Dissertation Title: "Against Cultural Dependency: Aesthetics and Economics in the Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta), 1966-1981”

Advisor: Lopez-Duran, Maria Fabiola

Barnard College, BA, Art History

Adrienne Rooney studies twentieth-century art and visual culture in the Americas, with a focus on the Circum-Caribbean and the United States. Her dissertation, tentatively titled "Against Cultural Dependency: Aesthetics and Economics in the Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta), 1966-1981," is the first extended academic study of Carifesta, an initiative that has embodied Caribbean integration more fully than political or economic efforts. Her dissertation attends to the conceptualization of the monumental, multi-lingual, ongoing festival and the (visual) culture foregrounded in its first four iterations in Guyana, Jamaica, Cuba, and Barbados. With the support of extensive archival research and contemporaneous theories by, among others, Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, and Sylvia Wynter, it weaves a story of the festival—a meeting place for artists from Brazil to Curaçao, from Venezuela to Haiti—in the heady, long 1970s. Building on scholarship that demonstrates that the visual and definitions of culture are centrally important in racialization and subjugation, it argues that 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.

She has presented her work at the annual conferences of the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA), College Art Association (CAA), Universities Art Association of Canada (AAUC/UAAC), SECAC, and Agricultural History Society as well as at the Paul Mellon Centre, the Tate (hosted with Worlding Public Cultures), Emory University, Oxford University, and Rice University. She is part of the Mark Claster Mamolen Dissertation Workshop Class of 2022, administered by the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University. She is also currently a resident of “Atlantic Worlds: Visual Cultures of Colonialism, Slavery, and Racism” a two-year remote residency program by the journal British Art Studies and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Along with Dr. Ramaesh J. Bhagirat-Rivera and Dr. Vibert C. Cambridge, she is co-organizer of the symposium "The Inaugural Caribbean Festival of Arts as Prism: 20th Century Festivals in the Multilingual Caribbean" (August 2022).

Prior to joining the program, she worked as a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2012–2015) and conducted research for and programmed at Danspace Project (2012 and 2016). She received her B.A. in art history from Barnard College / Columbia University (2012).

She is Co-organizer, with Dr. Fabiola López-Durán, of the Racial Geography Project, an initiative of the Rice University Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice.

Awards

2022 The Donald C. Locke Award

2020 Brown Foundation Co-Teaching Award

2019 Brown Foundation Dissertation Research Award

2019 James T. Wagoner ’29 Foreign Study Scholarship

2019 Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Fellowship

Publications

“The Battle of Algiers and Colonial Analogy in the Panther 21,” Journal of African American Studies. Volume 23, Issue 4 (December 2019): 455-475.

“Material Futures / Adrienne Rooney on Lubaina Himid at the New Museum, New York,” Texte zur Kunst, Issue No. 116. 12/2019.

Exhibition Review: Mapa Wiya (Your Map’s Not Needed): Australian Aboriginal Art from the Fondation Opale, Menil Collection, Houston, TX, caa.reviews. 12/2019.

Book review: Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, eds. Tatiana Flores and Michelle Ann Stephens. caa.reviews 8/2019.