Kellie Jones

Associate Professor

African American, African Diaspora, and Latin American Art
Ph.D., Yale University, 1999

Contact Information

Phone: (212) 854-8084 

Office: 911 Schermerhorn Hall 
Office Hours: Wednesdays, 5:30-6:45

Biography

Dr. Kellie Jones is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her research interests include African American and African Diaspora artists, Latino/a and Latin American Artists, and issues in contemporary art and museum theory. Her teaching covers the 17th–21st centuries.

Dr. Jones was named an Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellow in 2008 for her lifetime of writing on visual art. The fellowship commemorates the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954 which struck down legal segregation; it recognizes candidates whose work honors and furthers the spirit of the statute. In 2005 she was the inaugural recipient of the David C. Driskell Award in African American Art and Art History from the High Museum of Art, Atlanta and a Scholar-in-Residence, at the Rockefeller Foundation's Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy.

Her writings have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues and the journals NKA, Artforum, Flash Art, Atlantica, and Third Text among others. Her book EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Duke University Press 2011) has been named one of the top art books of 2011 by Publishers Weekly. Her project Taming the Freeway and Other Acts of Urban HIP-notism: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s is forthcoming from The MIT Press.

Dr. Jones is the curator of "Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980," which will open at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in October 2011. The show is part of the Getty Foundation's Pacific Standard Time initiative—a region-wide project documenting Southern California's contributions to artistic movements in the postwar period.

Selected Publications

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.