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The Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies has entered its fourth year with a new professorship, Kellie Jones, the Hans Hofman Professor of Modern Art at the Department of Art History and Archeology, and a MacArthur Fellow. She has big plans for the department, including further developing the work of her predecessor as professor, Professor Farah Jasmine Griffin.
Jones recently discussed with Columbia News their vision for the department and how African-American and African diaspora studies play an important role not only in educating students to become active, informed global citizens, but also in producing innovative, socially-engaging scholarships and Research and programming.
Q. As a new professor, how will you build on Farah’s work over the next three years?
A. Farah was an amazing step-in chair. It set a lot in motion, and we are currently in the construction phase. Since we are now a department, not an institute, we can grow our faculty and student body on our own terms. It is important to maintain connections with other subject areas such as history and art history, because we enliven these and our areas.
We have received great support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to center the arts in the study of African American and African diaspora. It’s surprising that art and culture play such a big role in this country – and African American art and artists in particular – but they weren’t that central to that discipline, so we want to change that.
We have a postdoctoral fellow this year, Jonah Mixon-Webster, a poet and sound artist who teaches literature. Our first artist-in-residence last year was jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran; this year, writer Edwidge Danticat will be doing a public broadcast this spring, so keep an eye out for news. The music historian Salim Washington, our international visiting professor from Durban, South Africa, will also be there this year.
In addition, we have two more professors in this field in cooperation with the Department of Art History: This semester it is Uchenna Itam, who has just completed her doctorate at the University of Texas, Austin, and is now working as a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. In the spring it’s Christina Knight from Haverford College. They teach contemporary courses focusing on the arts and theory of the African diaspora in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Q. Do you continue teaching as a professor?
A. Yes, this semester I am teaching my final seminar Issues in Performance Art. It has a feminist focus, and of course I like teaching it when Performa, the visual performance art biennial, is taking place and almost all of the programs are outdoors. In the spring I will be teaching my African American Artists the 20th and 21st Centuries Survey courses.
Many of my courses will – at least for the next few years – have a strong focus on African American and African diaspora. Since the pandemic and all the social justice work last year, people really want to see these courses. The classes may get bigger. Usually they are very self-choosing, so I’m happy about that, and especially now that visual artists from the African diaspora are very visible these days.
Q. Will there be other exhibitions like 2019’s 20 and Odd: The 400-Year Anniversary of 1619 at LeRoy Neiman Gallery?
A. It would be great. The curator of this exhibition was Kalia Brooks Nelson, our director of the Mellon Arts Project, so it’s a possibility. At the moment it is a challenge to get artists and their work on campus, but once we get past our current situation we will rethink the idea of the exhibitions.
Q. Are there any plans to add Latin American and Latin American arts and artists to the department as this is another focus of your research?
A. Yes, as a department that is also part of it. History professor Frank Guridy’s work, like me, is in part focused on Latinx and Latin America, and it’s an area where we’re looking for more coverage. The nice thing about the African diaspora in our unity is that we can be inclusive. Take music professor Kevin Fellezs’ latest book, Listen But Don’t Ask, Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Across the TransPacific, for example. When we say diaspora, we don’t leave out any part of the world. There are all kinds of collaborations and alliances and there is so much to do in this area.
Q. You have already touched on this, but would you like to add something to the multidisciplinary nature of the department?
A. African American and African Diaspora Studies has always been interdisciplinary. It includes social sciences and humanities. In the past the social sciences have been predominant and after 2020 people will certainly consider this area with concerns about social justice and an interest in the Black Lives Matter movement.
But we mustn’t forget that rights movements are also driven by culture – music, posters, and other visual documentation. If you really look at social justice, activism, all kinds of political movements, and even studying people’s lives, you will come across literature, music and the visual. We have a great group of professors who work in all of these areas and understand their interrelationships.
For example, GSAPP professor Mabel O. Wilson, who co-curated the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the beginning of 2021, along with many other projects, Vincent Scully Prize. You could say that architecture is only about buildings, but Mabel’s work shows that it is so much more.
This discipline looks at these important movements of people and culture, but not only in terms of social justice and social problems, as African American life has often been viewed. We are taking a broader approach to exposing the inequalities in life and advancing the arts sheds light on this expansive approach.
Q. What impact is the department expected to have on Harlem and Morningside Heights?
A. Since our establishment by Manning Marable in 1993 as the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, we have had an urban focus and cooperate with our neighbors. I want the community to be able to use all of the department’s offers. This year our entire program is online which allows us to reach so much more people looking for this type of content. And we continue to work with local organizations.
Another Mellon-sponsored program I lead is Black Curators Matter: An Oral History Project, which we run in partnership with the Columbia Center for Oral History Research. We create oral stories with six curators who were and are still active from the 1970s to the early 2000s. These are stories that arose from the current strong interest in visual artists from Africa and the African diaspora. We never want to forget the curators who worked tirelessly to bring this art to us. They were like the bridge between 1960s activism and what we see today in relation to so many black people working in museums. That was unknown in the 1970s, 1980s, and even the 1990s and 2000s.
We are cooperating with a number of institutions on this project, including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Since this is an oral history project, much of it is being recorded and placed in libraries, but there is a public component that will be happening over the next year and a half. It is also an intergenerational dialogue; For example, one of the dialogues is between Lowery Stokes Sims, who was the first black curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 1974, and Ashley James (CC’09), who is the first full-time black curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York where it was hired in 2019. Many blacks in the New York art world are Columbia graduates, including the Whitney Museum of Art curator Rujeko Hockley (CC’05) and MoMA curator Thomas Lax (GSAS’2013) who are also part of the Black Curators Matter project .
Q. What do you wish for the future of the department?
A. So that we can grow, not only does the faculty grow, but also the subject and student interest. We want to be a point of contact for students. We hope the rest of the university – as well as the entire Columbia community and our surrounding neighborhood – will come to terms with these stories of African American and African diaspora culture. We hope to serve all of these populations – especially at this challenging time when so many of us are threatened in so many ways – by developing our events, programs, teaching, research and visibility.
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