sacred at King’s and building on the success of a previous project—Theology, Modernity, and the Visual Arts (TMVA)—its purpose is to strengthen the foundations of Theology and the Visual Arts as a discipline within academic Theology, and help to shape its future.”

“There have been significant advances in this field in recent years, making this an ideal time to consolidate the discipline’s emerging achievements, map its horizons, and propel it forward. We will offer a sustained exemplification of how the task of Christian theology can be pursued comprehensively, systematically, and fruitfully through engagement with visual art, creating a confident and established presence in the academy, and securing an influential role for such theological work in the best universities.”

“At the heart of the project will be the building of a worldwide scholarly community in a subject area whose specialists frequently work in isolation, and the preparation of a set of ground-breaking publications, thereby expanding the subject area’s canon of core texts. These will include the first sustained discussion of the sources, norms, and methods underpinning the discipline, which have never been thoroughly considered, and a pioneering study of Christian Systematic Theology in dialogue with the resources of visual art. These will be accompanied by an accessible introductory handbook to the discipline, and a monograph on contemporary art and theology. Throughout the project, we will seek to form, develop, and inspire scholars who are bilingual in Theology and the Visual Arts, whose imaginations draw on both disciplines, and whose scholarship transforms the traditional parameters of both. We will also showcase our work to a public audience through a series of major public lectures in an internationally renowned arts venue.”