Krista Thompson

"Refracting Art History: Tom Lloyd, Light Art, and the Effect of Race"

Wed, March 18, 5:30pm @ Gallery 400

Krista Thompson (Ph.D., 2002, Emory University) is a teacher, curator, and scholar who researches and writes about visual and performance art in Africa and the African diaspora. 

A professor at Northwestern University, Thompson teaches courses on critical race theory, visual cultures of colonialism/postcoloniality, and contemporary visual cultures of Africa and the African diaspora. 

An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque, was published on Duke University Press in 2006. Thompson is also published in Small Axe, The Art Bulletin, African Arts, The Drama Review, Representations and American Art. Her second book, Camera, Performance, and the Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice, is forthcoming from Duke University press.

Continuing to explore performance art, the use of light and photography Thompson’s current works include:  Camera, Performance, and the Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Duke University Press), research on the presence of disappearance and absence in postcolonial Jamaican photography and the use of artificial light in African American art with a focus on Tom Lloyd, David Hammons, and Glenn Ligon. And to appear in The Renaissance Society's Black Is, Black Ain't catalogue, an essay on Ligon's neon work.

Thompson's honors include J. Paul Getty Foundation postdoctoral fellowship (2008), Emily Hall Tremaine, Foundation exhibition award (2012), American Council of Learned Societies fellowship (ACLS) (2012-2013), and David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia in 2009.