Photo by Tiffany L. Clark
I’m an art historian, curator, and critic based in Rochester, New York, and am invested in institutional change toward diversity and inclusion. Currently, I am Assistant Professor of Art History at Rochester Institute of Technology. I received my PhD from Stanford University in 2015 from the Department of Art & Art History, and my research focuses on issues of race and ethnicity in modern and contemporary art, drawing heavily on ideas central to conceptual art, black studies and feminist thought.
The question of American identity inspires my research on U.S.-based artists who are constantly expanding that question – and the question of humanism, more broadly – in generative directions. I study the art made by African American, Asian American, Latinx, Indigenous, and other diasporic cultures with a critical race studies methodology, uniting my training in American art and Contemporary art history. My teaching prioritizes accessible course design, object-based pedagogy, and experiential learning, and incorporates perspectives from feminist and queer theory, postcolonial and ethnic studies, and disability studies. Living artists and their ideas are the center of my curatorial work – I respect them, enjoy thinking alongside them, and love learning from them.
As Assistant Curator at the ICA Boston, I curated a monumental site-specific installation by Nina Chanel Abney (2019-2021), the exhibitions Tschabalala Self: Out of Body (2020) and Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art After Kusama (2019-2021), and assisted in curating When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art (2019), which toured nationally. As the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, I curated Second Sight: the Paradox of Vision in Contemporary Art, the permanent collection exhibition Art & Resolution, 1900 to Today, and co-curated To Count Art an Intimate Friend: Highlights from Bowdoin Collections, 1794-Present. At Bowdoin, I activated under-examined areas of the collection through my teaching and research, and also collaborated widely with faculty and students on curricular-related exhibitions and object-based teaching across geographies and time periods.
My writing has appeared in numerous exhibition catalogs and edited volumes; academic journals such as Art Journal, ASAP/J, American Quarterly, and Panorama; and the publications Artforum, Art in America, and caa.reviews.
The latest:
“Best Show of 2024: Ellen Y. Tani on Nikita Gale,” Artforum v. 63, no. 4 (December 2024).
A book review of Death’s Futurity: the Visual Life of Black Power (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023), by Sampada Aranke.
“On the Edge: The Theater of Refusal (Black Art and Mainstream Criticism),” ASAP/Journal v. 9 no. 2, special issue “Performing to Imagine: Enactment and Activism in 21st century Museums” (May 2024): 235-268.