Kellie Jones

Art of the African Diaspora, Latin American Art, Museums, Contemporary Art
Ph.D., Yale University, 1999

Dr. Kellie Jones is Professor in Art History and Archaeology and the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University. Her research interests include African American and African Diaspora artists, Latinx and Latin American Artists, and issues in contemporary art and museum theory.

Dr. Jones has received numerous awards for her work from the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University; Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a term as Scholar-in-Residence at the Terra Foundation for American Art in Europe in Giverny, France. In 2016 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

Dr. Jones’s writings have appeared in a multitude of exhibition catalogues and journals.  She is the author of two books published by Duke University Press, EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (2011), and South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (2017), which was named a Best Art Book of 2017 in The New York Times, a Best Book of 2017 in Artforum and received the Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award from the American Book Award in 2018.

Dr. Jones has also worked as a curator for over three decades and has numerous major national and international exhibitions to her credit.  Her exhibition “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980,” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, was named one of the best exhibitions of 2011 and 2012 by Artforum, and best thematic show nationally by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). She was co-curator of “Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the 1960s” (Brooklyn Museum), named one the best exhibitions of 2014 by Artforum.

South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. Duke University Press 2017.

Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties. The Monacelli Press 2014.

EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art. Duke University Press 2011.

Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980. Prestel Delmonico 2011.

Energy / Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964-1980. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2006.

Basquiat. New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2005.

Lorna Simpson. London: Phaidon Press, 2002.