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 » Adrienne Childs
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Adrienne Childs

Adrienne Childs
Independent Scholar; Associate, WEB DuBois Institute, Harvard University
PhD, University of Maryland (2002)
achildsphd@gmail.com
Visit Adrienne Childs's website

Adrienne L. Childs is an independent scholar, art historian and curator. She is an associate of the W.E.B DuBois Institute for the Study of African and African American Research at Harvard University. She has written on diverse topics such as Henry O. Tanner in North Africa, Black bodies in Meissen Porcelain, and the prints of David C. Driskell and Margo Humphrey.  As curator at the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland between 2005 and 2010 she curated many exhibitions including Her Story: Lithographs by Margo Humphrey; Arabesque: The Art of Stephanie Pogue; Creative Spirit: The Art of David C. Driskell and Tradition Redefined: The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art. She is co-editor of The Black Body in European Visual Art of the Long Nineteenth Century: Spectacles of Blackness, forthcoming from Ashgate. Her current project is an exploration of blacks in European decorative arts entitled Ornamental Blackness: The Black Body in European Decorative Arts.  

Full List of Publications

Books:
Margo Humphrey, The David C. Driskell Series of African American Art, Pomegranate, Fall, 2009

Evolution: Five Decades of Printmaking by David C. Driskell, Pomegranate, 2007

Articles:
“Activism and the Shaping of Black Identities, 1964-1988,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, The Twentieth Century, David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. eds., Harvard University Press, 2014.

“Tanner and “Oriental” Africa” in Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit, exhibition catalog in development by The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, University of California Press, 2012.

“Sugarboxes and Blackamoors: Ornamental Blackness in Early Meissen Porcelain,” in The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain, ed. Michael Yonan and Alden Cavanaugh, Ashgate, 2010

Curatorial Essays:
"Notes on the Politics of Identity in African American Art” in African American Art Since 1950: Perspectives from the David C. Driskell Center, Pomegranate, 2012

“Patterns of Nature: Domesticity, Memory and the Decorative in the Arts of David C. Driskell,” in Creative Spirit, The Art of David C. Driskell, The David C. Driskell Center, 2011

“Form, Color and Beauty in the Art of Stephanie E. Pogue,” in Arabesque: The Art of Stephanie E.  Pogue, The David C. Driskell Center, 2008

“Charting the Terrain of African American Art and Artistry,” in Holding our Own: Selections from the Collectors Club of Washington, D.C. Inc., University of Maryland University College, 2006

Contributing Author, Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, 2011

“Method and Mission: The Jean and Robert Steele Collection” in Successions: Prints by African American Artists from the Jean and Robert Steele Collection, The Art Gallery, University of Maryland, 2002

Contributing Author, Holland, Juanita, et. al., Narratives of African American Art and Identity: The David C. Driskell Collection, Pomegranate Press, 1998.

Echoes: The Art of David C. Driskell, The Art Gallery, University of Maryland, 1998

Reviews:
“Material Girls: Contemporary Black Women Artists,” The Journal of Modern Craft, March, 2012. 

“Portraits of A People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century,” Review article, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Autumn, 2006, www.19thc-artworldwide.org/

Publications

Margo Humphrey
Evolution: Five Decades of Printmaking by David C. Driskell
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