Photo by Bruce Powers (New Orleans, 2024)Allison K. Young, Ph.D. is an art historian, writer, and curator based in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is currently Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History at Louisiana State University and A&M School of Art in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU in 2017.
Allison's research focuses on postcolonial and contemporary art of the global South, with an emphasis on African and African Diaspora artists and art histories. She is currently working on two book projects: a monograph on the South African-born, UK-based artist Gavin Jantjes, and an exploration of art, material culture, and public history in contemporary Louisiana at the intersection of climate crisis and racial injustice. Her scholarship, at large, centers issues surrounding the intersection of art with questions of migration, environmentalism, and social justice from a variety of geographic and transnational perspectives.
Allison has curated exhibitions across the U.S. both independently and with institutions, and has published writing about contemporary art in both academic and critical platforms including African Arts, Art Journal, Art Review, Artforum, Apollo Magazine, Africanah.org, ART AFRICA Magazine, Burnaway Magazine, liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies, the International Review of African American Art, Panorama: Journal of the Society of Historians of American Art, and the Photoworks Annual in addition to numerous international exhibition catalogues, anthologies, and edited volumes.
Allison’s scholarship has received the support of grants, fellowships, and awards from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, the Phi Kappa Phi Honors Society (LSU Chapter), and the Louisiana Board of Regents. She has been a Contributing Editor of Global Modern and Contemporary Art for Smarthistory since 2015 and is currently Vice President of the Society of Contemporary Art Historians.
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