Scholarship
“Ochre and Ore: Indigenous Ecopoetics in Contemporary South African Art” in Methods in Ecocritical Art History, ed. Andrew Patrizio and Olga Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2026)
This publication is the first and the only survey of methods of ecocritical analysis in art history. It is an essential reading for anyone interested in understanding why ecocritical art history is a vital nexus for the discipline, and for the environmental humanities. The geographical and chronological range covered in twenty-three essays means this is a state-of-the-discipline snapshot like no other. The essays are framed by a series of editorial introductions that provide orientation within a disciplinary territory that is still in the state of flux, yet already complex. Illustrated in colour and black & white.
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"Renee Royale's Landscapes of Matter: Photography and the End of the World,” liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies, Vol. 8, Issue 2 (October 2024)
In 2021, New Orleans–based artist Renee Royale sojourned to Venice, Louisiana—the terminus of walkable land (referred to locally as “the End of the World”) where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico. Surrounded by marshes, human-made canals, and sprawling petrochemical campuses, Royale documented defunct buildings, polluted coasts, and barren trees with a Polaroid camera while collecting water, soil, and flora from each photographed site. The Polaroids were later submerged in jars containing this ecological debris, causing the images to peel, bubble, discolor, and decay. For the artist, the transformed exposures both witness and communicate the stories told by this landscape—indeed, she sees the environment as their cocreator. This article analyzes Renee Royale's work through the lens of ecocriticism and diaspora aesthetics and argues for its symbolic potential to express intersectional histories of violence and climate emergency in the Gulf of Mexico and circum-Caribbean. Reading her photographs as reflective of the Plantationocene condition, the article also considers questions of Black futurity and aftermath, affiliating Royale's practice with Afrofuturist propositions that seek alternate modes of survival beyond racial capitalism.
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“From Post-Black to the Afropolitan: The Studio Museum’s ‘F-Shows’ and Discourses on Black Art” in The Routledge Companion to African Diaspora Art History, ed. Eddie Chambers (London: Routledge, 2024)
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“Art for Liberation’s Sake: The Activist Art of Gavin Jantjes,” post, the scholarly platform for the Museum of Modern Art’s Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) research initiative, October 2022
In his screen-prints of the 1970s, South African artist Gavin Jantjes sought to convey the urgency and interconnectedness of global Black liberation movements. As an art student in exile in Hamburg, Jantjes dedicated his early practice to raising awareness of the brutal injustices of the apartheid system in South Africa, engaging with anti-colonial struggles waged by African and African-Diasporic populations around the world. In this essay, I look at a selection of early abstracted, dynamic compositions which evidence his belief in the connection between art and resistance, and his commitment to solidarity between localized struggles across the diaspora.
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Book Review of Delinda Collier, Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa (Duke University Press, 2020) for African Arts 55:3 (Autumn 2022)
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“Visuality and the Plantationocene: The Panoramas of Regina Agu” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 8:1 (Spring 2022)
Through the lens of recent theorizations of the Plantationocene – a term relating to the environmental and social changes wrought by exploitative agricultural and labor practices of the colonial era – this article focuses on Regina Agu’s site-specific installation Passage (2019), a multi-layered photographic panorama documenting the changing ecosystem of Louisiana, where river deltas, bayous, lakes and wetland forests have been irreparably damaged by subsidence, salinity and rising sea levels. Commissioned for the New Orleans Museum of Art, Passage responded to a concurrent exhibition of nineteenth-century landscape painting, which included works that documented the region’s colonization and harnessing for plantation agriculture. Exploring the region by water, Agu envisions Louisiana’s shifting, coastal ecosystems as a “future ruin” and a palimpsest of multiple geographies: as a site for natural resource extraction and a landscape marked by histories of enslavement. This aquatic vantagepoint, I suggest, serves as a foil to both the visual and extractive regimes of the plantation—its existence having been dependent on conscripted labor brought across the Atlantic, on irrigation and water management systems, and on forms of enclosure and spatial fixity that the element of water necessarily resists.
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"Lady of Silences: The Enigmatic Photo-Text Work of Zarina Bhimji," British Art Studies, Issue 20 (July 2021)
Zarina Bhimji’s work debuted in London in the 1980s, during a period that witnessed important revisionist critiques from the feminist and Black British art movements. Her early photo-text installations, primarily created while she was a student at Goldsmiths' College, address issues surrounding diaspora, the body, and the inhumanity of Britain’s immigration process. While these understudied works are most often framed in relation to postmodernist identity politics, Bhimji’s work avoids overtly political signifiers, instead privileging symbolically charged indices and abstract visual tableaux. As the artist states, “The language I use is related to vulnerability and this is not a culturally specific emotion”. Working toward a more holistic understanding of Bhimji’s art and its context, this article places it in dialogue with that of Mary Kelly, who taught at Goldsmiths throughout the 1980s and whose own production in London bridged the artistic and discursive boundaries that divided the art of the time. In so doing, it positions Bhimji in relation to both surrealist and second-wave feminist artists through her interest in affect, memory, and the symbolic representation of enigmatic childhood and domestic objects as expressions of subjectivity and the unconscious. As such, it demonstrates that postcolonial artists such as Bhimji are central, not peripheral, to the development of British contemporary art history.
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Book Review of Sarah Thomas, Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2019) for Slavery and Abolition 42:2 (May 2021)
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“Between Two Gulfs: Ecological Politics and Black Geographies in the Work of Regina Agu,” International Review of African American Art 29:4 (2020)
In installations that comprise landscape photography, found text, and drawing, Texas-based artist Regina Agu examines historical and ecological connections between the U.S. South and West Africa, as well as the complex relationships between landscape and communities of color across the Gulf of Mexico. Born in Houston to a Nigerian father and a Louisianian mother, Agu spent her childhood in Texas before relocating to West Africa with her family, where she lived and traveled until her early twenties. Agu’s work is informed by the maritime routes of migration that define not only her own biography but also centuries of colonialism and industrialization, from the Middle Passage to the rise of petrocultures, and the shared impacts of climate change on opposite Atlantic coasts. With these concerns in mind, this article focuses on Agu’s use of landscape photography as a means of producing an eco-critical history and geography of the Black Atlantic, in current and recent work.
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