Jordan Mason Mayfield

Jordan entered the department in 2019 and studies contemporary art of the African Diaspora with a concentration on the Americas and the Caribbean, and the arts of Black women, queer, and trans artists. They are currently writing their dissertation, “‘Come to My Garden’: Black Queer Feminist Eco-Aesthetics in the Afterlives of the Slave Trade,” which analyzes the aesthetic methods that Ellen Gallagher, Precious Okoyomon, and Cauleen Smith employ to illuminate the interconnectedness of the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the environment and ecology, and Black womanhood and Black queer identity. Jordan is concerned with how Black contemporary artists imagine new worlds and anti-colonial ontologies for Black women, queer, and gender-expansive people through their practices.

Jordan is a Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellow, Leadership Alliance Research Fellow, and Office of the Provost Diversity Fellow. Prior to coming to Columbia, they worked as the departmental assistant in the Exhibitions department of the Brooklyn Museum and also interned in the curatorial department of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art as an undergraduate. Jordan graduated from Wellesley College in 2018 with a B.A. in Art History with departmental honors and was awarded the 2018 Plogsterth Prize in Art History and the Pamela Daniels ’59 Fellowship.