Drew Thompson Named Associate Professor of Visual Culture and Black Studies

Associate Professor of Visual Culture and Black Studies

Bard Graduate Center and Bard College announced the joint appointment of Dr. Drew Thompson as associate professor of visual culture and Black studies in 2022. Dr. Thompson’s research and teaching at BGC focuses on the art and material culture of Africa and the African diaspora, with courses on visual history and theory, the art of decolonization, Black modernism, vernacular photography, and museums as (de-)colonial spaces. At Bard College, he teaches an undergraduate course that nurtures interests in the topics taught at BGC. Dr. Thompson’s expertise complements the BGC faculty’s diverse interdisciplinary research, which includes Indigenous material culture studies, urban archaeology, architectural history, fashion and textiles studies, culinary history, conservation studies, and material science.

“Drew Thompson is an exceptional scholar whose work explores the recent history of Lusophone Africa and its diasporic extensions but also the relationship between art, technology, and politics in Africa and the United States. We are thrilled that Dr. Thompson has chosen to bring his expertise to BGC,” said Peter N. Miller, dean of Bard Graduate Center.

“I am delighted that professor Drew Thompson undertakes this new role at Bard Graduate Center. He is expertly positioned to consider and interweave contemporary African and African American art across multiple disciplines, and Bard College as a whole will benefit from his track record of innovative scholarship and public-facing programming. This is an exciting new chapter for both Bard Graduate Center and Bard’s Annandale community,” said Christian Ayne Crouch, dean of graduate studies at Bard College.

Dr. Thompson stated, “I have long admired Bard Graduate Center. My appointment brings an unparalleled opportunity to advance BGC’s curriculum and public programming in the areas of African and Black diaspora visual and material culture. Furthermore, I am excited to expand my own research into new areas, including exhibition making, and to bring new constituencies to the conversation about the role of art in society at the pivotal moment we are living. I am grateful to BGC director and founder Susan Weber and Dean Miller for their foresight and vision in crafting this unique position.”

Dr. Thompson joins BGC from Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts where he has served as associate professor of contemporary art history and visual culture. Prior to his tenure at Ryerson, Dr. Thompson was assistant professor of historical and African studies (2013–21) and director of Africana studies (2017–20). In 2018, he launched the interactive arts platform “Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public Today,” which featured Elizabeth Alexander, Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Thelma Golden, Amy Sherald, and Bradford Young as invited speakers.

A writer and visual historian, Thompson authored Filtering Histories: The Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times (University of Michigan Press, 2021), which features a study of the role of photography in Mozambique’s history as a colony of Portugal and an independent nation. He is currently working on a second book project, provisionally titled “Coloring Black Surveillance: The Story of Polaroid in Africa, Anti-Apartheid Protest, and the Contemporary Art World,” which seeks to draw connections between the development of instant color photography, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and the use of Polaroids in US prisons.

Dr. Thompson earned his BA in history and art history from Williams College (2005) and his PhD in history from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (2013).

Ittai Weinryb

In the 2022–23 academic year, I was fortunate to be a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin— the most senior research institute in Germany.

This year, the first volume of my new book series Art / Work, created with Caroline Fowler, was published by Princeton University Press. This volume centers on ceramic arts; the second volume on pigments is now in production. I also finished writing my new book Art and Frontier, which carefully examines the place of art and material culture in frontier societies by concentrating on a complex moment in the history of European expansion in the Middle Ages when material consumption and production intensified dramatically. I focus on the geographical region of Crimea, a peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea, during a roughly two-hundred-year period of European exploration and colonization. Through a focused look into how art and material culture worked to produce, define, and profess the actual and conceptual space of the frontier, I argue a new understanding of the center can simultaneously arise.

Together with Eiren Shea and Qiao Yang, I am now organizing a twenty-speaker conference on the Golden Horde that will take place in the next academic year at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Catherine Whalen

In 2022–23, two of my chief goals were to advance digital and public humanities at Bard Graduate Center.

The first entailed teaching students to create a website for the course “Women Designers in the USA, 1900–Present: Diversity and Difference.” I was inspired to develop this class by the eponymous 2000–01 landmark exhibition and catalogue curated and edited by professor emerita Pat Kirkham. The course dovetailed with Bard Graduate Center’s recently launched Exhibition Archive Project, dedicated to preserving and promoting records of the institution’s past shows.

Women Designers in the USA is the first of these historic exhibitions to be reinterpreted as a public facing digital project. In the class, students created an extensive microsite as a workshop for this online exhibition’s future development. The course and the Exhibition Archive Project greatly benefited from Professor Kirkham’s spring 2023 residency. She shared her expertise with students and staff working on the project through classroom instruction, individual conferences, archive advisement, and recorded interviews. The result was rich and revelatory for all.

My teaching also included my regular seminar on craft and design in the postwar United States, in which students conduct interviews with contemporary artists, craftspeople, and designers as part of building the Bard Graduate Center Craft, Art, and Design Oral History Project, a public digital archive that I direct.

On behalf of Bard Graduate Center, assistant professor Meredith B. Linn and I were very pleased to collaborate with Columbia University to co-host the meeting of the North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium, delayed since 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The goal of the consortium is to foster public projects animated by humanistic inquiry in support of art, culture, history, and education for a more democratic society.

In addition to BGC and Columbia, its members include Brown, CUNY Graduate Center, Lehigh, Rutgers, Tufts, and Yale.