Adrienne Rooney, Department of Art History Ph.D. candidate, has recently been awarded a two year remote residency with the new, highly-selective project Atlantic Worlds: Visual Cultures of Colonialism, Slavery, and Racism supported by British Art Studies (BAS) and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Adrienne received one of four awards for this virtual program that "encourages transhistorical thinking, posing questions about histories of empire, networks of trade, transatlantic slavery, and creolisations." In addition to receiving a research grant, Adrienne will work in a cohort with the other awardees to develop new research on visual cultures of colonialism, slavery, and racism, culminating in the publication of their individual projects for BAS. The program will allow participants the opportunity to "re-examine the formation of the nation state, and focus on the networks of oppression driven by imperial, economic, and settler colonial pursuits."
Adrienne studies twentieth-century art and visual culture in the Americas, with a focus on the Caribbean and the United States. Her dissertation, tentatively titled "Against Cultural Dependency: Aesthetics and Economics in the Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta), 1966-1981," studies the early years of this monumental, transnational, and ongoing festival. Building on scholarship that demonstrates that the visual is centrally important in racialization and subjugation, it argues that visual culture at Carifesta coalesced as a critical technology in a tripartite push against the plantation economy and its legacies of (supposed) cultural, as well as epistemic and economic, dependency on Europe and the US.