Asma Naeem is an art historian and curator of prints, drawings and media arts at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. She has two shows opening in 2017 at the Portrait Gallery. “UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar,” co-curated with Taina Caragol, examines the historical invisibility of minorities in portraiture and images of nation-building. For this, Naeem worked with Titus Kaphar to exhibit the largest number of his works to date (18 total). The second “Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now,” explores the cultural and political strands of the long-overlooked medium of silhouettes, both in Early America and in the contemporary moment in the work of four female artists: Kristin Malakoff, Camille Utterback, Kara Walker, and Kumi Yamashita.
Upcoming exhibitions include an examination of how the story of slavery is both told and undone by the conventions of portraiture and its emphasis on biography and the body, a media art show featuring the work of Glenn Ligon and others, and a retrospective of Los Angeles-based artist, Don Bachardy. She previously curated the Portrait Gallery’s first all-media arts show on video art pioneer, Bill Viola.
Specializing in American and Contemporary Islamic art, Naeem is particular interested in the effects of displacement and dispossession, the history of technology, and the sensorial imagination of both artist and beholder. She holds a B.A. in art history and political science from Johns Hopkins University, a J.D. from Temple University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. Before returning to art history, she practiced law as a prosecutor in Manhattan and Washington, D.C.
Her 2017 exhibition catalogue, Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now from Princeton University Press, sheds light on the surprisingly complex historical, political, and social underpinnings of the ostensibly simple art form and explores how it registered the paradoxes of the unstable young nation roiling with tensions over slavery and political independence.
Forthcoming from University of California press is her book, “Out of Earshot: Sound and Technology in American Art, 1847-1897,” which urges scholars to think in new and more expansive ways about relations among the visual arts, sound technologies, and the senses of sight and sound.
She has been invited to be the keynote speaker and lecture at the Courtauld Institute, University of Minnesota, and University of Rhode Island, and has delivered papers at numerous conferences such as the American Association of Museum Curators, College Art Association, American Studies Association, and the Southeastern College Art Conference. At the 2010 College Art Association conference, she co-chaired a session titled, “Sounding American Art: Patterns and Possibilities.”
Naeem has taught an array of courses, including Modern European Art, American Art from the Civil War to the Present, and Contemporary Islamic Art. The latter has led to her current book-length study, tentatively titled, “Leaving Yourself Behind: The Partition of India and its Aftermath in American Art, 1947 – 2007.” Based on this research, she has published an article on the transcultural mobilities of Margaret Bourke-White and Zarina that appears in the 30th anniversary issue of American Art in 2017.
