Kellie Jones

Kellie Jones is Professor of Art History and Archaeology and a faculty member in the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University. Her research interests include African American and African Diaspora artists, Latinx and Latin American Artists, and issues in contemporary art and museum theory.

A MacArthur Fellow, Jones has received awards from the Hutchins Center at Harvard, the Terra Foundation, and the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation. She is the author of EyeMinded (2011) and South of Pico (2017), which received widespread acclaim and the American Book Award for criticism.

Jones has also worked as a curator for over three decades and has numerous major national and international exhibitions to her credit.  Her exhibition “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980,” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, was named one of the best exhibitions of 2011 and 2012 by Artforum, and best thematic show nationally by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). She was co-curator of “Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the 1960s” (Brooklyn Museum), named one the best exhibitions of 2014 by Artforum.

In Paris, Jones will focus on researching and writing the Parisian chapter of her book Augusta Savage: Inhabiting Black Modernism, exploring how Savage’s sculptural work engaged Black internationalism, pan-Africanism, and queer visual culture within the vibrant diasporic and artistic networks of interwar Paris. She will utilize archives at the American Library and Parisian institutions to deepen understanding of Savage’s connections to Negritude, the 1931 Colonial Exposition, and Black modernist communities, while contextualizing her work alongside the broader cultural movements captured in exhibitions like Paris Noir.