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Huey Copeland

Photograph by Steve Reinke

Office: Crowe 3-117
h-copeland@northwestern.edu

Huey Copeland (Ph.D., History of Art, University of California, Berkeley, 2006) is Director of Graduate Studies and Assistant Professor of Art History with an affiliation in African American Studies. His work focuses on modern, contemporary, and African American art with an emphasis on articulations of blackness in the visual field. A regular contributor to Artforum, Copeland has also published in Art Journal, Callaloo, Qui Parle, and Representations as well as in several international exhibition catalogues and edited volumes, including Modern Women: Women artists at the Museum of Modern Art.

Most notable among his forthcoming publications is Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (University of Chicago Press, 2012), which was awarded a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2009. Focused on the work of Renée Green, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, and Fred Wilson, the book provides a detailed account of how slavery shaped American art in the last decades of the twentieth century in order to argue for a reorientation of modern and contemporary art history where the subject of race is concerned. Bound to Appear derives from Copeland's research into theories of subject formation, twentieth-century sculpture, histories of slavery, gender and sexual difference, site-specific practices, and African American cultural discourse.

These interests are also reflected in his interdisciplinary course offerings, which range from the graduate seminar "Negressity and its Discontents" to the undergraduate survey "Global Modernisms: An Introduction." Alongside his work as a teacher, critic, and scholar, Copeland has co-organized exhibitions such as Interstellar Low Ways at the Hyde Park Art Center and co-edited journal volumes such as "New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual."

An alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program, his work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Georgia O'Keefe Museum Research Center for American Modernism. Most recently, he was a residential fellow at Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, where he continued to work on a new manuscript exploring the constitutive role of black femininity in Western art from the nineteenth century to the present.