Notes on Contributors
- Notes on Contributors
Terry Adkins is an installation artist, musician, activist, and cultural practitioner who for 20 years has pursued an ongoing quest to reinsert historically transformative figures to their rightful place in the landscape of regional and world history. Although his "recitals" combine sculpturally based installations with music, video, literature, and ritual actions that intend to uphold and preserve the legacies of his chosen subjects, Adkins' work is always abstract and lyrical. An inspiration to younger artists for his uncompromising stance, he is also a dedicated teacher as Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Spencer Museum of Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the High Museum of Art among others. He has recently been honored a United States Artists James Baldwin Fellow for 2008 and a Rome Prize Fellow for 2009.
Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the Department of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also directs the Center for the Humanities. He is currently series editor of Best African American Essays and Best African American Fiction, both annual anthologies published by Bantam Books.
Farah Jasmine Griffin is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies at Columbia University in the City of New York. She is the author of Who Set You Flowin?: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford, 1995), If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001) and Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane and The Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever, written with Salim Washington (Thomas Dunne, 2008). She is also the editor of Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus (Knopf,1999) co-editor, with Cheryl Fish, of Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African American Travel Writing (Beacon, 1998) and co-editor with Brent Edwards and Robert O'Meally of Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004). She is currently Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies. [End Page 4]
Mary Caroline Simpson received a doctorate in art history with a minor in American studies from Indiana University in 2001 and is currently an assistant professor at Eastern Illinois University. A sustained interest in museums, arts patronage, collecting, and philanthropy unites her research and a pedagogical focus on integrative learning. Examining the contributions of female arts professionals before the Women's Art Movement, her current research focuses on Art Institute of Chicago curator Katharine Kuh and her interactions with women artists, critics, curators, gallery owners, and collectors in Chicago and New York. [End Page 188]
