Activists Who Yearn for Art that Transforms: Parallels in the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements in the United States

Through this offering of comparative cultural and intellectual history, Professor Collins exposes links between the Black Arts Movement and the Feminist Art Movement in the United States to address a critical question that is too often tackled without seeing these movements as central: How did postwar cultural workers deeply immersed in sociopolitical movements in the United States see their role and work?

Lisa Gail Collins, who joined the Vassar College faculty in 1998, teaches courses on African American visual art and material culture, interdisciplinary African American history, feminist thought, and twentieth-century social and cultural movements in the United States. Professor Collins is author of The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past and Art by African-American Artists: Selections from the 20th Century.