The Driskell Center Welcomes Inaugural (2023-2024) Cohort for The Driskell Center Archives Research Fellowship Program
November 08, 2023
Four Fellows Launch Projects Using the Center's Archives
COLLEGE PARK, MD. – The Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, is pleased to announce that four Fellows have been chosen to inaugurate The Driskell Center Archives Research Fellowship Program.
ABOUT THE PROGRAM
The Driskell Center Archives Research Fellowship program, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with additional support from The Driskell Center, is an opportunity for emerging scholars from diverse backgrounds, fields, and perspectives to have unprecedented access to new collections in the Center’s Archives. Fellows in the current/inaugural cohort represent the fields of art history; museum education; curation; philosophy; cultural history; and independent scholarship. Moreover, these collections —the Hayes-Benjamin Papers on African American Art and Artists, the Alonzo Davis Collection, and the Michael D. Harris Collection — provide an opportunity for a new generation of scholars to engage with a new generation in the Center’s Archives and to create new histories of Black art. Fellows will convene for two multi-day research meetings (in October 2023 and February 2024) where they will share their process with each other and invited members of the Driskell Center and University of Maryland community. They will receive research support from the Archives team throughout the year and guidance from the Center’s leadership as they prepare their research for presentation at a public symposium in April 2024, followed by a publication in June of 2024.
ABOUT THE FELLOWS
Sarah Battle is a scholar on Washington Color School artist Kenneth Victor Young. Battle’s oral history project "Painting a Legacy” is an ongoing effort to record Louisville's Black modern art scene between 1950-1980 through the collaboration, care, and expertise of the artists and their families; these interviews will be preserved and made accessible by Young's alma mater, the University of Louisville. "Painting a Legacy" is made possible thanks to the generous support from the Center for Advanced Study in Visual Arts and Kentucky Oral History Commission. Most recently, “Painting a Legacy” has become the scholarly foundation for a curatorial initiative at the Speed Art Museum, co-curated with Dr. fari nzinga. Battle currently lives in Washington DC where she is the coordinator of academic programs and publications at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art.
Maya Harakawa (she/her) is an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Toronto. A specialist in art of the African diaspora in the United States, her research centers around questions of racial and artistic politics, particularly during the long 1960s. Her current book project on art and Harlem in the 1960s has been supported by ACLS/Henry Luce Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Wayne Spencer Coffey is a PhD candidate in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research seeks to answer the following question: How do stereotypical narratives about black urban life in the United States produce political policies that reproduce violence in those communities? Coffey’s dissertation, “Reproducing the Crisis: Blackness, Violence, and Visual Culture in the Postwar American City,” answers this question by examining a variety of mostly visual texts: civil rights photographs, African-American newspapers, cable television programs, and the political use of digital media platforms such as Twitter.
Terrence Phearse is a third year Ph.D. Student and Driskell Fellow at The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts studying Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory. His scholarship focuses on phenomenology, hermeneutics, and genealogy of African-American photography as a means for articulating and negotiating self-consciousness, recognition, and imagination through the study of modern philosophy. He is Chief of Staff at The Studio Museum in Harlem and former Exhibitions Manager at Fotografiska New York.
ABOUT THE DRISKELL CENTER The Driskell Center is a creative incubator dedicated to a world where Black artists exist at its center. We invite inquiry, experimentation, and dialogue to reexamine histories and shape shared futures.
All programs at The Driskell Center are free and open to the public, and the facility is wheelchair accessible. For further information regarding exhibitions and activities at The Driskell Center, please call 301-314-2615. The Driskell Center’s programming is supported in part by a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council and private donors.