| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Kellie Jones | | | Institution: | Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | | | |
Kellie Jones, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston) and the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia), and holds an honorary Doctorate from The Courtauld in London. She has also received awards for her work from the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University, The College Arts Association, and Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation. She was the inaugural winner of the David C. Driskell Prize in African American Art and Art History for the High Museum of Art in 2005. In 2016 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
Prof. Jones is Chair of the Department African American and African Diaspora Studies and Hans Hofmann Professor of Modern Art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology 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. She has spent close to two thrilling decades at Columbia University. From 1999 to 2006 she served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. Prof. Jones received both her PhD and MA degrees from Yale in the History of Art. Her BA is from Amherst College.
Prof. Jones’s writings have appeared in a multitude of exhibition catalogues and journals. She is the author of two books published by Duke University Press, EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (2011), and South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (2017), which received the Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award from the American Book Award in 2018 and was named a Best Book of the Decade in 2019 by ArtNews, Best Art Book of 2017 in The New York Times and a Best Book of 2017 in Artforum. She is at work on book projects on sculptor Augusta Savage as well as on Conceptual Art. Her book October Files: David Hammons (MIT Press, 2024) is at press.
Kellie Jones has also worked as a curator for over four decades. In the first decade of her career she worked fairly exclusively within institutions including the Walker Art Center and The Studio Museum in Harlem. However, for much of her curatorial career she served as a guest curator for a variety of venues. She has organized shows for the São Paulo Bienal (1989, showing Martin Puryear; which won best individual exhibition at the Bienal that year) and Johannesburg Biennale (1997, Life’s Little Necessities: Installations by Women in the 1990s). She 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. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Susan Stewart | | | Institution: | Princeton University | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 4. Humanities | | | Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Susan Stewart, Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities Emerita, Professor of English Emerita, and member of the Associated Faculty of the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University is a poet, critic, and translator. She has taught at Princeton for nineteen years. She served as the Director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts from 2009 to 2017 and edited the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets from 2013 to 2023.
Born in York, Pennsylvania in 1952, she completed her B.A. from 1970-1973 at Dickinson College, majoring in English with minors in Anthropology and Fine Arts. She went on to the University of Pennsylvania, completing her Ph.D. in Folklore & Folklife Studies in 1978 after five years of study interleaved with an M.A. in poetry from the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University, in 1974-75. In 1978 she joined the faculty of the English Department at Temple University, where she helped found the creative writing program and annual Rome seminars in aesthetics. She returned to the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, where she was Regan Professor of English. At Princeton, she was Annan Professor of English from 2004 to 2010 before assuming the Avalon chair.
Her degrees, in English, poetry, art history, and folklore, are reflected in the range of her publications ever since. She has alternated books of criticism and of poetry: as of 2023, there are seven of each. Her first book of criticism, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), brings a curiosity shaped by structuralist anthropology to the senses of senseless speech, across writing from nursery rhymes to the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Her second, On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), translated now into several languages, has been an ongoing resource for visual artists inspired by its attention to feelings about objects. (Collaboration with artists, including Ann Hamilton, William Kentridge, and Eve Aschheim, continues to inform her work across all of her genres, as it has informed her teaching.) The next book was Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Duke University Press, 1994), and then came Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (University of Chicago Press, 2002), which won both the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism and the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa.
Four books of poems appeared over these years, Yellow Stars and Ice (Princeton University Press, 1981), The Hive (University of Georgia Press, 1987 and 2008), The Forest (University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Columbarium (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have engaged not only visual artists, but also musicians, with many set by her frequent collaborator the composer James Primosch. Their work included the song cycles "Songs for Adam," commissioned by the Chicago Symphony, and "A Sibyl," commissioned by Collage New Music in 2015 and performed by the Juilliard Orchestra at MOMA in the summer of 2017.
At Princeton, Susan continued her practice of alternating books. Her books of poems have included Red Rover (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and Cinder: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2017). Translations and co-translations have regularly interrupted the pattern, including volumes of poems by Alda Merini, Milo de Angelis, Antonella Anedda, and Marcel Proust. Chicago also published a collection of her writing on art, The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (2005), along with The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making (2011), and, most recently, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
Her public honors and invitations have included a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997. She has been a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin (2014), a visiting writer at the American Academy in Rome (2001), a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (2005-2011), and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005-present), among many residencies, visiting positions, and memberships. Princeton gave her its Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities in 2014, and in 2023 she is delivering Oxford’s Clarendon Lectures. | |
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